northern counties where it is by no means the universal practice to bid 'Good-morning' and 'Good-night,' and the absence of this salutation has been felt strange and chilling by southern visitors, accustomed from childhood to regard it as an indispensable act of courtesy. However this may be, and the instances are probably becoming more rare every day, it certainly does not appear that, as a rule, any forms of morning and evening salutation were used in England in the early part of the sixteenth century, nor indeed until after the writing of this folio, which is placed between folios dated December 1594 and others bearing the date January 27, 1595. To judge from the plays which were the most popular and which professed to reflect everyday life, it seems to have been the practice for friends to meet in the morning and part at night without any special form of greeting or valediction. In the old Elizabethan dramas personages of all degrees enter the scene, or are introduced, with no further notice than 'How now, my lord,' or 'How now, sirrah,' and then plunge into their own topics. In Ben Jonson's plays, which are believed to give a graphic picture of ordinary life, and which have been carefully examined with a view to noting the morning salutations, there is hardly one, except in Every Man in his Humour, where you twice meet with Good-morrow.' But this play was written in 1598-a year after Romeo and Juliet was published and four years after the date of composition usually assigned to that tragedy. Goodmorrow' might have become familiar merely by means of Romeo and Juliet; but it does not appear that it had become a necessary or common salutation, for Ben Jonson drops it in his later pieces, and it would seem that such forms were then considered foppish or ridiculous, for in Every Man out of his Humour, iii. 1, where two gallants, Orange and Clove, salute a third in parting with Adieu' and Farewell,' and address each other with Save you, good Master Clove! Sweet Master Orange! the bystanders exclaim to each other: 1 How! Clove and Orange? Ay, they are well met, for it is as dry an orange as ever grew, nothing but salutation, and O Lord, sir! and It pleases you to say so, sir!... Monsieur Clove is a spiced youth. He will sit you a whole afternoon in a bookseller's shop reading the Greek, Italian, and Spanish, when he understands not a word of either. (III. 1.) If one were to collect the meagre salutations of earlier writers and compare them with those in Shakespeare, the contrast both in quantity and quality would be surprising. The variety and elegance of such greetings in the plays is such as to leave no doubt that they were studied, and for the most part original, and their resemblance to the notes in folio 111 of the Promus is strong enough to satisfy most unprejudiced persons as to their origin. The 'courtesy' which Bacon frequently extols as one of the greatest charms in manner, and which was such a striking and attractive quality in himself, seems to be pleasantly reflected in these apparently trivial notes, and perhaps society is more indebted than is generally supposed to plays which have given it so many lessons in the art of being courteous-an art, if so it can be called, which springs from an unselfish desire to put the wishes of others first and our own last, even in the smallest particulars; to greet our friend with some concern for his affairs rather than by first obtruding our own. Since five out of the eight forms of salutation which figure in these pages are from foreign languages, and since the English are only translations of some of these, it appears most probable that Bacon, on returning to his native country after three years' stay in France, missed, or at least perceived the advantages of, the more polished and graceful modes of speech to which he had become accustomed on the Continent, and that he adopted and endeavoured to make popular the forms which he noted. He The quotation is condensed. could not have pursued a better plan than by introducing them to public notice in his plays, and there they appear with a frequency which, considering their absence from other previous or contemporary writers, renders them remarkable, and seems to prove that they were introduced with an object. 'Good-morrow,' which stands first on the folio, occurs in the plays nearly a hundred times.' 'Good-night' is almost as frequent. Good-day' (also a Promus note) and Goodeven,' each appears about fifteen times. God be with you' is also common; but 'Good-bye' is used for the first and last time in Hamlet. 6 The notes on Bon-jour' and 'Bon-soir,' from which the English forms are taken, show curiously enough the unsettled state of spelling when Bacon wrote. His own does not seem to have been superior to the average. Often in the same sentence, or within a few lines, he is found spelling the same word in different ways, and in the present instance he was clearly doubtful as to what spelling to adopt. He writes Good-swoear' for 'Bonsoir,' and experimentalises upon Bon-jour' thus—“ Boniouyr,'' Bon-iour, Bridegroome.' It was this entry which first drew attention to the number of notes in this folio which bear a visible relation to certain details in Romeo and Juliet; for 'Bon-jour' is only used three times in Shakespeare-once, namely, in Tit. And. i. 2, once in Rom. Jul. ii. 4, and again in As Y. L. i. 2. In the latter instance, as a salutation to a French gentleman, the phrase is introduced naturally enough, but in the passage from Titus Andronicus it immediately strikes one as such an extraordinary anachronism that nothing but a confirmed habit of using the expression could, one would think, have induced the author to put it into the mouth of an ancient Roman. The strain upon probability is not so great in the case of In the list of upwards of 6,000 works, at Appendix G, ‘Good-morrow' has been noted thirty-one times, and Good-night' only eleven times in other authors. Romeo and Juliet; but still the fact of its being again introduced in an unnatural and unnecessary connection, does seem to point to the probability of its having been a word which came most naturally to the lips of the writer. If the passage in which 'bon-jour' is found in Romeo and Juliet be compared with the concluding lines of the essay Of Travel, it will seem to those who are disposed to accept Bacon as the author of the plays, that he is here ridiculing the man who lets his travel appear rather in his apparel and gestures than in his discourse, and who changes his country manners for those of foreign parts, whereas he should only prick in some flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of his own country.' Thus, (may it not be supposed ?) Bacon pricked into the customs of England the varied and courteous salutations with which we greet our friends both morning and evening.1 No reader will fail to notice that the one instance of 'bon-jour' in Romeo and Juliet is, as in the notes, in connection with the bridegroom Romeo; and one can scarcely avoid imagining that the solitary word 'rome,' which is entered six notes farther on in the Promus, with a mark of abbreviation over the e, may have been a hint for the name of the bridegroom himself.2 The next entry, 'Late rysing, finding a bedde; early rysinge, summons to rise,' seems to have been made with a view to Rom. Jul. iv. 5, where the nurse, finding Juliet abed, summons her to rise : See page 85 for further remarks upon the absence of forms of morning and evening salutation from the works of dramatists (excepting Shakespeare) between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. = * It has been suggested that 'rome' may be intended for the Greek word puun strength, and that the mark may denote that the vowel (e) is long in quantity. The objection to this suggestion is that Bacon frequently uses a mark of abbreviation, whilst in no other Greek word does he take any heed of quantity; but were it so, it would not extinguish the possibility that the word may have been a hint for the name of Romeo, alluding perhaps to the strength or violence of love which is alluded to in the following passages: i. 5, chor. 13; ii. 6, 9; iv. 2, 25; i. 2, 174-199. F Nurse. Mistress! what, mistress! Juliet! fast, I warrant her, she: Why, lamb! why, lady! fie, you slug-a-bed! Why, love, I say! madam! sweetheart! why, bride! The County Paris hath set up his rest, I must needs wake her. Madam, madam, madam! Will it not be? [Undraws the curtains. What, dress'd! and in your clothes! and down again! I must needs wake you: Lady! lady! lady! Alas! alas! Help, help! my lady's dead! O, well-a-day, that ever I was born! Further on occurs the French proverb, Qui a bon voisin a bon matin,' and the words 'lodged next,' the expression golden sleep, and one or two hints to the effect that one may be early up and none the better for it, together with the word uprouse, sweet, for 'speech of the morning' and 'well to forget.' Putting together these six or seven small notes, we seem to be in possession of the leading points which were to be introduced into the following passage in Romeo and Juliet, ii. 3: What early tongue so sweet saluteth me? But where unbruised youth with unstuffed brain Therefore thy earliness doth me assure Thou art uproused by some distemperature; |