No More Learning

Bartlett in his 'Dictionary' merely abridges Pickering. Both of them
should have confined the application of the word to material things, its
extension to which is all that is peculiar in the supposed American use
of it. For surely 'Complete Letter-Writers' have been '_improving_ this
opportunity' time out of mind. I will illustrate the word a little
further, because Pickering cites no English authorities. Skelton has a
passage in his 'Phyllyp Sparowe,' which I quote the rather as it
contains also the word _allowed_ and as it distinguishes _improve_ from
_employ:_--

'His [Chaucer's] Englysh well alowed,
So as it is _emprowed_
For as it is employd,
There is no English voyd. '

Here the meaning is to _profit by_. In Fuller's 'Holy Warre' (1647), we
have 'The Egyptians standing on the firm ground, were thereby enabled to
_improve_ and enforce their darts to the utmost. ' Here the word might
certainly mean _to make use of_. Mrs. Hutchison (Life of Colonel H. )
uses the word in the same way: 'And therefore did not _emproove_ his
interest to engage the country in the quarrel. ' Swift in one of his
letters says: 'There is not an acre of land in Ireland turned to half
its advantage; yet it is better _improved_ than the people. ' I find it
also in 'Strength out of Weakness' (1652), and Plutarch's
'Morals'(1714), but I know of only one example of its use in the purely
American sense, and that is 'a very good _improvement_ for a mill' in
the 'State Trials' (Speech of the Attorney. General in the Lady Ivy's
case, 1864). In the sense of _employ_, I could cite a dozen old English
authorities.
In running over the fly-leaves of those delightful folios for this
reference, I find a note which reminds me of another word, for our abuse
of which we have been deservedly ridiculed. I mean _lady,_ It is true I
might cite the example of the Italian _donna_[30] (_domina_), which has
been treated in the same way by a whole nation, and not, as _lady_ among
us, by the uncultivated only. It perhaps grew into use in the
half-democratic republics of Italy in the same way and for the same
reasons as with us. But I admit that our abuse of the word is
villainous. I know of an orator who once said in a public meeting where
bonnets preponderated, that 'the ladies were last at the cross and first
at the tomb'! But similar sins were committed before our day and in the
mother country. In the 'Harleian Miscellany' (vol. v. p. 455) I find
'this _lady_ is my servant; the hedger's daughter Ioan. ' in the 'State
Trials' I learn of 'a _gentlewoman_ that lives cook with' such a one,
and I hear the Lord High Steward speaking of the wife of a waiter at a
bagnio as a _gentlewoman_! From the same authority, by the way, I can
state that our vile habit of chewing tobacco had the somewhat unsavory
example of Titus Oates, and I know by tradition from an eye-witness that
the elegant General Burgoyne partook of the same vice. Howell, in one of
his letters (dated 26 August, 1623), speaks thus of another
'institution' which many have thought American: 'They speak much of that
boisterous Bishop of Halverstadt (for so they term him here), that,
having taken a place where ther were two Monasteries of Nuns and Friers,
he caus'd divers feather-beds to be rip'd, and all the feathers to be
thrown in a great Hall, whither the Nuns and Friers were thrust naked
with their bodies oil'd and pitch'd, and to tumble among the feathers. '
Howell speaks as if the thing were new to him, and I know not if the
'boisterous' Bishop was the inventor of it, but I find it practised in
England before our Revolution.

Before leaving the subject, I will add a few comments made from time to
time on the margin of Mr. Bartlett's excellent 'Dictionary,' to which I
am glad thus publicly to acknowledge my many obligations.