CHAPTER XX

MAZE ETYMOLOGY

The reader may be inclined to question the necessity for a whole chapter to be devoted to such a matter as this. "Surely anybody who has the curiosity to do so can look the words up in a dictionary!" Or he may object that the proper place to define and expound one's terms is in the opening chapter.

It will be found, however, that no clear-cut and simple definition of, for example, the word _labyrinth_ itself is to be found in any dictionary, and that with regard to its derivation authorities are not even yet in complete agreement. With the facts recounted in the preceding chapters at his disposal the reader may possibly find a little informal discussion of these points more intelligible and interesting than the more rigid presentment afforded by even the best dictionaries. Moreover, most dictionaries have little or nothing to say about Julian's bowers or Troy-towns. On the other hand, of course, this chapter could not have been written without free recourse to Murray, Skeat, Webster, Wright, and other monuments of the lexicographer's toil.

We will consider such words as seem worth discussing in their alphabetical order, commencing with one which was prominent in our last chapter, viz., "bower."

We have here a word of which the early connotation has been rather obscured by poetical insistence upon one of its extensions. As a convenient rhyme for "flower" and "shower" it has become one of the mainstays of the vernal poetaster, a circumstance which evoked one of the gems of Calverley's gentle satire:

"Bowers of flowers encountered showers In William's carol--(O love my Willie!); Then he bade sorrow borrow from blithe tomorrow I quite forget what--say a daffodilly."

(_Lovers, and a Reflection._)

The word has thus come to be chiefly employed to signify a leafy or shady arbour or a recess in a garden, a use quite consistent with, but narrower than, the principal and much older meaning, which was that of a dwelling, with particular reference to the character of privacy.

The common modern usage seems to have been first adopted by the Elizabethan poets. Hero, in "Much Ado about Nothing" (Act III, Sc. 1), sends by her attendant a message to her cousin Beatrice, bidding her

"... steal into the pleached bower, Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun, Forbid the sun to enter."

The Saxon form of the word was _búr_ or _bure_, related to _búan_, meaning "to dwell," and it was always used to denote something of the nature of an inner chamber or sanctum.

In Chaucer's works (late fourteenth century) it has the same force, _e.g._, in the "Wife of Bath's Tale":

"Blissing halles, chambres, kitchines and boures."

Somewhat later we find a poetical extension of the word to include not only the dwellings of human beings but also of animals and birds. Thus William Dunbar, a Scottish poet who lived about 1465-1530, speaking of birds hidden within thickets, used the phrase "within their bouris." This usage gave rise to the idea that the word was derived from "bough," a notion that seems to have first found expression in the anonymous "Letters of Junius," and shortly afterwards received the weighty sanction of Dr. Johnson. In Southey's "Curse of Kehama" the word in this sense is made to do duty as a verb:

"And through the leafy cope which bowered it o'er Came gleams of chequered light."

The metaphorical use of the word in its original sense is seen in Moore's "Evenings in Greece":

"Fancy, who hath no present home, But builds her bower in scenes to come."

The suggestion that Rosamond's Bower was of the nature of a hedge maze seems to be of rather late origin, probably arising in the seventeenth century, like the application of the term to the little hedge-box garden at Menteith (Queen Mary's Bower), to which we referred in