Читать книгу Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature - Charles C. Bombaugh - Страница 68

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Dickens, in “All the Year Round,” objects to the “softening of ruffian into rough, which has lately become popular.” Yet the use of the noun rough as applied to a coarse, violent, riotous fellow, a bully, instead of being a recent creation, dates back to the Elizabethan period. In Motley’s “History of the United Netherlands” in the description of the death of Queen Elizabeth (iv. 183), we are told:

“The great queen, moody, despairing, dying, wrapt in profoundest thought, with eyes fixed upon the ground or already gazing into infinity, was besought by the counsellors around her to name the man to whom she chose that the crown should devolve. ‘Not to a Rough,’ said Elizabeth, sententiously and grimly.”