2 Quoted in Norman Page’s A. E. Housman: A Critical Biography (1983), p. 175.
3 Bentley said of Warburton, one of Pope’s early annotators, that he had a voracious appetite for knowledge, but a poor digestion; fifty years earlier Hobbes wrote that “it is an argument of indigestion, when Greek and Latin sentences unchewed come up again, as they used to do, unchanged.” In an Easter sermon in 1619, John Donne said, “The memory, sayes St. Bernard, is the stomach of the soul, it receives and digests, and turns into good blood, all the benefits formerly exhibited to us in the particular.” And Ovid refers to Chaos, embryon Nature, as a “rudis indigestaque moles”—“a rude and indigested mass” in Dryden’s interestingly literal translation, 1693.
4 “His [Dryden’s] mind was growing to the last, his judgment widening and deepening, his artistic sense refining itself more and more. He confessed his errors, and was not ashamed to retrace his steps in search of that better knowledge which the omniscience of superficial study had disparaged.” (Among My Books, 1870, “Dryden.”)
5 Compton’s is also a more intelligently conceived encyclopedia in some ways than the flashier Encarta ’95—if you search for the word “concordance” on Compton’s, you retrieve a passage about Bible concordances; if you perform the same search on Encarta, you get every article that includes the shortened text-string concord: the town in Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau (who was born there), the supersonic Concorde, and so on.
6 Faulkner in the University, Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., University of Virginia Press (1959), pp. 116–7.
7 Charles W. Crawford wrote a history of the R. F. Learned Lumber Co. as his dissertation for the University of Mississippi in 1968. Though he never went to college, Rufus Frederick Learned, whose father was a lawyer and whose mother ran a boarding school for girls, could easily have known of Pope’s couplet; Pope was a pedagogical staple.
8 Cumulatively reminiscent, perhaps only to me, of the lines
While yet I groped
Within the darkened lumber-room
Of memory
in one of John Davidson’s Fleet Street Eclogues, “Michaelmas” (1893). It’s in the English Poetry Database, Disk 3. Joyce read John Davidson.
9 A mere 20,000 cards shy of the rude and indigested mass of cards that Guy Montgomery produced from all of Dryden’s poetry and plays and left alphabetized but unpublished on his death in 1951. Mary Jackman and Helen S. Agoa used Professor Montgomery’s fearsome legacy to create an early computer-generated punch-card concordance (1957): it may look a little crude, but it’s very useful. It led me to the “machining lumber” in the Prologue to Mr. Limberham (quoted above), which, since it was part of a play, wasn’t included in the English Poetry Database.
10 Was Finnegans Wake an attempt to write an unconcordanceable book? If so, the attempt failed: see Clive Hart, A Concordance to Finnegans Wake (1963). Hart, of the University of Lund, persuaded his wife to type Finnegan out on three-by-two-and-a-half cards and together they sorted it into a “Primary Index,” an index of “Syllabifications,” and an index of “Overtones.” (The word Propellopalombarouter, for example (p. 314), is separately indexed under Propellopalombarouter, and its syllabifications pellopalom-barouter, lopalombarouter, palombarouter, lombarouter, barouter, router, and outer.) With Hart’s help, I found one lumber closet and a slurred version of Lombard Street: “… she rapidly took to necking, partying and selling her spare favours in the haymow or in lumber closets or in the greenawn ad huck (there are certain intimacies in all ladies’ lavastories we just lease to imagination) or in the sweet churchyard close itself …” (p. 68). “I wouldn’t miss her for irthing on nerthe. Not for the lucre of lomba strait” (p. 207).
11 Du Cange’s Glossary, “Langobardi,” cites “Guntherus lib. 2. ex Ottone Frising. lib. 2. cap. 18. de Gestis Friderici,” which proves to be a bearded-lady anecdote by Bishop Otto of Freising (c. 1110–1158): “For to increase their army [by the drafting of women] they twisted the women’s hair about the chin in such a way as to imitate a manly and bearded face, and for that reason they were called Lombards (Longobardi), from their long beards.” (Otto of Freising, Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, tr. by Charles Christopher Mierow, p. 127.) Eric Partridge, however, in his Origins (1958), under “Lombard,” cites a private letter to him in which Ernest Weekley speculates that Longobardus refers to long axes (barta in Old High German), and not long beards. Whatever it was that was long, beards or axes, their owners came to be called Lombards. Perhaps it was both: one thinks of Tolkien’s blade-wielding, ore-loving dwarves, with their beards tucked under their belts. (Tolkien himself does not seem to be interested in the dwarvish etymology of Lombardy, but he does use lumber. Pamela Blanpied, author of a book about dragons, has kindly called my attention to Gandalf’s description of Butterbur, the innkeeper, in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, ch. 10: “A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room: thing wanted always buried.”)
12 Pepys’s Diary, September 16, 1668; William Wycherley, The Country Wife, IV, iii., modernized as “Lombard Street” in some editions. The u-spelling was common: University Microfilms offers Aqua Genitalis, a sermon by Simon Patrick on baptism, which was preached “at Alhallows Lumbard-street,” October 4, 1658, and published in 1670, and a collection of Farewell Sermons by various hands (1663), including “Mr. Lyes summary rehearsal at the conclusion of the last morning exercise at All-hallows Lumber-street.” A True Narrative of the Proceedings at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bayley describes a “yound [young] lad” who was tried and convicted for stealing one hundred and forty pounds “out of a goldsmiths shop in Lumbard Street” in 1678.
13 De Witt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes, The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1946, p. 107.
14 “… such as pledging myself, for undertaking; line, for department, or branch, as, the civil line, the banking line.” (The Life of Samuel Johnson, Dent, II, 143, A.D. 1777.)
15 Edward Henry Brooke Boulton, president of the Institute of Wood Science in Sussex, offers an interesting, although unsubstantiated, alternative theory in the article on “Lumbering” that he contributed to the new revised Chambers’s Encyclopaedia (1973): “A ‘Lombard’ was … a man who kept a pawnbroker’s shop, and the word ‘lumbering’ arose in the early days of the North American settlers when timber was used as a medium of exchange.” And the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1911) notes, under “limber,” that limar (plural of lim) means “boughs” or “branches” in Icelandic. One is tempted to propose that Viking explorers left the Indians of North America with some lim-lumbery Icelandic wood-word, which then persisted for six centuries or so in one or more Indian languages, until the Indians passed it on to the tree-felling colonists. The difficulty with this theory is that I have been able to find only one such word in my hasty check of Native American dictionaries. Li·me- is a noun-stem meaning “woods,” “brush,” or “branch” in the tongue of the Northern Sierra Miwok people, who ate acorn meal, grizzly bears, and yellowjacket larvae in the mountains not far from Sacramento, California. Sacramento is a very long way from Leif Ericsson’s Vinland, wherever it was exactly. See Catherine A. Callaghan, Northern Sierra Miwok Dictionary, 1987, p. 132.