The poet, then, from the aspect of this strange anomaly, as exemplified in Sir Leoline, is forced to the following conclusion:
"And what, if in a world of sin (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Such giddiness of heart and brain Comes seldom save from rage and pain, So talks as it's most used to do."
If we turn now to the last two paragraphs of the poem, we find all this illustrated; in these two paragraphs the poet has
"Forced together Thoughts so all unlike each other."
In the former are enumerated all those memorials which could move the Baron to "love and pity;" in the latter we are told of the "rage and pain" of his heart; and on this strange union the poet soliloquises in the conclusion.
A full discussion of this subject would be perhaps unsuited to the pages of "N. & Q.;" for, various as are the subjects to which they are open, ethics can hardly be reckoned one of them. I will conclude, therefore, with the following suggestion, viz. that the delicacy, the acuteness, and the truth evinced in this last scene of Christabel and its conclusion, tell of a deeper mind than has, perhaps, fallen to the lot of any English poet since the days of William Shakspeare.
CONVERTIBILITY OF THE WORDS "GRIN" AND "GIN".
Will some more learned readers than your present querist be so good as to tell us how it came to pass that the word _grin_ became changed in our modern Bibles for _gin_ (sometimes spelled _ginn_), with which it would seem there can be no cognation? In the sense of a trap or snare _grin_ occurs in Job xviii. 9., Ps. cxl. 5., and Ps. cxli. 9., in two Bibles which I have, viz., one "printed at London by Robert Barker, printer to the King's most excellent Majestie, 1640," and the other "printed by John Hayes, printer to the University of Cambridge, 1677."
In Cruden's _Concordance_, 1737, 1761, and 1769, it is given as _grin_ in these instances; neither in the modern editions of that valuable book have they noticed the word _gin_ as now used in the said three texts which would indicate that it is only within some eighty years, at any rate, that the change was adopted by the king's printer, and Oxford and Cambridge. Singularly enough, in these old editions of 1640 and 1677, while _grin_ is used in Job and Psalms, _gin_ is given in the side-note of Job xl. 24., in the text of Isa. viii. 14., and Amos iii. 5.