Pleafe Pafs the Mufhrooms

This afternoon as I was re-reading Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," I was struck by a passage which recounts the narrator's first impressions upon entering the eponymous dwelling: "the objects around me...the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy...(and) I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this..."

Of course, this reminded me of the carvings on my own ceilings, my own tapestry-hung drywalls (though my tapestries are not so sombre), and the armorial trophies which line the hallways of my double-wide mobile home. These things are, as the author points out, pretty old hat to most of us.

However, as I perused my bookshelves, and my eye fell upon a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, I realized there are some aspects of my genteel existence I just can't seem to get used to. I'm speaking here of certain conventions of spelling which typefied written and printed matter of the 18th century, and persisted in some places well into the middle of the 19th.

The volume in question was a lovely 1855 letterpress edition of "Reynard the Fox" by Goethe, translated into English by Thomas James Arnold, Esq., and published by Nattali and Bond, Bedford Street, Covent Garden, London. On page 85, the fox is on trial for murder, and being interrogated by the lion king, who says:

"Is't by your treatment of My Servants fhown?
Bruin, by your devices, hath been lamed;
My faithful Tybalt fo feverely maimed,
The Leech doubts if he may his health reftore--
But I will wafte My words on you no more;
Lo! your Accufers prefs on every fide;
All further fubterfuge feems now denied."

Besides the seemingly haphazard capitalization, which is applied to some nouns and not others (why "Accusers" but not "words"?), and to the possessive pronoun "My," there is the main mystery -- the "f" which replaces most, but not all s's. Where did it come from? what was its purpose? and why did it suddenly pass out of favor?

The rules for using it are usually, but not always easy to figure out. For example, why "Is't" rather than "If't"? Probably because "Is't" is considered two words rather than one, and the final "s" is never changed to "f."

But even after cracking the code, one is still left with no rhyme, reason, or rationale for this system. Apparently upper-case S's, as in "Servants," are not converted, but lower case s's at the beginning of a word are. As previously noted, a final "s" is never made into an "f," so it's "Pleafe pafs the mufhrooms," rather than "Pleafe paff the mufhrooms." This led me to wondering about the rule for double s's that occur with neither "s" at the beginning or ending of a word, until, on page 87, I read that "Sibby the Goofe, with anger hiffing, came..."

All this fpeculation caufes Me to wonder if I've not too much time on my Hands. I fhall ponder this Queftion as I pace about tonight, through my Paffageways lined with armorial Trophies.