Excerpt from Intensives and Down-Toners: A Study in English Adverbs This sense straightway would seem to have been archaic as early as Shakespeare, who has the phrase by and by almost exclusively in the modern sense of presently, before long. The only instance I know of in Shakespeare, in which by and by means straightway, is in II Henry VI, 11 1, 142: Now fetch me a stool hither by and by. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from Intensives and Down-Toners: A Study in English Adverbs Of intensives used to modify adjectives and adverbs, it may in general be said that most of them are adverbs derived from adjectives expressing absolute qualities, i. e. such as do not admit of variation, as, for example, pure, full, very, which in their strictest sense do not admit of degrees of comparison. For this reason they were naturally pitched upon to express the notion of completeness of a quality, so that, as we shall see in the sequel, pure blind, which has afterwards changed both its form and its meaning (purblind), originally meant «completely blind». But most of those intensives that originally expressed completeness, have in course of time come to mean merely a high degree of a quality; and this is in exact accordance with one of the well-established facts of word-history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.