* To gally, or gallow, is to frighten excessively—to confound with fright. It is an old Saxon word. It occurs once in Shakespeare:—

"The wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark,
And make them keep their caves.

Lear, Act III, sc. ii

Saxonisms: remants of old English, spoken by the Anglo-Saxons who invaded and ruled England during the middle ages

The time of the Commonwealth: 1649 to 1660, the period after the English Civil War when the British Isles had no monarch

Howards and Percys: two of the oldest families of the English aristocracy

Plebeianised: made fit for peasants or mob rule

To common language, the word is now completely obsolete. When the polite landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he is apt to set it down as one of the whaleman's self-derived savageries. Much the same is it with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth. Thus, some of the best and furthest-descended English words—the etymological Howards and Percys—are now democratised, nay, plebeianised—so to speak—in the New World.

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