GRADELY

It seems rather a rash step to differ from the mass of critical authority with which your last number has brought this shy, old-fashioned provincial word into a blaze of literary notoriety. Yet I cannot help conceiving the original form of this adverb to be *grathedly* (, root , with the preteritive prefix ) or *gerathely*. In our Yorkshire dialect, to *grathe* (pronounced *gradhe*) means, to make ready, to put in a state of *order* or *fitness*. A man inconveniently accoutred or furnished with implements for the performance of some operation on which he was employed, observed to me the other…