Crossword-Solution: EALE 4 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 4

Herodotus, too, was somewhat credulous in the matter of animals; Sir John Mandeville was not always to be trusted; and even Bernard von Breydenbach, who made a journey to the Holy Land about 1485, beheld strange beasts, like Spenser's giaunts, 'hard to be beleeved.' But perhaps the palm among these mediæval monsters is held by the eale, or, as it became later, the yale or jall; that strange beast which has survived--in effigy at least--unto our own times.

Thus readers of his life are drawn more especially either to sorrow for his calamities, or to admiration of this stoutest of all hearts set to nearly the stiffest of all hills, or to casuistical debate on the 'dram of eale' that brought about his own share in causing his misfortunes.

There is abundant if not exactly omnipresent common-sense; excellent manners; an almost total absence in that part of the letters which we are now considering of selfishness, and a total absence of ill-nature.[23] It is no business of ours here to embark on the problem, "What was the dram of eale" that ruined all this and more "noble substance" in Cowper? though there is not much doubt about the agency and little about the principal agents that effected the mischief.

The others read ‘ease’ for ‘eale,’ and modern writers have conjectured for the same word base, ill, bale, ale, evil, ail, vile, lead.

The happy ending was in fact the dram of eale that corrupted the whole substance of this sentimental comedy.