Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851

    John Nurse Chadwick.

King's Lynn.

Minor Notes

Note for the Topographers of Ancient London, and for the Monasticon.—

"Walter Grendon, Prior of the hospital of St John of Jerusalem, acknowledges to have received, by the hands of Robert Upgate and Ralph Halstede,—from Margaret, widow of S

John Philippott K

,—Thomas Goodlak and their partners,—4 pounds in full payment of arrears of all the rent due to us from their tenement called Jesoreshall in the city of London.

"Dated 1. December, 1406."

From the original in the Surrenden collection.

    L. B. L.

Gray and Burns.—

"Authors, before they write, should read."

So thought Matthew Prior; and if that rule had been attended to, neither would Lord Byron have deemed it worth notice that "the knell of parting day," in Gray's Elegy, "was adopted from Dante;" nor would Mr. Cary have remarked upon "this plagiarism," if indeed he used the term. (I refer to "Notes and Queries," Vol. iii., p. 35.) The truth is, that in every good edition of Gray's Works, there is a note to the line in question, by the poet himself, expressly stating that the passage is "an imitation of the quotation from Dante" thus brought forward.

I could furnish you with various notes on Gray, pointing out remarkable coincidences of sentiment and expression between himself and other writers; but I cannot allow Gray to be a plagiary, any more than I can allow Burns to be so designated, in the following instances:—

At the end of the poem called The Vision, we find—

"And like a passing thought she fled."

In Hesiod we have—

"ὁ δ' ἔπτατο ὥστε νόημα."—Scut. Herc. 222.

Again, few persons are unacquainted with Burns's lines—

"Her 'prentice han' she tried on man,
An' then she made," &c.

In an old play, Cupid's Whirligig (4to. 1607), we read—

"Man was made when Nature was but an apprentice, but woman when she was a skilful mistress of her art."

Pliny, in his Natural History, has the pretty notion that

"Nature, in learning to form a lily, turned out a convolvulus."

    Varro.

Richard III., Traditional Notice of.—I have an aunt, now eighty-nine years of age, who in early life knew one who was in the habit of saying:

"I knew a man, who knew a man, who knew a man who danced at court in the days of Richard III."

Thus there have been but three links between one who knew Richard III. and one now alive.

My aunt's acquaintance could name his three predecessors, who were members of his own family: their names have been forgotten, but his name was Harrison, and he was a member of an old Yorkshire family, and late in life settled in Bedfordshire.

Richard died in 1484, and thus five persons have sufficed to chronicle an incident which occurred nearly 370 years since.

Mr. Harrison further stated that there was nothing remarkable about Richard, that he was not the hunchback "lump of foul deformity" so generally believed until of late years.

The foregoing anecdote may be of interest as showing that traditions may come down from remote periods by few links, and thus be but little differing from the actual occurrences.

    H. J. B.

66. Hamilton Terrace,

St. John's Wood, March 5. 1851.

Oliver Cromwell.—Echard says that his highness sold himself to the devil, and that he had seen the solemn compact. Anthony à Wood, who doubtless credited this account of a furious brother loyalist, in his Journal says:

"Aug. 30, 1658. Monday, a terrible raging wind happened, which did much damage. Dennis Bond, a great Oliverian and anti-monarchist, died on that day, and then the devil took bond for Oliver's appearance."

Clarendon, assigning the Protector to eternal perdition, not liking to lose the portent, boldly says the remarkable hurricane occurred on September 3, the day of Oliver's death. Oliver's admirers, on the other hand, represent this wind as ushering him into the other world, but for a very different reason.

Heath, in his Flagellum (I have the 4th edit.), says:

It pleased God to usher in his end with a great whale some three months before, June 2, that came up as far as Greenwich, and there was killed; and more immediately by a terrible storm of wind: the prognosticks that the great Leviathan of men, that tempest and overthrow of government, was now going to his own place!"

I have several works concerning Cromwell, but in no other do I find this story very like a whale. Would some reader of better opportunities favour us with a record of these two matters of natural history, not as connected with the death of this remarkable man, but as mere events? Your well-read readers will remember some similar tales relative to the death of Cardinal Mazarine. These exuberances of vulgar minds may partly be attributed to the credulity of the age, but more probably to the same want of philosophy which caused the ancients to deal in exaggeration.

    B. B.

Snail-eating.—The practice of eating, if not of talking to, snails, seems not to be so unknown in this country as some of your readers might imagine. I was just now interrogating a village child in reference to the addresses to snails quoted under the head of "Folk Lore," Vol. iii., pp. 132. and 179., when she acquainted me with the not very appetising fact, that she and her brothers and sisters had been in the constant habit of indulging this horrible Limacotrophy.

"We hooks them out of the wall (she says) with a stick, in winter time, and not in summer time (so it seems they have their seasons); and we roasts them, and, when they've done spitting, they be a-done; and we takes them out with a fork, and eats them. Sometimes we has a jug heaped up, pretty near my pinafore-full. I loves them dearly."

Surely this little bit of practical cottage economy is worth recording.

    C. W. B.

Queries

BIDDINGS IN WALES

There is a nursery song beginning—

"Harry Parry, when will you marry?