Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853

"Les Lettres Juives."—Will any of your correspondents inform me who is the author of Lettres Juives? The first volume of my edition, in eight volumes 12mo., has the portrait of Jean Batiste B., Marquis de –, né le 29 Juin, 1704.

    J. R.

Sunderland.

["Par le Marquis D'Argens," says Barbier.]

Replies

ATTAINMENT OF MAJORITY

(Vol. viii., pp. 198. 250.)

In replying to Professor De Morgan's last communication on this subject, it may be as well, in order to avoid future misunderstanding, to revert briefly to my original question. I pointed out Ben Jonson's assertion, through a character in one of his plays, that about the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was the custom to regard the legal rights of majority as commencing with six o'clock A.M., and I asked to have that assertion reconciled with our present commencement at midnight, and with the statement that the latter is in accordance with the old reckoning.

Thus I started with the production of affirmative evidence, to rebut which I cannot find, in the replies of Professor De Morgan, any negative evidence stronger than his individual opinion, which, however eminent in other respects, has undoubtedly the disadvantage of being two hundred years later than the contemporary evidence produced by me. I afterwards cited Arthur Hopton as authority that lawyers in England, in his time, did make use of a day which he classifies as that of the Babylonians; but inasmuch as he apparently restricts its duration to twelve hours, whereas all ancient writers concur in assigning to the Babylonians a day of twenty-four hours, there is evidently a mistake somewhere, attributable either to Hopton or his printers.

This mistake may have arisen either from a misprint, or from a transposition of a portion of the sentence.

The supposition of a misprint is favoured by the circumstance that Hopton was, at the time, professing to describe natural days of twenty-four hours; of these there are four great classes of commencement, from the four principal quarters of the day; viz. from midnight, from mid-day, from sun-setting and from sun-rising. Hopton had already assigned three of them to different nations, and the fourth he had properly assigned, so far as its commencement at sunrise was concerned, to the Babylonians. What, then, can be more probable than that he intended this day also, like the rest, to be of twenty-four hours' duration; and that the words "holding till sun-setting" ought, perhaps, to have been printed "holding till sun-rising?"

This way of reconciling seeming anomalies, by the supposition of probable misprints, receives great encouragement in the occasional occurrence of similar mistakes in the most carefully printed modern books. I lately noticed, while reading Sir James Ross's Southern Voyage of Discovery, a work printed by the Admiralty, and on which extraordinary typographical care had been bestowed, the following, at page 121. of vol. ii.:

"It was full moon on the 15th of September, at 5·38 A.M."

But the context shows that "full moon" ought to have been printed new moon, and that "5·38 A.M." outlet to be 5·38 P.M.: and what renders these two mistakes the more remarkable is, that they have no sort of connexion, nor is the occurrence of the one in any way explanatory of the other.

Now, the misprint of "sun-setting" for sun-rising, which I am supposing in Hopton's book, would be much more likely of occurrence than these, because these form part of a series of carefully examined data from which a scientific deduction is to be drawn, while Hopton's is a mere loose description. And, moreover, a twenty-four hour day, commencing and ending with sunrise, does not, after all, appear to be so wholly unknown to English law as Prof. De Morgan supposes, since Sir Edward Coke, to whom the professor especially refers, describes such a day in these words:

"Dies naturalis constat ea 24 horis et continet diem solarem et noctem; and therefore in Inditements for Burglary and the like, we say in nocte ejusdem diei. Iste dies naturalis est spatium in quo sol progreditur ab oriente in occidentem et ab occidente iterum in orientem."

But there is another way of reconciling the discrepancy—Hopton may not have intended the words "holding till sun-setting" to apply to the Babylonians, but only to "the lawyers in England," whose day, he says, commenced at the same time as the Babylonian day. The transposition of the words in question to the end of the sentence would give such a meaning, viz. "The Babylonians begin their day at sun-rising, and so do our lawyers count it in England, holding till sun-setting." Altered in this way, the latter clause does not necessarily apply to the Babylonians.

Here again we have a lawyers' day almost verbally identical with one assigned to them by Sir Edward Coke: "Dies artificialis sive solaris incipit in ortu solis et desinit in occasu, and of this the law of England takes hold in many cases."

Nor does Lord Coke strengthen or vary his description in the least, when speaking of the day commencing at midnight; he uses again the same expression with regard to it, "The Egyptians and Romans from midnight, and so doth the law of England in many cases."

Hence the authority of Chief Justice Coke, is at best only neutral; for who will undertake to prove to which of these classes of "many cases" Lord Coke meant to assign the attainment of majority?

In support of Ben Jonson's testimony, it may be urged that the midnight initial of the day was itself derived by us from the Romans; and it is nearly certain that they did not perform any legal act, connected with birthday, until the commencement of the dies solis.

A proof of this may be observed in the discussion by Aulus Gellius (Noct. Attic., iii. 2.) as to which day, the preceding or the following, a person's birth, happening in the night, was to be attributed. He quotes a fragment from Varro,—

"Homines qui ex media nocte ad proximam mediam noctem his horis XXIV nati sunt, uno die nati dicuntur."

On which Gellius remarks:

"From these words it may be observed that the arrangement of (birth) days was such, that to any person born after sunset, and before midnight, the day from which that night had proceeded should be the birthday; but to any person born during the last six hours of the night, the day which should succeed that night must be the birthday."

This explanation might seem almost purposely written in reply to some such difficulty as occurred to Professor de Morgan (antè, p. 250.), when he remarks that, if birthday were to be confined to daylight, "a child not born by daylight would have no birthday at all!" But since it was notorious amongst the Romans that the civil day began at midnight, such a quæri solitum as this could never have been mooted, if the birthday observance had not been known and acknowledged to have a different commencement. In continuation of the same subject, Gellius proceeds to quote another passage from Varro, which I shall also repeat, not only as furnishing still farther proof that the Romans did not regard the night as forming any part of the birthday, but also as affording an opportunity of recording an opinion as to the interpretation of Varro's words, which, in this passage, do not appear to have ever been properly understood.

After stating that many persons in Umbria reckon from noon to noon as one and the same day, Varro remarks:

"Quod quidem nimis absurdum est; nam qui calendarum hora sexta natus est apud Umbros, dies ejus natalis videri debebit et calendarum dimidiatus, et qui est post calendas dies ante horam ejusdem diei sextam."

Now why should beginning one's birthday at noon appear so absurd to Varro? Simply because the hours of the night were not then supposed to be included in the birthday at all, and therefore Varro could not realize the idea of a birthday continued through the night.

He says that, according to the Umbrian reckoning, a person born on any day after the point of noon, would have only half a birthday on that day; and for the other half, he would have to take the forenoon of the following day. Varro had no notion of joining the afternoon of one day to the forenoon of another, because he looked upon the unbroken presence of the sun as the very essence of a natal day.

Nothing can be plainer than that this was the true nature of the absurdity alluded to; but it would not suit the prejudices of the commentators, because it would compel them to admit that sexta hora must have been in the afternoon, in opposition to their favourite dogma that it was always in the forenoon.

For if Varro had intended to represent sexta hora in the forenoon, he would have said that the other half-day must be taken from the afternoon of the pridie, instead of saying, as he does say, that it must be taken from the forenoon of the postridie of the Calends.

Consequently, Varro means by "qui Calendarum hora sexta natus est," a person born in the sixth hour of the day of the Calends; the sixth hour being that which immediately succeeded noon—the media hora of Ovid. But what Varro more immediately means by it is, not any particular point of time, but generally any time after noon on the day of the Calends.

That the true position of sexta hora, when implying duration, was in the afternoon, has long been a conviction of mine; and I have elsewhere produced undeniable evidence that it was so considered by ancient authors. But this passage from Varro is a new and hitherto unnoticed proof, and certainly it ought to be a most convincing one, because it seems impossible to give Varro's words a rational meaning without the admission of this hypothesis, while with it everything is clear and consistent.

The commentators, driven by the necessity I have just pointed out, either to admit the afternoon position of sexta hora, or to abstain from reading it as a space of time, have attempted to force a meaning by reading sexta hora in its other sense, an absolute mathematical point, the punctus ipse of noon.

In so doing they have not scrupled to libel Varro's common sense; they represent his idea of the absurd to consist in the embarrassment that would be caused by the birth occurring at the critical moment of change,—split as it were upon the knife-edge of noon; so that, in the doubt that would arise as to which day it should belong, it must be attributed partly to both!

This interpretation is so monstrous, and so evidently wide of the meaning of the words, that its serious imputation would scarcely be believed, if it were not embalmed in the Delphin edition of Aulus Gellius, where we read the following footnote referring to the argumentum ad absurdum of Varro:

"Infirmum omnino argumentum, et quod perinde potest in ipsum Varronem retorqueri. Quid enim? Si quis apud Romanos Calendis hora vi. noctis fuerit natus, nonne pariter dies ejus natalis videri debebit, et partim Calendarum, et partim ejus dici qui sequetur?"

It is not worth while to inquire what may have been the precise dilemma contemplated by the writer of this note, since most certainly it is not a reflex of Varro's meaning. The word dimidiatus is completely cushioned, although Gellius himself has a chapter upon it a little farther on in the same volume.

The anomaly that amused Varro was the necessity of piecing together two halves not belonging to the same individual day and with the hiatus of a night between them; a necessity that would assuredly appear most absurd to one who had no other idea of birthday than the twelve consecutive hours of artificial day, which he would call "the natural day."

This proneness of the Romans to look upon the dies solis as the only effective part of the twenty-four hours, is again apparent in their commencement of horary notation at sunrise, six hours later than the actual commencement of the day. And in our own anomalous repetition of twice twelve, we may still trace the remains of the twelve-hour day; we have changed the initial point, but we have retained the measure of duration.

It is, however, certain that the two methods of reckoning time continued for a long time to exist contemporaneously. Hence it became necessary to distinguish one from the other by name, and thus the notation from midnight gave rise, as I have remarked in one of my papers on Chaucer, to the English idiomatic phrase "of the clock;" or the reckoning of the clock, commencing at midnight, as distinguished from Roman equinoctial hours, commencing at six o'clock A.M. This was what Ben Jonson was meaning by attainment of majority at six o'clock, and not, as Professor De Morgan supposes, "probably a certain sunrise." Actual sunrise had certainly nothing to do with the technical commencement of the day in Ben Jonson's time. For convenience sake, six o'clock had long been taken as conventional sunrise all the year round; and even amongst the Romans themselves, equinoctial hours were frequently used at all seasons. Actual sunrise, in after times, had only to do with "hours inequall," which are said to have fallen into disuse, in common life, so early as the fifth or sixth century.

I trust I may now have shown reasonable grounds for the belief that Ben Jonson may, after all, have had better authority than his license as a dramatic poet, for dating the attainment of majority at six o'clock A.M.; and that nothing short of contemporary evidence directly contradictory of the custom so circumstantially alluded to by him, ought to be held sufficient to throw discredit upon it. It is one of the singular coincidences attending the discussion of this matter by Gellius, that, at the conclusion of the chapter I have been expatiating upon, he should cite the authority of Virgil; observing that the testimony of poets is very valuable upon such subjects, even when veiled in the obscurity of poetic imagery.

    A. E. B.

Leeds.

LORD HALIFAX AND MRS. CATHERINE BARTON

(Vol. viii., p 429.)

Your Correspondent Prof. De Morgan has so ingeniously analysed the facts, which he already possesses, bearing on the connexion of Sir Isaac Newton's niece with Lord Halifax, and her designation in the Biographia Britannica, that I am tempted to furnish him with some additional evidence. This question of Mrs. Catherine Barton's widowhood has often been canvassed by that portion of her relatives who do not possess the custody of Sir Isaac Newton's private letters.

The Montagues had a residence in the village of Bregstock in Northamptonshire, where the Bartons lived. The Bartons were a family of good descent, and had long been lessees of the crown with the Montagues for lands near Braystock.

There were several Colonel Bartons, whose respective ages and relationship can best be exhibited by a short pedigree. Thomas Barton had two sons, Thomas and Robert.