Replies to Minor Queries.
Dr. Eleazar Duncon (Vol. ix., pp. 56. 184.).—Dr. Eleazar Duncon, and his brother Mr. John Duncon, are mentioned in Barnabas Oley's Preface to George Herbert's Country Parson, as having "died before the miracle of our happy Restoration." There was another brother, Mr. Edmund Duncon, rector of Fryarn Barnet, in the county of Middlesex; sent by Mr. Farrer to visit George Herbert, during his last illness.
E. H. A.
Christian Names (Vol. vii., pp. 406. 488. 626.).—The earliest instance I have yet met with, of an individual with two Christian names, occurs in the compulsory cession of the Abbey of Vale Royal to King Henry VIII.; the deed conveying which is still extant in the Augmentation Office. It is in Latin, and signed by John Harwood the Abbot, Alexander Sedon the Prior, William Brenck Harrysun, and twelve other monks of the Abbey. Vale Royal Abbey is now the seat of Lord Delamere, into whose family it came by purchase in 1616, from the descendant of Sir Thomas Holcroft, the original grantee from the crown.
T. Hughes.
Chester.
I send you a much earlier instance of two Christian names than any that has hitherto been given in your pages. Henry Prince of Wales, son of King Henry IV., was baptized by the names Henry Frederick. Vide Camden's Remains, 4to., 1605. I have not a reference to the page.
C. de D.
Abigail (Vol. iv., pp. 424., &c.; Vol. viii., p. 653.).—Your recent correspondents on this subject do not appear to have met with the passage in which I mentioned, that since putting the question, I had found that a waiting-maid in Beaumont and Fletcher's comedy of The Scornful Lady was named Abigail; and that, as the play appeared to have been a favourite one, the application of the name to the class generally was probably owing to it. In the absence of any proof of its having been previously used in this sense, I still continue to think that this conjecture was well founded. Considering the terms on which Dean Swift was with the Mashams, he was the last person in the world to have used such a term, unless it had been so long in familiar use as to be deprived of all appearance of personal allusion to them.
J. S. Warden.
"Begging the question" (Vol. viii., p. 640.).—This phrase is identical with that of "petitio principii," a figure of speech well known both to logicians and mathematicians, i. e. assuming a point as proved, and reasoning upon it as such, which has in fact not been proved.
J. S. Warden.
Russian Emperors (Vol. ix., p. 222.).—I am informed by a late resident in Russia that the rumour to which Mr. Crosfield refers has no foundation. I am farther informed, however, that after a twenty-five years' reign the monarch has even more absolute and despotic authority than before the lapse of that time. I hope this subject may be well ventilated, as considerable misapprehension exists about it.
John Scribe.
Garble (Vol. ix., p. 243.).—Your correspondent E. S. T. T. was mistaken when he said that the "corrupt" meaning of the word garble is now the only one ever used. In proof of this I would give one instance, familiar to me, in which it still retains its "good" signification. In "working" cochineal, spices, and other similar merchandise at the warehouse in which they are stored upon their arrival in this country, the operation of
sifting and separating the good from the bad is termed garbling: the word being here employed in the very same sense as in the examples quoted by E. S. T. T., illustrative of its original meaning, and which sense he erroneously stated it no longer possessed.
R. V. T.
Mincing Lane.
I cannot agree with your correspondent E. S. T. T., that a corruption of meaning has taken place in this word; and that whereas it originally meant a selection of the good and a discarding of the bad parts of anything, its present meaning, is exactly the reverse of this. Its original signification is correctly stated: the garbling of spices, drugs, &c., meant the selection of the good and the rejection of the bad. But the garbling of a passage cited as a testimony is a precisely analogous process. The person who garbles the passage omits those parts which can be used against his view, and adduces only those parts which support his conclusion. He selects the parts which are good, and rejects those which are bad, for his purpose. When a passage is said to be garbled, it is always implied that the person who quotes it has suppressed a portion which tells against himself; but that portion is, so far as he is concerned, the bad, not the good portion. The secondary and metaphorical is therefore precisely analogous to the primary and literal sense of the word, and not the reverse of it.
L.
Electric Telegraph (Vol. ix., p. 270.).—As every new attempt to improve this invaluable invention, and to extend its use, is of world-wide importance, the following extract from La Presse, a French newspaper of March 23rd, will excite inquiry:
"On écrit de Berne, le 17 Mars, MM. Brunner et Hipp, directeurs des télégraphes électriques de la Suisse, viennent d'inventer un appareil portatif à l'aide duquel, en l'appliquant à un point quelconque des fils télégraphiques, on peut transmettre une dépêche. L'essai de cet appareil a été fait à deux lieues de Berne, dans un lieu où il n'existe aucune section de télégraphie."
The writer goes on to say that the experiment had been tested with success on the lines to Zurich, Basle, Geneva, &c.
J. Macray.
Oxford.
Butler's "Lives of the Saints" (Vol. viii., p.387.).—The inquiry respecting the various editions of this valuable work not having yet received any answer, the following information may in some degree satisfy the inquirer. The first edition of the Rev. Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints was published in the author's lifetime, at various intervals from 1754 to 1759, when the last of the four volumes appeared, of which the edition was composed. Part II. of vol. iii. is now before me, with the date 1758. No other edition appeared till after the death of the learned and pious author, which took place in 1773.
The second edition was undertaken by the most Rev. Dr. Carpenter, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, and appeared in 12 vols. in 1779. It is stated in the title-page to be "corrected and enlarged from the author's own MS." It did contain all the notes omitted in the previous edition, and other matter prepared by the author. The third edition was published in Scotland, and other editions followed; but I am unable to give any particulars of them. But the splendid stereotype edition, published in London by Murphy, in 1812, in 12 vols., is by far the best ever produced, or ever likely to appear. Since this there have been other editions; one in 2 vols., published in Ireland, and a cheap edition in 12 small vols., printed at Derby; but they deserve little notice.
F. C. H.
Anticipatory Use of the Cross (Vol. viii. passim).—In answer to particular inquiry, I have been furnished by a resident in Macao with an answer, of which the following is the substance:—The cross is commonly used in China, and consists of any flat boards of sufficient size, the upright shaft being usually eight to ten feet high. The transverse bar is fixed by a single nail or rivet, and is therefore often loose, and may be made sometimes to traverse a complete circle. It is not so much an instrument of punishment in itself, as it is an operation-board whereon to confine the criminal, not with nails, but ropes, to undergo—as in the case of a woman taken in adultery—the cutting away of the flesh from the bosom. He adds, that he has witnessed such punishment, and he has no doubt that the cross has been used in this way in China immemorially. Any of your correspondents will much oblige me by correcting or confirming this statement from positive testimony.
T. J. Buckton.
Lichfield.
The Marquis of Granby (Vol. ix., p. 127.).—A portrait of this nobleman constitutes the sign of a public-house at Doncaster, and of another at Bawtry, nine miles from that town. His lordship, it is said, occasionally occupied Carr House, near the former place, as a hunting-box in the middle of the last century. As an instance of his lordship's popularity, I may here add, that out of compliment to him, and for his greater convenience in hunting, at a period when there was a considerable extent of uninclosed and undrained country around Doncaster, the corporation directed several banks and passages to be made on their estate at Rossington; and in 1752, that body likewise presented the Marquis with the freedom of the borough.
C. J.
Irish Letters (Vol. ix., p. 246).—The following inscription on the monument of Lugnathan, nephew of St. Patrick, at Inchaguile, in Lough Corrib, co. Galway, is supposed to be the most ancient in Ireland:
"LIE LUGNAEDON MACC LMENUEH."
"The stone of Lugnaodon, son of Limenueh."
The oldest Irish manuscript is the Book of Armagh, which contains a copy of the Gospels, and some very old lives of St. Patrick. (See O'Donovan's Irish Grammar, Dublin, 1845, p. lii.)
Thompson Cooper.
Cambridge.
Rev. John Cawley (Vol. ix., p. 247.).—In reply to the inquiry of C. T. R., What is the authority for stating that the Rev. John Cawley, rector of Didcot, was a son of Cawley the regicide? I send you the following extract from Wood's Athenæ (Bliss's edition), vol. iv. col. 580.:
"John Cawley, son of Will. Cawley of the city of Chichester, gent., was, by the endeavours of his father, made Fellow of All Souls' College (from that of Magdalen) by the visitors appointed by Parliament, anno 1649; took the degrees in arts, that of Master being completed in 1654; and whether he became a preacher soon after, without any orders conferred on him by a bishop, I cannot tell. Sure I am, that after his Majesty's restoration, he became a great loyalist, disowned the former actions of his father, who had been one of the judges of King Charles I.; when he was tryed for his life by a pretended court of justice, rayled at him (being then living in a skulking condition beyond sea); and took all opportunities to free himself from having any hand or anything to do in the times of usurpation. About which time, having married one of the daughters of Mr. Pollard of Newnham Courtney, he became rector of Dedcot, or Dudcot, in Berkshire; rector of Henley in Oxfordshire; and in the beginning of March, 1666, Archdeacon of Lincoln."
Ἁλιεύς.
Dublin.
New Zealander and Westminster Bridge (Vol. ix., pp. 74. 159.).—Your correspondents have traced this celebrated passage to a letter from Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, and to passages in poems by Mrs. Barbauld and Kirke White. It appears to me that the following extract from the Preface to P. B. Shelley's Peter Bell the Third, has more resemblance to it. It is addressed to Moore:
"Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges you will receive from them; and in the firm expectation, that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Westminster Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream; some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells, and the Fudges, and their historians."
John Thrupp.
10. York Gate.
Several passages from different writers having been mentioned in your columns as likely to have suggested to our brilliant essayist and historian his celebrated graphic sketch of the New Zealander meditating over the ruins of London, I would beg leave to hint the probability that not one of those many passages were present to his mind or memory at the moment he wrote. The fact is that the picture is so true to nature, and has been so often sketched, and the associations and reflections arising from it so often felt and described, that I cannot for a moment admit the insinuation of a charge of plagiarism, or even unconscious adaptation of another's thoughts in one so abundantly stored with imagery of his own, that the very overflowings of his own wealth would enrich a generation of writers. It has however occurred to me that his classic mind might have remembered the picture of Marius amid the ruins of Carthage, or, more probably, the still more striking passage in the celebrated letter of Sulpicius to Cicero, on the death of his daughter Tullia, in which he describes himself, on his return from Asia, as sailing from Ægina towards Megara, and contemplating the surrounding countries:
"Behind me lay Ægina, before me Megara; on my right I saw Piræus, and on my left Corinth. These cities, once so flourishing and magnificent, now presented nothing to my view but a sad spectacle of desolation."
And he then proceeds with his melancholy reflections on so many perishing memorials of human glory and grandeur in so small a compass.
G. W. T.
Volney wrote thus:
"Qui sait si sur les rives de la Seine, de la Tamise ... dans le tourbillon de tant de jouissances ... un voyageur, comme moi, ne s'asseoira pas un jour sur de muettes ruines, et ne pleurera pas solitaire sur la cendre des peuples et la mémoire de leur grandeur?"—Les Ruines, chap. ii. p. 11.
Mackenzie Walcott, M.A.
Misapplication of Terms (Vol. ix., p. 44.).—I cannot pretend to set up my judgment against that of Mr. Squeers, who has in his favour the proverbial wisdom of the Schools. Riddle, however, who I believe is an authority, gives the word Lego no such meaning as "to hearken." If Plautus uses the word in that sense, as it is an uncommon one, the passage should have been quoted, or a reference given. The meaning of
the word appears to be "to collect, run over, see, read, choose." In justification of my criticism, and in reply to Mr. Squeers, I shall quote Horne Tooke's remark, in speaking of "τα δεοντα, or things which ought to be done;" Div. Purley, Pt. II. ch. viii. (vol. ii. pp. 499-501., edit. 1849):
"The first of these, Legend, which means That which ought to be read, is, from the early misapplication of the term by impostors, now used by us as if it meant, That which ought to be laughed at. And so it is explained in our Dictionaries."
At the hazard of being again deemed hypercritical, while on this subject, the misapplication of terms, I must question the correctness of the phrase "Under the circumstance." A thing must be in or amidst its circum-stances; it cannot be under them. I admit the commonness of the expression, but it is not the less a solecism. Can you inform me when it was introduced? I hope it is not old enough to be considered inveterate. The best authors write "in the circumstances;" and yet so prevalent is the anomaly, that in a very respectable periodical, not long since, the French "dans les circonstances présentes," given as a quotation, is rendered "Under the present circumstances."
J. W. Thomas.
Dewsbury.
Hoglandia (Vol. viii., p. 151.).—In reply to an inquiry for the full title of a book from which a quotation is given in Pugna Porcorum, the full title is Χοιρόχωρογραφία, sive Hoglandiæ descriptio, published anonymously in 1709, in retaliation of Edward Holdsworth's Muscipula. "Hoglandia" is Hampshire, and Holdsworth probably was a Hampshire man, for he was educated at Winchester, and we may presume the anonymous author to have been a Cambro-Briton.
H. L.