Minor Queries with Answers.
Dame Hester Temple.—"Lady Temple lived to see seven hundred of her own descendants: she had thirteen children." I have extracted this "sea-serpent" from an extract in Burke from Fuller's Worthies, but I am unable to refer to the original for confirmation of this astounding fact; if true it is wonderful.
Y. S. M.
[Fuller's amusing account of Dame Hester Temple will be found in his Worthies of Buckinghamshire, vol. i. p. 210. edit. 1840. He says: "Dame Hester Temple, daughter to Miles Sands, Esq., was born at Latmos in this county, and was married to Sir Thomas Temple, of Stow, Baronet. She had four sons and nine daughters, which lived to be married, and so exceedingly multiplied, that this lady saw seven hundred extracted from her body. Reader, I speak within compass, and have left myself a reserve, having bought the truth hereof by a wager I lost. Besides, there was a new generation of marriageable females just at her death; so that this aged vine may be said to wither, even when it had many young boughs ready to knit.
"Had I been one of her relations, and as well enabled as most of them be, I would have erected a monument for her—thus designed. A fair tree should have been erected, the said lady and her husband lying at the bottom or root thereof; the heir of the family should have ascended both the middle and top bough thereof. On the right hand hereof her younger sons,
on the left her daughters, should, as so many boughs, be spread forth. Her grandchildren should have their names inscribed on the branches of those boughs; the great-grandchildren on the twigs of those branches; and the great-great-grandchildren on the leaves of those twigs. Such as survived her death should be done in a lively green, the rest (as blasted) in a pale and yellow fading colour.
"Pliny, lib. vii. cap. 13. (who reports it as a wonder worthy the chronicle, that Chrispinus Hilarus, prælatâ pompâ, 'with open ostentation,' sacrificed in the capitol seventy-four of his children and children's children attending on him,) would more admire, if admitted to this spectacle.
"Vives telleth us of village in Spain, of about an hundred houses, whereof all the inhabitants were issued from one certain old man who lived, when as that village was so peopled, so as the name of propinquity, how the youngest of the children should call him, could not be given.[[1]] 'Lingua enim nostra supra abavum non ascendit;' ('Our language,' saith he, meaning the Spanish, 'affords not a name above the great-grandfather's father'). But, had the offspring of this lady been contracted into one place, they were enough to have peopled a city of a competent proportion though her issue was not so long in succession, as broad in extent.
"I confess very many of her descendants died before her death; in which respect she was far surpassed by a Roman matron, on which the poet thus epitapheth it, in her own person[[2]]:
'Viginti atque novem, genitrici Callicrateæ,
Nullius sexus mors mihi visa fuit.
Sed centum et quinque explevi bene messibus annos,
In tremulam baculo non subeunte manum.'
'Twenty-nine births Callicrate I told,
And of both sexes saw none sent to grave,
I was an hundred and five winters old,
Yet stay from staff my hand did never crave.'
Thus, in all ages, God bestoweth personal felicities on some far above the proportion of others. The Lady Temple died A.D. 1656.">[
Footnote 1:[(return)]
In Comment upon 8th chapter of lib. xv. de Civitate Dei.
Ausonius, Epitaph. Heröum, num. 34.
Samuel White.—In Bishop Horsley's Biblical Criticism, he refers several times to a Samuel White, whom he speaks of in terms of contempt, and calls him, in one place, "that contemptible ape of Grotius;" and in another, "so dull a man." Query, who was this Mr. White, and what work did he publish?
I. R. R.
[Samuel White, M.A., was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Chaplain to the Earl of Portland. His work, so severely criticised by Bishop Horsley, is entitled A Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah, wherein the literal Sense of his Prophecies is briefly explained: London, 4to., 1709. In his Dedication he says: "I have endeavoured to set in a true light one of the most difficult parts of Holy Scripture, following the footsteps of the learned Grotius as far as I find him in the right; but taking the liberty to leave him where I think him wide of the prophet's meaning.">[
Heralds' College.—Are the books in the Heralds' College open to the public on payment of reasonable fees?
Y. S. M.
[The fee for a search is 5s.; that for copying of pedigrees is 6s. 8d. for the first, and 5s. for every other generation. A general search is 2l. 2s. The hours of attendance are from ten till four.]
Pope.—Where, in Pope's Works, does the passage occur which is referred to as follows by Richter in his Grönlandische Prozesse, vol. i.?
"Pope vom Menschen (eigentlich vom Manne) sagt, 'Er tritt auf, um sich einmal umzusehen, und zu sterben.'"
A. E.
Aberdeen.
["Awake my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of kings.
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us, and to die)
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man."—Essay on Man, Epist. i. l. 1-5.]