MINOR NOTES.
Alderman Beckford.—Gifford (Ben Jonson, vol. vi. p. 481.) has the following note:—
"The giants of Guildhall, thank heaven, yet defend their charge: it only remains to wish that the citizens may take example by the fate of Holmeby, and not expose them to an attack to which they will assuredly be found unequal. It is not altogether owing to their wisdom that this has not already taken place. For twenty years they were chained to the car of a profligate buffoon, who dragged them through every species of ignominy to the verge of rebellion; and their hall is even yet disgraced with the statue of a worthless negro-monger, in the act of insulting their sovereign with a speech of which (factious and brutal as he was) he never uttered one syllable." ... "By my troth, captain, these are very bitter words."
But Gifford was generally correct in his assertions; and twenty-two years after his note, I made the following one:—
"It is a curious fact, but a true one, that Beckford did not utter one syllable of this speech. It was penned by Horne Tooke, and by his art put on the records of the city and on Beckford's statue, as he told me, Mr. Braithwaite, Mr. Seyers, &c., at the Athenian Club.
"ISAAC REED.
"See the Times Of July 23. 1838, p. 6."
The worshipful Company of Ironmongers have relegated their statue from their hall to a lower position: but it still disgraces the Guildhall, and will continue to do so, as long as any factious demagogue is permitted to have a place among its members.
L.S.
The Frozen Horn.—Perhaps it is not generally known that the writer of Munchausen's Travels borrowed this amusing incident from Heylin's Mikrokosmos. In the section treating of Muscovy, he says:—
"This excesse of cold in the ayre, gave occasion to Castilian, in his Aulicus, wittily and not incongruously to faine that if two men being smewhat distant, talke together in the winter, their words will be so frozen that they cannot be heard: but if the parties in the spring returne to the same place, their words will melt in the same order that they were frozen and spoken, and be plainly understood."
J.S.
Salisbury.
Inscription from Roma Subterranea.—If you deem the translation of this inscription, quoted in Lord Lindsay's fanciful but admirable Sketches of the History of Christian Art, worth a place among your Notes, it is very heartily at your service.
"Sisto viator
Tot ibi trophæa, quot ossa
Quot martyres, tot triumphi.
Antra quæ subis, multa quæ cernis marmora,
Vel dum silent,
Palam Romæ gloriam loquuntur.
Audi quid Echo resonet
Subterraneæ Romæ!
Obscura licet Urbis Cœmetria
Totius patens Orbis Theatrium!
Supplex Loci Sanetitatem venerare,
Et post hac sub luto aurum
Coelum sub coeno
Sub Româ Romam quærito!"
Roma Subterranea, 1651, tom. i. p. 625.
(Inscription abridged.)
Stay, wayfarer—behold
In ev'ry mould'ring bone a trophy here.
In all these hosts of martyrs,
So many triumphs.
These vaults—these countless tombs,
E'en in their very silence
Proclaim aloud Rome's glory:
The echo'd fame
Of subterranean Rome
Rings on the ear.
The city's sepulchres, albeit hidden,
Present a spectacle
To the wide world patent.
In lowly rev'rence hail this hallow'd spot,
And henceforth learn
Gold beneath dross
Heav'n below earth,
Rome under Rome to find!
F.T.J.B.
Brookthorpe.
Parallel Passages.—
"There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked, from cieled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men."—Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying, chap. i. sect. 1. p. 272. ed. Edin.
"Here's an acre sown indeed
With the richest royalest seeds,
That the earth did e'er suck in,
Since the first man dyed for sin:
Here the bones of birth have cried,
Though gods they were, as men they died."
F. BEAUMONT
M.W. Oxon.
A Note on George Herbert's Poems.—In the notes by Coleridge attached to Pickering's edition of George Herbert's Poems, on the line—
"My flesh begun unto my soul in pain,"
Coleridge says—
"Either a misprint, or noticeable idiom of the word began: Yes! and a very beautiful idiom it is: the first colloquy or address of the flesh."
The idiom is still in use in Scotland. "You had better not begin to me," is the first address or colloquy of the school-boy half-angry half-frightened at the bullying of a companion. The idiom was once English, though now obsolete. Several instances of it are given in the last edition of Foxe's Martyrs, vol. vi. p. 627. It has not been noticed, however, that the same idiom occurs in one of the best known passages of Shakspeare; in Clarence's dream, Richard III., Act i. Sc. 4.:
"O, then began the tempest to my soul."
Herbert's Poems will afford another illustration to Shakspeare, Hamlet, Act iv. Sc. 7.:—
"And then this should is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing."
Coleridge, in the Literary Remains, vol. i. p. 233., says—
"In a stitch in the side, every one must have heaved
a sigh that hurts by easing."
Dr. Johnson saw its true meaning:
"It is," he says, "a notion very prevalent, that sighs impair the strength, and wear out the animal powers."
In allusion to this popular notion, by no means yet extinct, Herbert says, p. 71.:
"Or if some years with it (a sigh) escape
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss."
D.S.
"Crede quod habes," &c.—The celebrated answer to a Protestant about the real presence, by the borrower of his horse, is supposed to be made since the Reformation, by whom I forget:—
"Quod nuper dixisti
De corpore Christi
Crede quod edis et edis;
Sic tibi rescribo
De tuo palfrido
Crede quod habes et habes."
But in Wright and Halliwell's Reliquiæ Antiquæ, p. 287., from a manuscript of the time of Henry VII., is given—
"Tu dixisti de corpore Christi, crede et habes
De palefrido sic tibi scribo, crede et habes."
M.
Grant to the Earl of Sussex of Leave to be covered in the Royal Presence.—In editing Heylyn's History of the Reformation, I had to remark of the grant made by Queen Mary to the Earl of Sussex, that it was the only one of Heylyn's documents which I had been unable to trace elsewhere (ii. 90.). Allow me to state in your columns, that I have since found it in Weever's Funeral Monuments (pp. 635, 636).
J.C. ROBERTSON.
Bekesbourne.
The first Woman formed from a Rib (Vol. ii., p. 213.).—As you have given insertion to an extract of a sermon on the subject of the creation of Eve, I trust you will allow me to refer your correspondent BALLIOLENSIS to Matthew Henry's commentary on the second chapter of Genesis, from which I extract the following beautiful explanation of the reason why the rib was selected as the material whereof the woman should be created:—
"Fourthly, that the woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him; but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved."
IOTA.
Beau Brummel's Ancestry.—Mr. Jesse some years back did ample justice to the history of a "London celebrity," George Brummell; but, from what he there stated, the following "Note" will, I feel assured, be a novelty to him. At the time that Brummell was considered in everything the arbiter elegantiarum, the writer of this has frequently heard Lady Monson (the widow of the second lord, and an old lady who, living to the age of ninety-seven, had a wonderful fund of interesting recollections) say, that this ruler of fashion was the descendant of a very excellent servant in the family. Not long ago, some old papers of the family being turned over, proofs corroborative of this came to light. William Brummell, from the year 1734 to 1764, was the faithful and confidential servant of Charles Monson, brother of the first lord: the period would identify him with the grandfather of the Beau; the only doubt was, that as Mr. Jesse has ascertained that William Brummell, the grandfather, was, in the interval above given, married, had a son William, and owned a house in Bury Street, how far these facts were compatible with his remaining as a servant living with Charles Monson, both in town and country. Now, in 1757, Professor Henry Monson of Cambridge being dangerously ill, his brother Charles sent William Brummell down, as a trustworthy person, to attend to him; and in a letter from Brummell to his master, he, with many other requisitions, wishes that there may be sent down to him a certain glass vessel, very useful for invalids to drink out of, and which, if not in Spring Gardens, "may be found in Bury Street. It was used when Billy was ill." From the familiarity of the word "Billy," he must be speaking of his son. These facts are certainly corroborative of the old dowager's statement.
M(2).