THE FROZEN HORN.
(Vol. ii., p. 262. Vol. iii., p. 25.)
Your correspondent J. M. G. quotes Hudibras, p. i. c. i. l. 147.:
"Where truth in person does appear,
Like words congeal'd in northern air."
Zachary Grey does not, in his note, refer to Mandeville, but he says:
"See an explication of this passage, and a merry account of words freezing in Nova Zembla, Tatler, No. 254.; and Rabelais' account of the bloody fight of the Arimasphians and Nephelebites upon the confines of the Frozen Sea (vol. iv. c. 56. p. 229., Ozell's edit. 1737). To which Mr. John Done probably refers, in his panegyric upon T. Coryat, and his Crudities:
'It's not that French which made his giants see,
Those uncouth islands, where words frozen be,
Till by the thaw next year they've voice again."
W. B. H.
Manchester.
J. M. G. quotes Sir John Mandeville for the story of the congealed words falling like hail from the rigging of his ship in the Arctic regions. I do not remember the passage, but there is one almost identical in Rabelais' Pantagruel, lib. iv. ch. lv., headed—
"Comment en haulte mer Pantagruel ouït diverses parolles desgelées."
In the notes to Bohn's translation it is said:
"Rabelais has borrowed these from the Courtisan of Balthasar de Castillon, of which a French translation was printed in 1539, and from the Apologues of Cælius Caleagnnius of Ferrara, published in 1544."
W. J. Bernhard Smith.
Temple.