Minor Notes.
Lord Edward Fitzgerald's Mother.
—A highly respectable woman, recently living in my service, and who was born and bred in the household of the late Duke of Leinster, told me that, when she was a child, she was much about the person of "the old Duchess;" and that she had often seen the bloody handkerchief that was taken off Lord Edward Fitzgerald, after he had been shot at his capture. This relic of her unfortunate son the venerable and noble lady always wore stitched inside her dress. The peerage states that she was a daughter of the Duke of Richmond, was married in 1746-7, and bore seventeen children. As the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald was not until 1798, she must have been full seventy years old when she thus mourned; reminding one in the sternness of her grief of the "Ladye of Branksome."
A. G.
Chaucer and Gray.
—Of all the oft-quoted lines from Gray's Elegy, there is not one which is more frequently introduced than the well-known
"E'en, in our ashes live their wonted fires."
Now Gray was an antiquary, and there is no doubt too well read in Chaucer. Is it too much, therefore, to suggest that he owed this line to one in Chaucer's "Reves Prologue:"
"Yet in our ashen cold is fire yreken."
In Chaucer the sentiment it embodies is satirical:—
"For whan we may not don, than wol we speken,
Yet in our ashen cold is fire yreken."
In Gray, on the other hand, it is the moralist who solemnly declares:
"E'en from the tomb the voice of nature cries,
E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires."
But the coincidence cannot surely be accidental.
WILLIAM J. THOMS.
Shakspeare Family.
—In the Rotulorum Patentium et Clausorum Cancellariæ Hiberniæ Calendarium, vol. i. pars i. p. 99 b. is an entry, which shows that one Thomas Shakespere and Richard Portyngale were appointed Comptrollers of Customs in the port of Youghal, in Ireland, in the fifty-first year of Edward III.
J. F. F.
Epitaph on Dr. Humphrey Tindall (Vol. iii., p. 422.).
—The epitaph in Killyleagh churchyard is not unlike the following inscription on the tomb of Umphrey Tindall, D.D., Dean of Ely and President of Queen's College, Cambridge, who died Oct 12, 1650, in his sixty-fifth year, and is buried in the south aisle of the choir of Ely Cathedral:—
"In presence, government, good actions, and in birth,
Grave, wise, courageous, noble, was this earth;
The poor, the Church, the College say, here lies
A friend, a Dean, a Master, true, good, wise."
K. C.
Cambridge.
Specimens of Composition.
—In the current (June) number of the Eclectic Review there is a critique on Gilfillan's Bards of the Bible, the writer of which indulges in the use of several most inelegant, extraordinary, and unpardonable expressions. He speaks of "spiritual monoptotes," &c., as if all his readers were as learned as he himself professes to be: but the climax of his sorry literary attempt is as follows:
"Over the whole literature of modern times there is a feeling of reduced inspiration, milder possession, relaxed orgasmus, tabescent vitality, spiritual collapse."—P. 725.
What would the author of the Spectator have thought of a writer who could unblushingly parade before the literary public such words as "relaxed orgasmus," "tabescent vitality," "monoptotes," &c.?
J. H. KERSHAW.
Burke's "mighty Boar of the Forest."
—It has been much canvassed, what induced Burke to call Junius the "mighty boar of the forest." In the thirteenth book of the Iliad I found that Idomeneus, when awaiting the attack of Æneas, is compared to the "boar of the mountains." I think it therefore probable that Burke applied the comparison (quoting, from memory) to Junius. Perhaps you will not think this trifle unworthy of a place among the "Notes."
KENNETH R. H. MACKENZIE.