Minor Notes.

Epitaph at King Stanley.

—Epitaph engraved on brass let into a large flagstone in King Stanley churchyard, Gloucestershire. Copied 15th July, 1846.

"ANN COLLINS, died 11 Sept. 1804, ætatis 49.

"'Twas as she tript from cask to cask,

In at a bunghole quickly fell,

Suffocation was her task,

She had no time to say farewell."

E. D.

Monuments of De la Beche Family.

—Among the interesting communications relating to monuments and trees, I see no mention made of some fine effigies of the De la Beche family, in an old church near which are the largest yew-trees I ever saw, on the edge of the Downs, about four miles above the road which runs from Reading in Berkshire to Wallingford, through Pangbourne and Streatley. I quite forget the name of this remote village, but it is above Basildon Park and Streatley; and a trip there would repay an archæologist for the time and outlay.

ÆGROTUS.

Cousinship.

—There appear to be various ways of computing relationship. The following is the mode which I have usually adopted, and I should be glad to know whether or not it is strictly correct:

James
\|
____________
John	William
\|	\|
David	George
\|	\|
Thomas	Henry
\|	\|
Edward	Robert

In the above pedigree Thomas and Henry are second cousins; Edward and Robert third cousins; and so on. If I am asked what relation Henry is to David, I reply they are first and second cousins; or else I invert the answer, and say that David is Henry's first cousin once removed: on the principle of making the relationship as near as possible by stating the degree of the older ascendant: in other words, I do not say that Henry is David's second cousin once removed. In like manner, David and Robert are first and third cousins; or David is Robert's first cousin twice removed.

E. N.

Borrowing Days.

—In a communication in "N. & Q." (Vol. v., p. 278.) regarding Sir Alexander Cumming, there occurs the following statement:

"The last three days of March are called the 'Borrowing Days' in Scotland, on account of their being generally attended with very blustering weather, which inclines people to say that they would wish to borrow three days from the month of April in exchange for those last three days of the month of March."

I remember to have heard, when a child, in the north of Ireland, a far more poetical, if not a more rational, explanation of what is undoubtedly a very common interchange of character between March and April, for a few successive days towards the close of the former, and commencement of the latter, month. "Give me (says March) three days of warmth and sunshine for my poor young lambs whilst they are yet too tender to bear the roughness of my wind and rain, and you shall have them repaid when the wool is grown." An attentive observer of the weather will seldom find the recurrence of this accommodation loan to fail. This day (the 24th) and the two last days have been of a temperature very unusual so early in the year, and I have little doubt that before the 1st of May there will be a per contrà of three successive days of cold and bluster carried to the credit side of April's account with Æolus and Co.

MCC.

March 24.

Monumental Plate at Lewes Castle.

—The following is an exact copy of an inscription in raised characters on a plate now at Lewes Castle:—

HER : LIETH : ANE : BORST

R : DAVGHTER : AND :

HEYR : TO : THOMAS

GAYNSLORD : ESQVIER

DECEASED : XVIII : OE :

IANVARI : 1591 : LEAVING

BEHIND : HER : II : SONES :

AND : V : DAVGHTERS.

The size of the plate is three feet by two feet Can any of the readers of "N. & Q." inform me whence this plate was taken, and what occasioned its removal?

A. W.

Junius and the Quarterly Review.

—The writer in the Quarterly Review who has attributed the Letters of Junius to Thomas Lyttelton, seems to have overlooked that passage in the Lyttelton Letters in which the writer confesses his deficiency in the principal "rhetorical figure," which at once rendered "the style of Junius" so popular:

"Irony is not my talent, and B—— says I have too much impudence to make use of it. It is a fine rhetorical figure; and if there were a chance of attaining the manner in which Junius has employed it, its cultivation will be worth my attention."

Letter 36. p. 131.

In my researches to "set this question at rest," I have found the Discoverers of Junius invariably inclined to withhold some fact or circumstance, which, if published with the proofs, must have overthrown their hypotheses. This may be good policy in an advocate pleading before a jury, or in an orator addressing a popular assembly, where an object may be attained by "making out a good case." On the question of Junius it is not only disingenuous, but highly reprehensible, since it proves that the writer thinks more of gratifying his own vanity, than in satisfying the public.

W. CRAMP.

Handwriting.

—In my last communication (Vol. v., p. 235.), in consecutive lines, when was printed where, and second was printed record. This is not wholly the printer's fault: in the common current hands, n and re are much alike; and n and r, s and r, are like enough to cause mistake. I have more than once got as far as a second proof, containing what might, if it had been printed, have been interpreted as a reflection on the dimensions of the clergy, which was far from my intention; namely, allusion to the area of a circular rector, in which the first r should have been s. What I want to make a note on, is this: no current hand is taught at schools: the so-called small hand is nothing but the larger hand written smaller. If any one would publish some specimens of current hand, in which all the letters are perfectly distinguishable from each other, he would do good service. And the (?) might go the length of a woodcut (which imitates writing better than copper): for no persons write so badly as writers. The task should not be undertaken by a writing-master: for there are few who will go through thick and thin in their calligraphy. What is wanted is a good skewer-hand, in which there are none of those upstrokes and downstrokes which, in former days, used to subject boys to certain other upstrokes and downstrokes, of which it can only be said that the former were more bearable than the latter.