FitzGerald proved a most kindly contributor to the series of “Suffolk Notes and Queries” that I edited for the ‘Ipswich Journal’ in 1877-78. The following were some of his notes, all signed “Effigy”—a play on his initials:—
“Major Moor, David Hume, and the Royal George.—In a review of Burton’s Life of Hume, p. 354 of the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine,’ April 1849, is the following quotation from the book, and the following note upon it:
“‘Page 452. “Major M---, with whom I dined yesterday, said that he had frequently met David Hume at their military mess in Scotland, and in other parties. That he was very polite and pleasant, though thoughtful in company, generally reclining his head upon his hand, as if in study; from which he would suddenly recover,” &c. [Note by the Editor, John Mitford of Benhall.] We merely add that Major M--- was Major Moor, author of the Hindoo Pantheon, a very learned and amiable person.’
“A very odd blunder for one distinguished Suffolk man to make of another, and so near a neighbour. For David Hume died in 1776, when Major Moor was about seven years old; by this token that (as he has told me) he saw the masts of the Royal George slope under water as she went down in 1782, while he was on board the transport that was to carry him to India, a cadet of thirteen years old.
“Nearly sixty years after this, Major Moor (as I also heard him relate) was among the usual company going over one of the Royal Palaces—Windsor, I think—when the cicerone pointed out a fragment of the Royal George’s mast, whereupon one elderly gentleman of the party told them that he had witnessed the disaster; after which Major Moor capped the general amazement by informing the little party that they had two surviving witnesses of it among them that day.
“Suffolk Minstrelsy.—These fragments of a Suffolk Harvest-Home Song, remembered by an old Suffolk Divine, offer room for historical and lyrical conjecture. I think the song must consist of tew several fragments.
“‘Row tu me, tow tu me,’ says He-ne-ry Burgin,
‘Row tu me, row tu me, I prah;
For I ha’ tarn’d a Scotch robber across the salt seas,
Tu ma-i-nt’n my tew brothers and me.’”“The Count de Grasse he stood amaz’d,
And frigh-te-ned he were,
For to see these bold Bri-tons
So active in war.”
“Limb.—I find this word, whose derivation has troubled Suffolk vocabularies, quoted in its Suffolk sense from Tate Wilkinson, in ‘Temple Bar Magazine’ for January 1876. Mrs White—an actress somewhere in the Shires,—she may have derived from Suffolk, however—addresses her daughter, Mrs Burden, in these words: ‘I’ll tell you what, Maam, if you contradict me, I’ll fell you at my feet, and trample over your corse, Maam, for you’re a limb, Maam, your father on his deathbed told me you were a limb.’ (N.B.—Perhaps Mr White it was who derived from us.) And again when poor Mrs Burden asks what is meant by a parenthesis, her mother exclaims, ‘Oh, what an infernal limb of an actress you’ll make, not to know the meaning of prentice, plural of apprentices!’ Such is Tate’s story if correctly quoted by ‘Temple Bar.’ Not long ago I heard at Aldbro’, ‘My mother is a limb for salt pork.’”
The Suffolk dialect was ever a pet hobby of FitzGerald’s. For years he was meditating a new edition of Major Moor’s ‘Suffolk Words,’ but the question never was settled whether words of his own collecting were to be incorporated in the body of the work or relegated to
an appendix. So the notion remained a notion. Much to our loss, for myself I prefer his ‘Sea-Words and Phrases along the Suffolk Coast’ (in the scarce ‘East Anglian,’ 1868-69 [81]) to half his translations. For this “poor old Lowestoft sea-slang,” as FitzGerald slightingly calls it, illustrates both his strong love of the sea and his own quaint lovable self. One turns over its pages idly, and lights on dozens of entries such as these:—