[74] Bibliographical Decameron, vol. ii. p. 454.
[75] The editor of the Life prints the following note by Mr Raine, the coadjutor of Surtees in his investigations into the history of the North of England: "I one evening in looking through Scott's Minstrelsy wrote opposite to this dirge, Aut Robertus aut Diabolus. Surtees called shortly after, and, pouncing upon the remark, justified me by his conversation on the subject, in adding to my note, Ita, teste seipso."—P. 87.
[76] Among other volumes of interest, the Chetham has issued a very valuable and amusing collection of documents about the siege of Preston, and other incidents of the insurrection of 1715 in Lancashire.
[77] I remember hearing of an instance at a jury trial in Scotland, where counsel had an extremely subtle point of genealogy to make out, and no one but a ploughman witness, totally destitute of the genealogical faculty, to assist him to it. His plan—and probably a very judicious one in the general case—was to get the witness on a table-land of broad unmistakable principle, and then by degrees lure him farther on. Thus he got the witness readily to admit that his own mother was older than himself, but no exertion of ingenuity could get his intellect a step beyond that broad admission.
[78] "An Informatory Vindication of a poor, wasted, misrepresented remnant of the suffering anti-popish, anti-prelatic, anti-erastian, anti-sectarian, only true church of Christ in Scotland."
[79] The applicability of this to Varro has been questioned. It is a matter in which every one is entitled to hold his own opinion. To say nothing of the other extant shreds of his writings—and I never found any one who had anything to say for them—I cannot account even the De Re Rustica as much higher in literary rank than a Farmers' and Gardeners' Calendar. No doubt it is valuable, as any such means of insight into the practical life of the Egyptians or the Ph[oe]nicians would be, even were it less methodical than what we have from Varro. But this, or other writing like it, will hardly account for his great fame among contemporaries. Look, for instance, to Cicero at the outset of the Academics: "Tu ætatem patriæ, tu descriptiones temporum, tu sacrorum jura, tu sacerdotum munera, tu domesticam, tu bellicam disciplinam, tu sedem regionum et locorum, tu omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum nomina, genera officia, causas aperuiste: plurimumque poetis nostris omninoque latinis, et literis luminis attulisti, et verbis: atque ipse varium et elegans omni fere numero poema fecisti: philosophiamque multis locis inchoasti—ad impellendum satis, ad edocendum parum." Laudation could scarcely be pitched in higher tone towards the works of the great Youatt, or Mr Huxtable's contributions to the department of literature devoted to manure and pigs. The De Re Rustica, written when its author was eighty years old, seems to have been about the last of what he calls his seven times seventy works, and it is natural to suppose that somewhere in the remaining four hundred and eighty-nine lay the merits which excited such encomiums. The story about Gregory the Great suppressing the best of Varro's works to hide St Augustine's pilferings from them, would be a valuable curiosity of literature if it could be established.
[80] Miscel. of Irish Arch. Soc., i. 120.
[81] See Mr Muir's very curious volume on "Characteristics of Old Church Architecture in the Mainland and Western Islands of Scotland."
[82] "Instrumentum super Aucis Sancti Cuthberti."—Spalding Club.
[83] It would not be difficult to trace a resemblance between some of the exceedingly elaborate sculpture of the New Zealanders and that of the sculptured stones, especially in the instance of the very handsome country-house of the chief Rangihaetita, represented in Mr Angas's New Zealanders Illustrated. Its name, by the way, in the native Maori, is Kai Tangata, or Eat-man House—so called, doubtless, in commemoration of the many jolly feasts held in it, on missionaries and others coming within Wordsworth's description of