A NEST OF SAXONISTS.
Queen’s College, Oxford, was called “a nest of Saxonists” towards the close of the sixteenth century, when those learned antiquarians and Saxonists, Rawlinson and Thwaites, flourished there. It is recorded of the latter, in Nichols’s Bowyer, that he said, writing of the state of the college, “We want Saxon Lexicons. I have fifteen young students in that language, and but one Somner for them all.” Our Cambridge gossip,
COLE, RELATES A PLEASANT MISTAKE,
(taken notice of by Warton also in the first volume of his History of English Poetry) of a brother Cantab’s having undertaken to translate the Scriptures into Welsh, and rendering vials of wrath (meaning vessels—Rom. v. 8) by the Welsh word Crythan, signifying crowds or fiddles. “The Greek word being φιαλας,” he adds, “it is probable he translated from the English only, where finding vials, he mistook it for viols.” The translator was Dr. Morgan, who died Bishop of St. Asaph, in 1604.
MINDING THE ROAST.
Lord Nugent, on-dit, once called on an old college acquaintance, then a country divine of great simplicity of manners, at a time when his housekeeper was from home on some errand, and he had undertaken to mind the roast. This obliged him to invite his lordship into the kitchen, that he might avoid the fate of King Alfred. Our dame’s stay exceeded the time anticipated, and the divine having to bury a corpse, he begged Lord N. to take his turn at the spit, which he accordingly did, till the housekeeper arrived to relieve him. This anecdote reminds me of the following