Spenser's Fairy Queen, II. xii. 2.
"Good morrow."—Passim.
R. H.
[Is not our correspondent confounding the morrow of All Saints, which the 2nd of November certainly is, with the morrow of All Souls? Sir H. Nicolas, in his most useful Chronology of History, says most distinctly:—"The morrow of a feast is the day following. Thus, the feast of St. Peter ad Vincula is the 1st of August, and the morrow of that feast is consequently the 2nd of August."—P. 99.]
Hotchpot.—Will you kindly tell me what is the derivation of the local term hotchpot, and when it was first used?
M. G. B.
[The origin of this phrase is involved in some obscurity. Jacob, in his Law Dictionary, speaks of it as "from the French," and his definition is verbatim that given in The Termes of the Law (ed. 1598), with a very slight addition. Blackstone (book ii. cap. 12.) says, "which term I shall explain in the very words of Littleton: 'It seemeth that this word hotchpot is in English a pudding; for in a pudding is not commonly just one thing alone, but one thing with other things together.' By this housewifely metaphor our ancestors meant to inform us that the lands, both those given in frankmarriage, and those descending in fee-simple, should be mixed and blended together, and then divided in equal portions among all the daughters.">[
High and Low Dutch.—Is there any essential difference between High and Low Dutch; and if there be any, to which set do the Dutchmen at the Cape of Good Hope belong?
S. C. P.
[High and Low Dutch are vulgarisms to express the German and the Dutch languages, which those nations themselves call, for the German Deutsch, for the Dutch Holländisch. The latter is the language which the Dutch colonists of the Cape carried with them, when that colony was conquered by them from the Portuguese; and has for its base the German as spoken before Martin Luther's translation of the Bible made the dialect of Upper Saxony the written language of the entire German empire.]