"Woods of oranges will smell into the sea perhaps twenty miles; but what is that, since a peal of ordnance will do as much, which moveth in a small compass?"
It is once used by Shakespeare, Macbeth:—
"Ere to black Hecate's summons
The shard-borne beetle, with drowsy hums,
Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done
A deed of dreadful note."
Will not ringing a peal, then, mean a succession of sweet sounds caused by the ringing of bells in certain keys? Some ringers begin with D flat; others, again, contend they should begin in C sharp.
In your last number is a query about Scarborough Warning. Grose, in his Provincial Glossary, give the meaning as "a word and a blow, and the blow first;" it is a common proverb in Yorkshire. He gives the same account of its origin as does Ray, extracted from Fuller, and gives no notion that any other can be attached to it.
R.J.S.