Which he, from Eden, Edinburgh did name."
Reliquiæ Galeanæ, 67*
Charles Mathews, in a letter directed to his son at Mold N. W., dated 4th November [1825], says:
"Lord Deerhurst, who franked this letter, laughed at the idea of your being condemned to be at Mold, and told me an impromptu of Sheridan's, upon being compelled to spend a day or two there:
"'Were I to curse the man I hate
From youth till I grow old,
Oh might he be condemn'd by fate
To waste his days in Mold!'"
Memoirs of Charles Mathews, v. 504.
C. H. Cooper.
Cambridge.
The Silent Woman (Vol. v., p. 468.).—A very similar sign to this is one called "The Honest Lawyer," who is represented in exactly the same position as "The Silent Woman." The interpretation seems tolerably obvious in both cases, such a state being one in which the lady could not be otherwise than silent, nor the gentleman than honest.
S. L. P.
Oxford and Cambridge Club.
Serpent with a human Head (Vol. iv., pp. 191. 331.).—Perhaps the most ancient representations of this figure are to be found in those papyri of the ancient Egyptians, called the Ritual, or prayers of the dead, in which are depicted the progress or peregrination of the soul through the regions of the nether world, or Hades, to a future state of existence. Fac-similes of the Ritual have been published in Rosellini's Monumenti dell' Egitto, Dr. Lepsius's Todten-Buch, the plates of Lord Belmore's Collection of Hieroglyphic Monuments, and in the great French work entitled Description de l'Egypte. A similar form occurs also in several of the woodcuts inserted in the prose version, (printed at Paris by Antoine Verard in 1499) of Guillaume de Guileville's poem entitled Le Pélerinaige de l'Ame, a monastic legend of the fourteenth century, evidently founded on the old Egyptian belief. At the end of the pilgrimage represented in the Egyptian papyri, the soul is conducted by her guardian angel into the great Hall of Judgment, where the deeds done in the body are placed in the balance in the presence of Osiris, the judge of the assize, who passes sentence. A representation of the same scene became a favourite decoration in mediæval Christian churches, of which many vestiges have been discovered of late years in this country; with this difference, that in these fresco-paintings St. Michael was substituted, as judge of the tribunal, for Osiris. In the woodcuts above mentioned, published by Verard, the woman-headed serpent pursues the soul, like an accusing spirit, into the Hall of Judgment, seats herself even in one of the scales of the balance to counterpoise the good deeds placed in the opposite scale by the soul, telling her at the same time that her name is Sinderesis, or the WORM of Conscience. Thus, by a circuitous route, we arrive at the signification of the original Egyptian symbol.