Any farther communications on the above Queries shall be forwarded to the correspondent.]
Prester John.—I should be glad, through the medium of "N. & Q.," to be favoured with some information relative to this mysterious personage.
Strath Clyde.
[The history of Prester John, or of the individuals bearing that appellation, appears involved in considerable confusion and obscurity. Most of our Encyclopædias contain notices of this mysterious personage, especially Rees's, and Collier's Great Historical Dictionary. "The fame of Prester or Presbyter John," says Gibbon, "a khan, whose power was vainly magnified by the Nestorian missionaries, and who is said to have received at their hands the rite of baptism, and even of ordination, has long amused the credulity of Europe. In its long progress to Mosul, Jerusalem, Rome, &c., the story of Prester John evaporated into a monstrous fable, of which some features have been borrowed from the Lama of Thibet (Hist. Généaologique des Tartares, part ii. p. 42.; Hist. de Gengiscan, p. 31. &c.), and were ignorantly transferred by the Portuguese to the emperor of Abyssinia (Ludolph. Hist. Æthop. Comment. l. ii. c. 1.). Yet is is probable that, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Nestorian Christianity was professed in the horde of the Keraites.">[
Homer's Iliad in a Nut.—On the tomb of those celebrated gardeners, Tradescant father and son, these lines occur in the course of the inscription:
"Whilst they (as Homer's Iliad in a nut),
A World of Wonders in one closet shut."
Will you explain the comparison implied in the words "as Homer's Iliad in a nut?"
David.
[It refers to the account given by Pliny, vii. 21., that the Iliad was copied in so small a hand, that the whole work could lie in a walnut-shell: "In nuce inclusam Iliada Homeri carmen, in membrana scriptum tradidit Cicero." Pliny's authority is Cicero apvd Gellium, ix. 421. See M. Huet's account of a similar experiment in Gentleman's Magazine, vol. xxxix. p. 347.]