The occurrence, as recounted by both Orosius and Herodotus, is attributed to a horse (a sacred horse, Herod.), not to a horseman, knight, or thane. What is meant by the Anglo-Saxon text is, certainly, anything but clear, as it stands in Barrington's edition; and he himself confesses this, and does not admit it into his English translation.
Dr. Bosworth seems to have wisely omitted the word in the second edition of his dictionary; and Thorpe confesses he can make nothing of it, in his Analecta. We find no such word in Cædmon, Beowulf, or the Saxon Chronicle; and the only reference made by Dr. Bosworth, in his first edition, is to this very place in Alfred's Orosius, in which he seems to have followed Lye.
May it not have been an error in the earlier transcribers of the MS., and the real word have been twentigum, i. e. he ordered his thane to pass over the river with twenty men, since the thane, by himself, could have been but of little use on the other side the river? However this may be, the fact is not historical at all, and therefore, as respects history, is of little consequence.
John Orman, M.A.
Cambridge.
Pugna Porcorum (Vol. vii., p. 528.).—The author of this poem, as is generally believed (though its production has also been assigned to Gilbertus Cognatus or Cousin), was Joannes Leo Placentius, or Placentinus, of whom the following account is given in the Biographie Universelle:
"Jean-Leo Placentius ou Le Plaisant, n'est connu que comme l'auteur d'un petit poème tautogramme, genre de composition qui ne peut offrir que le frivole mérite de la difficulté vaincue. Né à Saint Trond, au pays de Liège, il fit ses études à Bois-le-Duc, dans l'école des Hiéronomytes; embrassa la vie religieuse, au commencement du seizième siècle, dans l'ordre des Dominicains, et fut envoyé à Louvain pour y faire son cours de théologie. Les autres circonstances de sa vie sont ignorées; et ce n'est que par conjecture qu'on place sa mort à l'année 1548. On peut consulter sur cet écrivain, la Bibl. Belgica de Foppens, et les Scriptores ordin. Prædicator. des PP. Quétif et Echard."
Ἀλιέυς.
Dublin.
This production appears to have been merely designed as a display of the writer's skill. Dr. Brown notices it in his Philosophy of the Mind, lect. 36; and Ebert: "Porcius, Pugna Porcorum, per P. Porcium, Poetam (J. Leonem), without