"'I bought it (says Beckford) to have something to read when I passed through Lausanne. I have not been there since. I shut myself up for six weeks, from early in the morning until night, only now and then taking a ride. The people thought me mad. I read myself nearly blind.'
"I inquired if the books were rare or curious. He replied in the negative. There were excellent editions of the principal historical writers, and an extensive collection of travels. The most valuable work was an edition of Eustathius; there was also a MS. or two. All the books were in excellent condition; in number, considerably above six thousand, near seven perhaps. He should have read himself mad if there had been novelty enough, and he had stayed much longer.
"'I broke away, and dashed among the mountains. There is excellent reading there, too, equally to my taste. Did you ever travel alone among mountains?'
"I replied that I had, and been fully sensible of their mighty impressions. 'Do you retain Gibbon's library?'
"'It is now dispersed, I believe. I made it a present to my excellent physician, Dr. Schall or Scholl (I am not certain of the name). I never saw it after turning hermit there.'"
William Bates.
Birmingham.
St. Paul's Epistles to Seneca (Vol. vii., pp. 500. 583.).—The affirmation so frequently made and alluded to by J. M. S. of Hull, that Seneca became, in the last year of his life, a convert to Christianity, is an old tradition, which has just been revived by a French author, M. Amédée Fleury, and is discussed and attempted to be established by him at great length in two octavo volumes. I have not read the book, but a learned reviewer of it, M. S. De Sacy, shows, with the greatest appearance of reason and authority, that the tradition, instead of being strengthened, is weakened by all that M. Fleury has said about it. M. De Sacy's review is contained in the Journal des Débats of June 30, in which excellent paper he is a frequent and delightful writer on literary subjects. In the hope that it may interest and gratify J. M. S. to be informed of M. Fleury's new work, I send this scrap of information to the "N. & Q."
John Macray.
Oxford.
"Hip, Hip, Hurrah!" (Vol. vii., pp. 595. 633).—The reply suggested by your correspondent R. S. F., that the above exclamation originated in the Crusades, and is a corruption of the initial letters of "Hierosolyma est perdita," never appeared to me to be very apposite.
In A Collection of National English Ballads, edited and published by W. Chapple, 1838, in a description of the song "Old Simon, the King," the favourite of Squire Western in Tom Jones, the following lines are quoted:
"'Hang up all the poor hep drinkers,'
Cries old Sim, the king of skinkers."[[4]]