It may farther be mentioned that the French, who have a good acquaintance with Madagascar, "have found Drury's statement of the geography, the natural history, the manners of the people, and the conspicuous men of the time, in Madagascar, remarkably accurate." (Bib. Gén. des Voyages, Paris, 1808.) Archdeacon Wrangham says: "Duncombe (?) calls Drury's Madagascar the best and most genuine account ever given of the island;" and the missionary Ellis quoted Drury without the slightest suspicion that any doubt hangs over the genuineness of his narrative. Drury's account of himself runs thus:—"I, Robert Drury," he says, when commencing his book, "was born on July 24, 1687, in Crutched Friars, London, where my father then lived; but soon after removed to the Old Jury, near Cheapside, where he was well known, and esteemed for keeping that noted house called 'The King's Head,' or otherwise distinguished by the name of the Beef-stake House; and to which there was all my father's time a great resort of merchants, and gentlemen of the best rank and character." To this famous resort of the Revolutionary and Augustan ages I lately betook myself for my stake, in the hope that mine host might be found redolent of the traditional glory of his house. But alas! that worthy, although firmly believing in the antiquity of the King's Head, and of there being some book in existence that would prove it, could not say of his own knowledge whether the king originally complimented by his predecessor was Harry the Eighth or George the Fourth!
In conclusion, I would just add, is not the circumstance of our subject holding the humble post of porter at the East India House confirmatory of that part of his story which represents him as one of the crew of Hon. Company's ship "Degrave," whose wreck upon Madagascar I take to be an undoubted fact? What so probable as this recognition, in a small provision for a man in his old age, whose misfortunes commenced while in their service? Finally, to me the whole narrative of Robert Drury seems so probable, and so well vouched for, that I have given in my adhesion thereto by removing him to a higher shelf in my library than that occupied by such apocryphal persons as Crusoe, Quarle, Boyle, Falconer, and a host of the like.
J. O.
Footnote 1:[(return)]
The editions of Madagascar known to me are those of 1727, 1731, and 1743, by the original publisher, Meadows, Hull, 1807, and London, 1826.
THE TERMINATION -BY.
(Vol. vii., p. 536.)
I would suggest a doubt, whether the suffix -by, in the names of places, affords us any satisfactory evidence, per se, of their exclusively Danish origin. This termination is of no unfrequent occurrence in districts, both in this country and elsewhere, to which the Danes, properly so called, were either utter strangers, or wherein they at no time established any permanent footing. The truth is, there seems to be a fallacy in this Danish theory, in so far as it rests upon the testimony of language; for, upon investigation, we generally find that the word or phrase adduced in its support was one recognised, not in any single territory alone, but throughout the whole of Scandinavia, whose different tribes, amid some trifling variations of dialect, which can now be scarcely ascertained, were all of them as readily intelligible to one another as are, at this day, the inhabitants of two adjoining English counties. If this were so, it appears that, in the case before us, nothing can be proved from the existence of the expression, beyond the fact of its Norse origin; and our reasonable and natural course is, if we would arrive at its true signification, to refer at once to the parent tongue of the Scandinavian nations, spoken in common, and during a long-continued period, amid the snows of distant Iceland, on the mountains of Norway, the plains of Denmark, and in the forests of Sweden.
This ancient and widely-diffused language was the Icelandic, Norman, or Dönsk tunga,—that in which were written the Eddas and Skálda, the