"Nevertheless in the law, which here preserves the old reckoning, he is of full age on the 9th: though he were born on the 10th, he is of age to execute a settlement a minute after midnight on the morning of the 9th."
I want to have this statement reconciled with the opening scene of Ben Jonson's Staple of News, where Pennyboy jun. counts, as his watch strikes—"one, two, three, four, five, six!"—
"Enough, enough, dear watch,
Thy pulse hath beat enough
—The hour is come so long expected," &c.
Then "the fashioner" comes in to fit on the heir's new clothes; he had "waited below 'till the clock struck," and gives, as an excuse, "your worship might have pleaded nonage, if you had got 'em on ere I could make just affidavit of the time."
All these particulars are too verbatim to admit of doubt as to the peculiar usage of that time; and from other sources I know that Ben Jonson was right: but it is not alluded to in the treatise first mentioned, nor is it stated when the usage was altered to "a minute after midnight."
A. E. B.
Leeds.
Hartman's Account of Waterloo.—In the note to the 3rd Canto of Childe Harold, Stanza 29, Lord Byron says: