"Delights for Ladies; to adorn their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distillatories, with Beauties, Bouquets, Perfumes, and Waters. Reade, practise, and censure." London, Robert Young. 1640.
Who is the author of this interesting little work? Some one has written on the fly-leaf, "See Douce's Illustrations of Shakspeare, vol. i. p. 69., where there is a reference to this curious little book;" but as I cannot readily lay my hand on Douce, I will feel obliged for the information sought for from any of your valued correspondents.
George Lloyd.
Dublin.
[The author was Sir Hugh Plat, who, says Harte, "not to mention his most excellent talents, was the most ingenious husbandman of the age he lived in. In a word, no man ever discovered, or at least brought into use, so many new sorts of manure." The Delights for Ladies first appeared in 1602, and passed through several editions. Douce merely quotes this work. Plat was the author of several other works: see Watt and Lowndes.]
Burton's Death.—Did Burton, author of Anatomy of Melancholy, commit suicide?
C. S. W.
[The supposition that Robert Burton committed suicide originated from a statement found in Wood's Athenæ, vol. ii. p. 653. (Bliss). Wood says, "He, the said R. Burton, paid his last debt to nature in his chamber in Christ Church, at or very near that time which he had some years before foretold from the calculation of his own nativity; which, being exact, several of the students did not forbear to whisper among themselves that, rather than there should be a mistake in the calculation, he sent up his soul to heaven through a slip about his neck.">[
Joannes Audoënus.—I shall be obliged by any notices of the personal or literary history of John Owen, the famous Latin epigrammatist, in addition to those furnished by the Athenæ Oxonienses. Wood remarks, that "whereas he had made many epigrams on several people, so few were made on or written to him. Among the few, one by Stradling, and another by Dunbar, a Scot," I have met with one allusion to him among the epigrams of T. Bancroft, 4to., Lond. 1639, signat. A 3.:
"To the Reader.