E. C. H.
B. L. M. (Vol. viii., p. 585.).—The letters B. L. M., in the subscription of Italian correspondence, stand for bacio le mani (I kiss your hands), a form nearly equivalent to "your most obedient servant." In the present instance the inflection baciando (kissing) is intended.
W. S. B.
"The Forlorn Hope" (Vol. viii., pp. 411. 569.).—For centuries the "forlorn hope" was called, and is still called by the Germans, Verlorne Posten; by the French, Enfans perdus; by the Poles and other Slavonians, Stracona poczta: meaning, in each of those three languages, a detachment of troops, to which the commander of an army assigns such a perilous post, that he entertains no hope of ever rescuing it, or rather gives up all hope of its salvation. In detaching these men, he is conscious of the fate that awaits them; but he sacrifices them to save the rest of his army, i. e. he sacrifices a part for the safety of the whole. In short, he has no other intention, no other thought in so doing, than that which the adjective forlorn conveys. Thus, for instance, in Spain, a detachment of 600 students volunteered to become a forlorn hope, in order to defend the passage of a bridge at Burgos, to give time to an Anglo-Spanish corps (which was thrown into disorder, and closely pursued by a French corps of 18,000 men) to rally. The students all, to the last man, perished; but the object was attained.
It much grieves me thus to sap the foundation of the idle speculation upon a word the late Dr. Graves indulged in, and which Mr. W. R. Wilde inserted in the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science for February, 1849; but, on the other hand, I rejoice to have had the opportunity of endeavouring to destroy the very erroneous supposition, that Lord Byron had fallen into an error in his beautiful line:
"The full of hope, misnamed forlorn."
What the late Dr. Graves meant by haupt or hope, for head, I am at a loss to conceive. Haupt, in German, it is true, means head; but in speaking of a small body of men, marching at the head of an army, no German would ever say Haupt, but Spitze. As to hope (another word for head) I know not from what language he took it; certainly not from the Saxon, for in that tongue head was called heafod, hefed, or heafd; whilst hope was called hopa, not hope.
C. S. (An Old Soldier.)
Oak Cottage, Coniston, Lancashire.
Two Brothers of the same Christian Name (Vol. viii., p.338.).—I have recently met with another instance of this peculiarity. John Upton, of Trelaske, Cornwall, an ancestor of the Uptons of Ingsmire Hall, Westmoreland, had two sons, living in 1450, to both of whom he gave the Christian name of John. The elder of these alike-named brothers is stated by Burke, in his History of the Landed Gentry, to have been the father of the learned Dr. Nicholas Upton, canon of Salisbury and Wells, and afterwards of St. Paul's, one of the earliest known of our authors on heraldic subjects. The desire of the elder Upton to perpetuate his own Christian name may in some way account for this curious eccentricity.