"May 18, 1725. I found the effect of last night drinking that foolish Dorset, which was pleasant enough, but did not at all agree with me, for it made me very stupid all day."
Query, What is Dorset?
R. P.
"Vanitatem observare."—Can any of your readers explain the following extract from the Council of Ancyra, A.D. 314? I quote from a Latin translation:
"Mulieribus quoque Christianis non liceat in suis lanificiis vanitatem observare: sed Deum invocent adjutorem, qui eis sapientiam texendi donavit."
What is meant by "vanitatem observare?"
R. H. G.
King's Prerogative.—A writer in the Edinburgh Review, vol. lxxiv. p. 77., asserts, on the authority of Blackstone (but he does not refer to the volume and page of the Commentaries, and I have in vain sought for the passages), that it is to this day a branch of the king's prerogative, at the death of every bishop, to have his kennel of hounds, or a compensation in lieu of it. Does the writer mean, and is it the fact, that if a bishop die without having a kennel of hounds, his executors are to pay the king a compensation in lieu thereof? And if it is, what is the amount of that compensation? Is it merely nominal? I can understand the king claiming a bishop's kennel of hounds or compensation in feudal times, when bishops were hunters (vide Raine's Auckland Castle, a work of great merit, and abounding with much curious information); but to say, to this day it is a branch of the king's prerogative, is an insult alike to our bishops and to religious practices in the nineteenth century. Of hunting bishops in feudal times, I beg to refer your readers, in addition to Mr. Raine's work, to an article in the fifty-eighth volume of the Quarterly Review, p. 433., for an extract from a letter of Peter of Blois to Walter, Bishop of Rochester, who at the age of eighty was a great hunter. Peter was shocked at his lordship's indulgence in so unclerical a sport. It is obvious neither Peter nor the Pope could have heard of the hunting Bishops of Durham.
Fra. Mewburn.
Quotations in Cowper.—Can any of your correspondents indicate the sources of the following quotations, which occur in Cowper's Letters (Hayley's Life and Letters of Cowper, 4 vols., 1812)? In vol. iii. p. 278. the following verses, referring to the Atonement, are cited: