Are there any other traditions of him, and can he have any connection with the name bestowed by children on the middle finger, in the following elegant rhyme?—
"Tom Thumbkin,
Will Wilkins,
Long Lonkin," &c.?
This I had always supposed merely to refer to the length of the finger, but the coincidence of names is curious.
SELEUCUS.
REPLIES.
TREATISE OF EQUIVOCATION.
I can now inform you that the MS. Treatise of Equivocation, about which J.M. inquired (Vol. i., p. 263.), is preserved in the Bodleian Library (Laud, Miscellaneous MSS. 655.). Dodd, in his Church History (vol. ii. pp. 381. 428.), under the names Blackwell and Francis Tresham, mentions the work by its second title, A Treatise against Lying and fraudulent Dissimulation, and states that the MS. is in the Bodleian. Through the kindness of Dr. Baudinel, I have seen the tract; and as there is a certain historical interest attached to it, some information on the subject may be acceptable to your readers. But it may be as well first to give the account of its production at the trial of Guy Fawkes and the conspirators, Jan. 27, 1606. (See State Trials, vol. ii. col. 180.) After Coke had introduced under the seventh head of his speech, as the fourth means for carrying on the plot, "their perfidious and perjurious equivocating," there follows:—