MINOR NOTES.
Alderman Beckford.—Gifford (Ben Jonson, vol. vi. p. 481.) has the following note:—
"The giants of Guildhall, thank heaven, yet defend their charge: it only remains to wish that the citizens may take example by the fate of Holmeby, and not expose them to an attack to which they will assuredly be found unequal. It is not altogether owing to their wisdom that this has not already taken place. For twenty years they were chained to the car of a profligate buffoon, who dragged them through every species of ignominy to the verge of rebellion; and their hall is even yet disgraced with the statue of a worthless negro-monger, in the act of insulting their sovereign with a speech of which (factious and brutal as he was) he never uttered one syllable." ... "By my troth, captain, these are very bitter words."
But Gifford was generally correct in his assertions; and twenty-two years after his note, I made the following one:—
"It is a curious fact, but a true one, that Beckford did not utter one syllable of this speech. It was penned by Horne Tooke, and by his art put on the records of the city and on Beckford's statue, as he told me, Mr. Braithwaite, Mr. Seyers, &c., at the Athenian Club.
"ISAAC REED.
"See the Times Of July 23. 1838, p. 6."
The worshipful Company of Ironmongers have relegated their statue from their hall to a lower position: but it still disgraces the Guildhall, and will continue to do so, as long as any factious demagogue is permitted to have a place among its members.
L.S.
The Frozen Horn.—Perhaps it is not generally known that the writer of Munchausen's Travels borrowed this amusing incident from Heylin's Mikrokosmos. In the section treating of Muscovy, he says:—
"This excesse of cold in the ayre, gave occasion to Castilian, in his Aulicus, wittily and not incongruously to faine that if two men being smewhat distant, talke together in the winter, their words will be so frozen that they cannot be heard: but if the parties in the spring returne to the same place, their words will melt in the same order that they were frozen and spoken, and be plainly understood."