This is a sad complaint against the Museum authorities of former times.
EDWARD F. RIMBAULT.
Mrs. Tempest.—Can any of your correspondents give me any account of Mrs. (or, in our present style, Miss) Tempest, a young lady who died the day of the great storm in Nov., 1703, in honour of whom Pope's early friend Walshe wrote an elegiac pastoral, and invited Pope to give his "winter" pastoral "a turn to her memory." In the note on Pope's pastoral it is said that "she was of an ancient family in Yorkshire, and admired by Walshe." I have elsewhere read of her as "the celebrated Mrs. Tempest;" but I know of no other celebrity than that conferred by Walshe's pastoral; for Pope's has no special allusion to her.
C.
Sitting cross-legged.—In an alliterative poem on Fortune (Reliquiæ Antiquæ, ii. p. 9.), written early in the fifteenth century, are the following lines:—
"Sitte, I say, and sethe on a semeli sete,
Rygth on the rounde, on the rennyng ryng;
Caste kne over kne, as a kynge kete,
Comely clothed in a cope, crouned as a kyng."
The third line seems to illustrate those early illuminations in which kings and great personages are represented as sitting cross-legged. There are numerous examples of the A.-S. period. Was it