Mariner's Compass (Vol. ii., p. 56.).—The "fleur de lis" was made the ornament of the northern radius of the mariner's compass in compliment to Charles of Anjou (whose device it was), the reigning king of Sicily, at the time when Flavio Gioja, the Neapolitan, first employed that instrument in navigation.
O. P. Q.
Arabic Numerals, Brugsch (Vol. ii., pp. 294. 424.).—Brugsch, Numerorum apud Veteres Ægyptos demoticorum Doctrina. Ex Papyris et Inscriptionibus nunc primum illustrata. 4to., with five plates of facsimiles, &c., is published in this country by Williams and Norgate, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, where J. W. H. may see it, or whence he may get any information he may require respecting it.
W.
Miscellaneous.
NOTES ON BOOKS, SALES, CATALOGUES, ETC.
Mr. Bohn has just issued a new volume of his Antiquarian Library; and we shall be greatly surprised if it does not prove one of the most popular of the whole series. It is a new and greatly enlarged edition of Mr. Keightley's Fairy Mythology illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of various Countries, a work characterised alike by a quick perception of the beauty of the popular myths recorded in its pages, the good taste manifested in their selection, and the learning and scholarship with which Mr. Keightley has illustrated them. The lovers of folk-lore will be delighted with this new edition of a book, which such men as Goethe, Grimm, Von Hammer, Douce, and Southey have agreed in commending; and of which the appearance is particularly well timed, for a fitter book for fire-side reading, or a Christmas present, we know not than this edition of Keightley's Fairy Mythology, with its inimitable frontispiece by George Cruikshank, which alone is worth the price of the volume.
Whitaker's Clergyman's Diary and Ecclesiastical Calendar is intended to supply a want which is acknowledged to have been long felt by the clergy, though the lawyer and man of business have been for many years well supplied with works of a similar character. A glance at the Table of Contents shows how much valuable matter, of especial interest to our clerical friends, has here been collected from various sources for their information; and to prove the value of a work destined, we have no doubt, to find for many years an extensive and well-deserved patronage.
Few of our readers but have tested and found the value of Mrs. Cowden Clarke's Concordance to Shakspeare; and few are the nurseries into which some of her clever and kindly books for children have not found their way; so that albeit her projected series of tales, The Girlhood of Shakspeare's Heroines, scarcely belongs to the class of works usually noticed in our columns, we gladly find in Mrs. Clarke's love of children and reverence for Shakspeare, an excuse for saying a few words in favour of her good work of tracing the probable antecedents in the history of some of Shakspeare's heroines.