"I do not intend this hot seasons to bid you the base, through the wide and dusty champaign of the councils."
The meaning I receive from this is, "I don't mean to carry you through the maze of the ancient councils of the church;" but I wish to know the exact force of the expression "to bid you the base?"
R. (a Reader).
Saints' Days.—The chorea invita is not a very satisfactory explanation of St. Vitus's dance; and though St. Vitus is not in the Roman martyrology of our day, yet he is in the almanacs of the fifteenth century, and probably earlier. The martyr Vitus makes the 15th of June a red letter-day in the first almanac ever printed. Who was St. Vitus, and how did he give his name to the play of the features which is called his dance? Again, the day before St. Patrick is celebrated in Ireland, St. Patricius is celebrated in Auvergne. Can any identity be established?
M.
Chepstow Castle.—In Carlyle's Life of Cromwell, vol. i. pp. 349, 350., there is a letter from Cromwell, dated before Pembroke, wherein he directs a Major Saunders, then quartered at or near Brecon, to go to Monmouthshire and seize Sir Trevor Williams of Llangevie, and Mr. Morgan, High Sheriff of Monmouth, "as," he writes, "they were very deep in the plot of betraying Chepstow Castle." Carlyle has the following foot-note to the letter:
"Saunders by his manner of indorsing this letter seems to intimate that he took his two men; that he keeps the letter by way of voucher. Sir Trevor Williams by and bye compounds as a delinquent, retires then into Llangevie House, and disappears from history. Of Sheriff Morgan, except that a new sheriff is soon appointed, we have no farther notice whatever."
Can any of your correspondents give me information in what work I can find a tolerably full account of this "betraying of Chepstow Castle?" and also of what place in the county was this Morgan, Sheriff of Monmouth?
Danydd Gam.
The Wilkes MSS. and "North Briton."—I inquired long since what had become of these MSS., which Miss Wilkes bequeathed to Peter Elmsley, of Sloane Street, "to whose judgement and delicacy" she confided them,—meaning, I presume, that she should be content to abide by his judgement as to the propriety of publishing them, or a selection; but certainly to be preserved for the vindication of her father's memory; otherwise she would have destroyed them, or directed them to be destroyed. In 1811 these MSS. were, I presume, in the possession of Peter Elmsley, Principal of St. Alban's Hall, as he submitted the Junius Correspondence, through Mr. Hallam, to Serjeant Rough, who returned the letters to Mr. Hallam. Where now are the original Junius Letters, and where the other MSS.? The Athenæum has announced that the Stowe MSS., including the Diaries and Correspondence of George Grenville, are about to be published, and will throw a "new light" on the character of John Wilkes. I suspect any light obtained from George Grenville will be very like the old light, and only help to blacken what is already too dark. I therefore venture to ask once again, Where are the Wilkes MSS.? and can they be consulted? Further, are any of your readers able and willing to inform us who were the writers of the different papers in the North Briton, either first or second series? Through "Notes and Queries" we got much curious information on this point with reference to the Rolliad.