St. Lucia, April 15. 1851.
Minor Notes.
Lord Edward Fitzgerald's Mother.
—A highly respectable woman, recently living in my service, and who was born and bred in the household of the late Duke of Leinster, told me that, when she was a child, she was much about the person of "the old Duchess;" and that she had often seen the bloody handkerchief that was taken off Lord Edward Fitzgerald, after he had been shot at his capture. This relic of her unfortunate son the venerable and noble lady always wore stitched inside her dress. The peerage states that she was a daughter of the Duke of Richmond, was married in 1746-7, and bore seventeen children. As the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald was not until 1798, she must have been full seventy years old when she thus mourned; reminding one in the sternness of her grief of the "Ladye of Branksome."
A. G.
Chaucer and Gray.
—Of all the oft-quoted lines from Gray's Elegy, there is not one which is more frequently introduced than the well-known
"E'en, in our ashes live their wonted fires."
Now Gray was an antiquary, and there is no doubt too well read in Chaucer. Is it too much, therefore, to suggest that he owed this line to one in Chaucer's "Reves Prologue:"
"Yet in our ashen cold is fire yreken."