Lambert Simnel (Vol. iii., p. 390.).
—Though I cannot throw any light upon the question of T., Was this his real name? I may mention, as a Worcestershire man, that it is a custom among the pastrycooks of Worcester to make, at the beginning of Lent, a rich sort of cake; consisting of a thick crust of saffron-bread filled with currants, citron, and all the usual ingredients of wedding-cake, which is called a "simnel." I cannot say how long this custom has existed, but I have every reason to believe it is one of great antiquity. From Johnson's explanation of the term, I conclude, that this practice of making "simnels" must in former times have been more general than it is at present.
E. A. H. L.
Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (Vol. iii., pp. 142. 227. 458.).
—I submit that the "crimson-circled star" may be named without calling on the poet to explain.
The planet Venus, when she is to the east of the sun, is our evening star (and as such used to be termed Hesperus by the ancients).
The evening star in a summer twilight is seen surrounded with the glow of sunset, "crimson-circled." The rose, too, was a flower sacred to Venus, which might justify the epithet. But I suppose the blush of the sky was what the poet thought of at such a moment.
Venus sinking into the sea, which in setting she would appear to do,—falls into the grave of Uranus,—her father, according to the theory of Hesiod (190). The part cast into the sea, from which Aphrodite sprung, is here taken, by a becoming license (which softens the grossness of the old tradition), for the whole; so that the ocean, beneath the horizon of which the evening star sinks, may be well described by the poet as "her father's grave."
That Venus is meant, the gender of the pronoun relating to the star seems to prove beyond a doubt; there being no other sufficiently important to occur in a picture of this kind, to which a female name is given.
V.