Philadelphia.
180. Printers' Privilege.
—I have heard it confidently stated that printers have the privilege, if they are disposed to use it, to wear on all occasions a sword dangling at their sides. If it be so, whence does it arise? I have heard two explanations, one, bearing primâ facie evidence of incorrectness, a special grant as a mark of favour; the other, which is the only reasonable way of accounting for such a totally unsuitable privilege, that when the act passed forbidding arms to be commonly worn, all kinds and manner of people were mentioned by the name of their trades, businesses, &c., except printers, who were accidently omitted. How much of truth might there be in all this? What is the act alluded to?
TEE BEE.
181. Death of Pitt.
—What authority is there for the accompanying statement respecting the death of Mr. Pitt?
"Among the anecdotes of statesmen few are more interesting than that which records the death of Pitt. The hand which had so long sustained the sceptre of this country found no hand to clasp it in death. By friends and by servants he was alike deserted; and a stranger wandering on from room to room of a deserted house, came at last by chance to a chamber untended but not unquiet, in which the great minister lay, alone and dead."—See Edinburgh Review for July, 1851, p. 78., on the Poems and Memoir of Hartley Coleridge.
NATHANIEL ELLISON.
182. "A little Bird told me."
—C. W. wishes to know if any of the readers of "NOTES AND QUERIES" can tell him the origin of the proverb, "A little bird told me."