Aged 76 years.
The following explanation is given of this enigmatical statement. Christopher Burraway was the fruit of an incestuous connexion between a father and daughter, and was early placed in the Foundling Hospital, from whence, when he came of age, he was apprenticed to a farmer. Coming in after years by chance to Martham, he was hired unwittingly by his own mother as farm steward, her father (or rather the father of both) being dead. His conduct proving satisfactory to his mistress she married him who thus became, successively, mother, sister, mistress, and wife, to this modern Œdipus. The episode remains to be told. Being discovered by his wife to be her son, by a peculiar mark on his shoulder, she was so horror-stricken that she soon after died, he surviving her scarcely four months. Of the other slab enough remains to show that it covered her remains; but the registers from 1729 to 1740 are unfortunately missing so that I cannot trace the family further.
First Panorama (Vol. iii., p. 526.).
—I remember when a boy going to see that panorama. I was struck with "the baker knocking at the door, in Albion Place, and wondered the man did not move!" But this could not have been the first (though it might have been the first publicly exhibited), if what is told of Sir Joshua Reynolds be true, that, having held that the painting of a panorama was a "thing impossible," on the sight of it he exclaimed—"This is the triumph of perspective!" I have frequently met with this anecdote.
B. G.
Queries.
Minor Queries.
Vermuyden.
—I wish very much to obtain a portrait, painted or engraved, of Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, Knt., a celebrated Flemish engineer in the time of Charles I. Can any one kindly assist my object, and inform me where one is to be met with?