The use of the title "Honorable" to the House of Commons, and to members within its walls, is familiar to us all.
The worthiness and antiquity of the title is proved by its being given to one of the Persons of the Eternal Trinity in the Te Deum.
F. W. J.
Minor Queries.
93. Frederick Egmont; Peter (Egmont?).
—They appear as booksellers merely and only, so far as I can make out, because the promptorius puerorum, or medulla grammaticæ, printed by Pynson, in 1499, is said, in the colophon, to be at their expense. Neither Ames nor Dibdin gives any further evidence. The following is therefore worth a Note. It is from the ad lectorem (or rather, the adolescentibus studiosis) of the Multorum Vocabulorum equivocorum interpretatio Magistri Johannes de garlandia: Paris, 1502, 4to.
"Sed nihil tam arduum tamque difficile fuit quod labor improbus non vicerit. Ut videlicet mei amicissimo Fredericho Egmont morem gererem optatissimus: qui cum in vestra excellentissima anglie patria. Et librorum sit fidelissimus mercator et amicorum suorum amantissimus, nullum unque librum ex officina sua nisi perquam castigatus emittet."
Query, was F. Egmont a printer as well as a bookseller? Granting that officina means a shop, how can a mere bookseller sell none but correctly printed works? The writer of the above was himself a bookseller (Joh. Ant. Venetus).
Of Peter above-mentioned, or rather of his name, the following is the history:—The colophon of the promptorius, of which there is a copy in the Grenville Library, runs as follows "... in expensis virtuosorum virorum Frederici Egmont et Petri post pascha, anno domini MCCCC nonagessimo nono, decima v'a die mensis Maii." Hence Hain and others have entered Peter post Pascha as an English bookseller, presuming that the words post pascha cannot belong to the date, because the more definite day, "May 15," follows. But surely, among the varieties of the time when every man did what seemed good in his own eyes as to titles, colophons, &c., it may easily have happened that a double description of a part of the date may have occurred, one description containing more than the other. Query, Can any other instance be produced of this hypertautology? [6] At any rate, such a thing is more likely than that a bookseller should have been called Peter After-Easter. At the same time such whimsical things were done in the Latinization of names, both by their owners and by others for them, that no certain conclusion can be drawn. For example, more atrocious changes have been made than would be that of Easterby into post pascha.
M.