—— Rectory, Hereford, July 28.

LORD MAYOR NOT A PRIVY COUNCILLOR.
(Vol. iv., pp. 9. 137.)

I will not attempt to follow all the statements of L. M., because some of them are totally beside the question, and others contradict each other. I shall only observe that he totally mistakes my argument when he says, as if in reply to me, that it is not necessary to have the courtesy title of lord to be a privy councillor. No one ever said any such thing. What I said was this, that the Mayor of London, like those of Dublin and York, had the courtesy title of lord, and that this title of lord brought with it the other courtesy designation of right honorable, which latter being also (but not likewise) the designation of privy councillors, had, as I suppose, occasioned the error now predicated of the Mayor of London being a privy councillor, which, I repeat, he is no more than any Lord John or Lady Jane, who have also the title of Right Honorable.

L. M., however, states as a matter of fact, that "the Lord Mayor is always summoned to council on the accession of a new sovereign." Now I assert, and I think have proved in my former note, that the Lord Mayor never was so summoned to council. I now add that he never has on any occasion entered the council chamber, that he has never taken the oath nor performed any act of a privy councillor, and that in short there is not the smallest doubt with any one who knows anything about the Privy Council, that the Lord Mayor of London no more belongs to it than the Lord Mayors of York or Dublin, or the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, all of whom are equally styled Right Honorable, which title, I repeat, is the sole and silly pretence of this new-fangled hypothesis.

C.

"HOUSE OF YVERY."
(Vol. iv., pp. 101. 136.)

Observing the imperfect knowledge which Lowndes and your correspondents apparently have of the work called Anderson's House of Yvery, I send you a few Notes to clear up some points.

It may be said there were two editions of this work; one containing the censorious comments of (I presume) Lord Egmont on the degraded state of the peerage; the second, that in which those comments were cancelled. To the first, no printer's name appeared in the title-page; to the second is the name of "H. Woodfall, jun."

Lowndes has entirely mistaken the origin of the different paging in vol. i. The fact is, the original edition of the Introduction contained 41 pages of text, but the cancels reduced that number to 37; which p. 37., as Lowndes correctly remarks, is in the second edition misprinted 29. I possess both copies, with and without the cancels. By Lowndes we are led to believe that only p. xxxvii. was destroyed; but in truth they are p. xvi., and parts of pp. xv. and xvii., and nearly the whole of pp. xxxv.-vi., containing the anecdotes of the tailor's son and the apothecary's brother-in-law being sent, or intended to be sent, to foreign courts, as ambassadors from England. Another cancel occurs in vol. ii., of nearly the whole of pp. 444-5-6, which occasions Lowndes to say that pp. 446-7 are missing. The duplicate pages 453 to 460 are peculiar to the second edition only. One of my copies contains two additional plates, one of Wardour Castle, the other of Acton Burnell, evidently engraved for the work. The map of the baronies of Duhallow, &c., is only in one copy, viz. the original edition. Unfortunately, this original edition wants all the portraits of Faber, but it has the tomb of Richard Percival of 1190, beginning "Orate," as in Lowndes. It contains also a duplicate portrait of Sir Philip Percival, engraved by Toms in 1738 (who also engraved the Wardour and Acton Burnell Castles); and this duplicate is also in the other copy.

Were I to form any judgment when this work was commenced, I should say about 1738, and that all the engravings for it were done by Toms; and the first edition was printed in 1742, without any printer's name, and that some copies were so bound up. The other copies remained in sheets until the next year, when Faber was employed to engrave the portraits, and till 1744 or 1747; 1747 being the latest date of Faber's plates. There is some curious information in these volumes, and I would recommend your readers to observe how much the conduct of the Catholics of Ireland, recorded in vol. ii. p. 271., resembles that of the Catholics of the present day.