J. M.
Hans Holbein.
—Is the place of this eminent artist's sepulture now known? His death (by the plague) in 1554 was probably a release from neglect and poverty. When he was compelled to give up his painting-rooms at the palace, after Henry's decease, he is conjectured to have resided in Bishopsgate street.
EDWARD F. RIMBAULT.
Ivory Medallion of Lord Byron.
—In the catalogue which Mr. Cole, of Scarborough, printed in 1829, of books in his private collection, he mentions a copy of Lord Byron's Marino Faliero, 1821, bound in a unique style, and having, inserted in a recess, on the front cover, a finely finished head of the noble poet, on ivory, in high relief, of beautiful Italian carving. Can any of your correspondents tell me who is now the possessor of this work of art?
W. S. G.
Newcastle-on-Tyne.
Trumpington Church.
—On the north side of the tower of Trumpington Church, Cambridgeshire, there is a curious recess in the basement story, which I have not met with anywhere else, or seen fully accounted for. It is sufficiently capacious for a man to stand in, having an arched entrance six feet in height, with a turning to the westward of about two feet, and is formed completely within the thickness of the wall. The village tradition, that it was formerly used as a confessional, founded on the existence of an opening into the interior part of the tower, now blocked up, has long been disesteemed. In the volume by the Cambridge Camden Society, on the Churches in Cambridgeshire, it is said to have been made for an ecclesiastic to stand in, to ring the Sanctus bell. A round hole, lined with wood, in the roof of the niche, evidently intended for a bell-rope, and chafings upon the upper part of the little aperture, such as the friction of one would produce, are very convincive of its having been used for some such purpose. But when we consider that the Sanctus bell, except when a hand one, was "suspended on the outside of the church, in a small turret over the archway leading from the nave into the chancel,"[5] the probability that it was made for the purpose above-mentioned seems very much weakened. I shall feel obliged for a reference to any other instance, or a more satisfactory explanation.