—CLERICUS D. may be informed that the work of Petrus Joannes Olivarius de prophetiâ; Basilea, 1543, is in the library of Trinity College, Dublin.
TYRO.
Dublin.
Slavery in Scotland (Vol. v., p. 29.).
—To the question of E. F. L., as to what time the custom of mitigating the punishment of condemned Scottish criminals to perpetual servitude was done away with, I cannot at present give a definite answer; but perhaps the following curious extract from the Decisions of Fountainhall may be interesting to enquirers on this subject:—
"Reid, the Mountebank, pursues Scot of Harden and his Lady, for stealing away from him a little Girl, called the Tumbling Lassie, that danced upon his stage; and he claimed damages, and produced a contract, whereby he bought her from her mother, for £30 Scots. But we have no Slaves in Scotland, and mothers cannot sell their bairns; and physicians attested the employment of tumbling would kill her; and her joints were now grown stiff, and she declined to return; though she was at least a 'prentice, and so could not run away from her master; yet some cited Moses's Law, that if a servant shelter himself with thee, against his master's cruelty, thou shalt surely not deliver him up. The lords, renitente cancellario, assoilzied Harden, on the 27th January (1687)."—Vol. i. p. 439.
R. S. F.
Perth.
Cibber's Lives of the Poets (Vol. v., pp. 25., 116.).
—P. T. says that "he has not Croker's last edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson," to which MR. CROSSLEY had referred him as to Shiells' share in Cibber's Lives. He has printed "last" in Italics; but I see reason to suspect that he has not seen any of Mr. Croker's editions, nor even Boswell's own; for the MS. note which he quotes from a fly-leaf of his (P. T.'s) copy of the Lives of the Poets, is nothing but a verbal repetition of what Boswell had stated on Dr. Johnson's authority in his text, but of which he had added a refutation in a note; which note, with some corroborative circumstances, was repeated in both Mr. Croker's editions.