—In the notes to the beautiful poem Italy, by Samuel Rogers, published (I think) in 1830, the following occurs:—
"'You admire that picture,' said an old Dominican to me at Padua, as I stood contemplating a Last Supper in the refectory of his convent, the figures as large as life. 'I have sat at my meals before it for seven-and-forty years and such are the changes that have taken place among us; so many have come and gone in the time, that when I look upon the company there—upon those who are sitting at the table silent as they—I am sometimes inclined to think that we, and not they, are the shadows.'"
In the sixth volume of Lord Mahon's History of England, chap. lx. p. 498., we find this passage:
"Once as Sir David Wilkie (Mr. Washington Irving and myself being then his fellow-travellers in Spain) was gazing on one of Titian's master-pieces—the famous picture of the Last Supper in the refectory of the Escurial—an old monk of the order of St. Jerome came up, and said to him, 'I have sat daily in sight of that picture for now nearly three score years. During that time my companions have dropped off, one after another—all who were my seniors, all who were of mine own age, and many or most of those who were younger than myself; nothing has been unchanged around me except those figures, large as life, in yonder painting; and I look at them till I sometimes think that they are the realities, and we the shadows.'"
The great resemblance between these two passages is very striking; the latter only amplifies the former by very few words.
D. F. M'L.
Cork.
Antiquity of County Boundaries.
—In the loop of Devonshire, on the western side of the Tamar, formed by the parishes of Werrington and North Petherwyn, none of the names of places are Cornish, but end in the Saxon termination of cot, whilst in all other parts the Cornish names are used up to the banks of the river. Modern Cornwall is a province so well defined by the language of its place-names, that it could be marked off without difficulty, if its artificial boundary-lines were omitted on a map. How does this limited extent of the language consist with some accounts of the former extent of the kingdom?
S. R. P.