books in which all our proceedings were recorded; and as every member conceived himself bound to contribute some composition, either in verse or prose, and we had also many mirthfully ingenious debates, our archives soon swelled to two or three folios, replete with much miscellaneous wit and fun. I had a great share in its proceedings; and it soon grew into such fame that the Governor and all the principal people of the country ambitiously solicited the honour of being members or honorary visitants. It lasted as long as I stayed in Annapolis, and was finally broken up only when the troubles began and put an end to everything that was pleasant and proper.......

"The times were grown beyond measure troublesome: men's minds were restless and dissatisfied, for ever discontented and grumbling at the present state of things, and for ever projecting reformations. In Maryland the condition of the established clergy was highly respectable; and being all under the patronage of Government, they naturally were on the side of Government, and thus, in case of competition, threw great weight into that scale. The officers of Government were still better provided for; and by this support Government, which however neither kad, nor could have, any object in view but the good of the people, had generally carried its points, or at least had preserved something like a balance of power. There, as well as here, the country and the people were divided into parties. Placemen and their dependents took the part of Government, but were always opposed by a faction, whose leaders were instigated merely with the view of turning others out that they themselves might come in. And in Maryland the popular leaders have almost always been lawyers.

"This had long been the constant state of things, but it was now much worse. There was a fierceness in opposition that was unusual. They seemed to aim at a total renversement, and to stick at nothing to attain their end. The Church and churchmen either did stand much in their way, or the great placemen had cunningly contrived to place our order in the front of the battle, that themselves might take shelter behind us. Some individuals of our order had been irregular, licentious, and profligate; this was made the pretence for passing an Act, subjecting us to a novel jurisdiction (as we had no constitutional control, by our having no bishops) of a novel court, composed equally of laymen and clerks. The provision for the clergy was a tax, or tithe, of tobacco, the produce of the country, viz., 40 lbs. (or 30 lbs. of inspected tobacco) per poll. This was thought too much, as in some instances it really was, and Acts were moved for to compel us to accept of a modus, or composition in money, greatly to our loss. For a long time this was withstood. And this disappointment so vexed its chief abettors, the lawyers, that in a sort of frenzy they now pretended that the law by which the clergy claimed the 40 lbs. per poll was null and void. And this opinion they published in the newspapers, offering at the same time to defend the people who, in consequence of it, should refuse the payment of their taxes to the clergy gratis. The consequence of such a step may easily be guessed: at first, I received about half my salary, and ever after less and less. A suit was commenced in behalf of the clergy; but when after infinite trouble and delay it was got ready for trial, the troubles had then gotten to such a height that we could get no lawyer to try it. The pretence of its nullity was this: The law was passed in 1701-2, and the writs summoning the Assembly that passed it were issued in the name of King William, who, it afterwards appeared, happened to be dead at the time. Hence it was contended that there being an original defect, and the authority by which the people met being null, all that they did was null. And

yet the law had been in force, and observed as a law, for upwards of seventy years, had been recognized by many subsequent laws, and had been ratified by the succeeding sovereigns, as well as by succeeding Assemblies. What seemed most provoking was that vestrymen also were appointed by the same law, and two of its principal opposers, viz., Messrs. Chase and Paca, were vestrymen, and continued to act as such. In all these contests I was constantly and materially concerned. I drew up sundry memorials, remonstrances, and petitions, and wrote many papers to the public. And towards the close of it I was drawn into a long, keen, and wearisome newspaper contest with the two chief demagogues, viz., Messrs. Chase and Paca, of which controversy, the most important one that ever I was engaged in, as the papers written on both sides are still in being, all I choose to say is, that I was generally allowed to have the better of the argument, but they carried their point. None of the clergy who stood out received their salaries; the cause could not be brought to a trial; and finally, after I left Annapolis, the Governor, beset and worried by his council to give us up for the sake of peace, as it was called, in evil hour passed the law. I must do him the justice to own that when he found he could no longer resist the importunities with which he was urged, he sent an express to me, urging me to come to him, and that if I still stood out he also would. Unfortunately, I was absent on a journey, and before my return the deed was done, and irrevocable. The sad sequel of these contentions will come in in its course."

After being Rector of Annapolis for about two years, the Governor, without any solicitation, offered my grandfather the living of Queen Anne's parish, in St. George's county, which he accepted. The story of his finding the church doors shut against him (like Mr. Balwhidder in Galt's Annals of the Parish), and of some one purchasing eight loads of stones to drive him and his friends from the church by force, I included in my former

extracts.

"Other troubles also soon came on us. The times grew dreadfully uneasy, and I was neither an unconcerned nor an idle spectator of the mischiefs that were gathering. I was, in fact, the most efficient person in the administration of Government, though I neither had a post nor any prospect of ever having one. The management of the Assembly was left very much to me; and hardly a Bill was brought in which I did not either draw or at least revise, and either got it passed or rejected. It is not necessary here to set down how such things are done they were done in that Provincial Assembly; and I have not a doubt but that they are done in the same manner and by the same means in the British Parliament. All the Governor's speeches, messages, &c., and also some pretty important and lengthy papers from the Council, were of my drawing up. All these things were, if not certainly known, yet strongly suspected; and, of course, though I really had no views nor wishes but such as I believed to be for the true interest of the country, all the forward and noisy patriots, both in the Assembly and out of it, agreed to consider me as an obnoxious person. And these, besides my public controversy, engaged me in so many little private and public debates with individuals among my acquaintances, and with committees of patriots, that for two or three years I was kept as it were in a state of constant fever. Hardly a day passed over my head in which my mind was not put upon the stretch by some great event or other......

"About this time the eldest brother of my wife died, leaving a large young family and a very fine estate. He

DRYDEN.

I give to our English Letters-for the first time, as I believe, from the press-that burst of music, Dryden's chant of the Spring, the opening to The Flower and the Leaf, as he wrote it :

Now turning from the wintry signs, the Sun
His course exalted through the Ram had run;
And whirling up the skies his chariot,-drove
Through Taurus,-and the lightsome realms of Love,
Where Venus from her orb descends in showers,
To glad the ground and paint the fields with flowers:
When first the tender blades of grass appear,
And buds, that yet the blast of Eurus fear,
Stand at the door of life, and doubt to clothe the year;
Till gentle heat and soft repeated rains

Make the green blood to dance within their veins; Then, at their call embolden'd, out they come, And swell the germs and burst the narrow room; Broader and broader yet, their blooms display, Salute the welcome sun, and entertain the day. Then from their breathing souls the sweets repair To scent the skies, and purge th' unwholesome air: Joy spreads the heart, and with a general song Spring issues out, and leads the jolly months along." In all the editions that I have seen, in the third verse, that glory of the cesura, for the rimed couplet, the impetuous roll onward of the voice to the ninth interval is obscured and lost by the premature apparition of the comma in the sixth

"And whirling up the skies, his chariot drove." That this has found its right seat, as it here appears, in the ninth, I hope that every apt ear will at once own, self-convinced. If more is wanted, there is the gain in good sense: the sungod whirling up the skies his chariot in the stead of himself. If more, here are the words of the antique lay which Dryden remoulds in another English:

"When that Phebus his chaire of gold so hie Hadde whirled up the sterrie sky alofte, And in the Boole was entred certainely." His compositor fell-as we have seen others, now compositor, now editor, do-under the seduction of the music. EREM.

[See the late W. D. Christie's Globe Edition of Dryden, also Cooke's Pocket Edition, for variety of punctuation.]

FOLK-LORE.

A DEPOSIT FOR LUCK.-I was told, the other day, of a nobleman, who has now been dead several years, that, on leaving for a time his various houses in town and country, he placed some pieces of silver and copper in a drawer in the house, as he considered it very unlucky to return to a house in which there was not any money. It was a part of this folk-lore that the drawer in question must not be locked. I am told that, when he returned to the house, one of his first acts was to examine the drawer to see if his

deposit for luck remained intact; and that he always found this to be the case. This was not to be wondered at, as I am told that the housekeeper who was left in charge, being aware of her master's peculiarity, removed the money from the open drawer as soon as he had quitted the house, and replaced it before his return. It was thus saved from the dishonesty of any workpeople who were employed on the premises; and as to the luck, no one concerned was one penny the CUTHBERT BEDE.

worse."

DUCKS' EGGS AFTER SUNSET.-A farmer's wife, in Rutland, was promised a setting" " of ducks' eggs by the wife of another farmer, who sent the eggs at nine o'clock in the evening. "I cannot imagine how she could have been so foolish," said the first-named, when she mentioned the matter to me on the following day. I inquired as to the foolishness, and was told that ducks' eggs brought into a house after sunset would do no good, and would never be hatched. CUTHBERT BEDE.

AN OLD CUMBRIAN CUSTOM.-A friend from the North sends me some notes on an old custom once practised in Westward parish, Cumberland. The day after a christening, the mother of the child would give a tea to all her neighbours that were wives. In the evening, the husbands would come to fetch their wives home, and just when all were ready to depart, a pail or milk-pail was placed right in the doorway on the door sill. Over this each wife had to jump, that being the only way in which they were allowed to pass out of the house. The way in which the pail was cleared was considered a sure test as to whether each of the good wives was in "an interesting way" or not. If they cleared the pail, they were themselves clear; but those who stumbled, or put their foot in the pail while making the jump, were considered by the rest to be in that interesting state out of which their entertainer had just emerged.

Worksop.

THOMAS RATCLIFFE,

bably it arose from hence, that as the goats delight in stripping these trees, as has been said, some one has conceited that the devil by way of retaliation under this tree strips or fleas the goats in their turn. But whilst I am writing this, I have received from an ingenious hand a more probable conjecture on the causes of this name, that several small threads or filaments like goat's

hair lie betwixt the wood and the bark.”

Had the worthy bishop been writing in these days, he would probably have sent a query on this subject to the editor of "N. & Q." Can any contributor learned in Northern lore explain about the devil and the goats? In these countries there is, or was, a belief that goats rendered homage or worship to the devil, and were able to render themselves invisible once in each twenty-four hours for the due performance of this rite.

Belfast.

W. H. PATTERSON, M.R.I.A.

SHAKSPEARIANA.

"KING RICHARD II.," ACT II. sc. 3, ll. 51-2:"And what stir

Keeps good old York there, with his men of war?" Will some Shakspearian scholar kindly explain the above lines? My difficulty is with the word "stir," which Shakspeare uses in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act v. sc. 4, 1. 13, in the sense of "bustle," "confusion"; as he does in 1 Hen. VI., Act i. sc. 4, alluding to "alarum, thunder and lightning ""What stir is this?" and in Macbeth, Act i. sc. 3, as "motion," "action":

"If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me Without my stir."

The above lines from Richard II. seem capable of two readings-either, "What stir is it that keeps good old York there?" or, "What stir does good old York keep there?" Which of these is the right construction? Or, if neither, what is?

MOTH.

A SHAKSPEARIAN NOTE.-In a copy of Shakspeare edited by Howard Staunton, and published by Routledge in 1860, occurs a curious note on a passage in Macbeth, Act v. sc. 3:"K. Mach. Seyton! I am sick at heart, When I behold-Seyion, I say! This push Will chair me ever, or dis-seat me now.

Vol. iii. p. 511. "Chair" is, according to the editor, an emendation due to Dr. Percy, the old text having "cheer." And the latter seems to be the reading in most editions of Shakspeare, notwithstanding the emendation suggested by the Bishop of Dromore. However, it may be worth while mentioning that in Shropshire, where the good bishop was born, even to this day, and in the midland and northern counties of England, a "chair" is provincially denominated a "cheer," yet perhaps more archaically than provincially. JOHN PICKFORD, M.A. Newbourne Rectory, Woodbridge.

"OTHELLO."-I venture to suggest a very simple emendation of a much vexing passage in Othello. I believe that the original MS. ran thus :

"A fixed figure of the time, for scorn

To point his low unmoving finger at," and that, in the process of printing, the prepositions became transposed, and the concluding s of the pronoun repeated in the word that follows. The substitution of "low" for "slow" (an evident and indefensible error) would render, with the restoration of the transpositions, the image absolutely correct in both sense and artistic rectitude.

[Dyce has

R. H. LEGIS.

"The fixed figure for the time of scorn To point his slow and moving finger at."] "BUSYLESS," Tempest, iii. 1 (5th S. iv. 181, 365; v. 105.)—I think JABEZ might take busy as equal to busying, and busy(ing) less busyless. Also, as to be busy may mean to be bustling or to be in a bustle, so might bustling) less or bustleless =busyless or busiless, not busy or not in a bustle. Or, if still dissatisfied, I adduce for his full consideration the adjective tameless-wild, untamed, not domestic, from the adjective tame=not wild, tamed, domestic. Whereby tame, tameness, tameless, support busy, business, busiless. J. BEALE.

tion of H. H. on the passage of the Tempest, iii. 1, I have been somewhat amused by the emenda15, so nearly akin to my own in the notes of the Cambridge edition which appeared in 1863. I appeared here two years ago, and makes thoroughly can now furnish an addition to the line, which good sense of the whole :

"But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours, Most busyliest when jaded."

See likewise my emendation on crowes in the Cambridge notes. JOHN BULLOCK.

Aberdeen.

BRIDGE OR TUNNEL FROM DOVER TO CALAIS. -In Sir John Sinclair's correspondence (1831), he writes:

"When we came to Dover, we amused ourselves with discussing the various modes of crossing from England to France. That by means of a balloon gave rise to some pleasantries. We afterwards discussed the idea of having a wooden floating bridge, ten feet wide and ten feet high; the passage being twenty-five miles broad. Montgolfier calculated that it would require 14,000,000 feet of oak, which, at 2s. 6d. per cubical foot (the price of oak in France at that time), would amount to 1,750,000. Montgolfier therefore contended that for 3,000,000. sterling at the utmost a wooden floating bridge might be constructed from Dover to Calais on a larger scale than the one originally proposed, which ruption to navigation, however, was an insurmountable would defy any tempest that could arise.

I obstacle to such an attempt.

The inter

"It was amusing after this discussion to hear, in a

farce acted in one of the theatres in Paris, the following lines put into the mouth of a projector:

"Pour dompter les Anglais,

Il faut bâtir un pont sur le Pas de Calais.' We likewise discussed the idea of having a subterranean pass ge under the Channel, but the procuring of air was a difficulty that could not easily be got the better of. The only means that we could contrive for getting this obstacle surmounted was to compress air in barrels and transmit it in that state, to be let out in the centre of W. J.

the excavation."

PHILOLOGICAL ETHNOLOGY.-The recent speculations on the descent of races of mankind, as indicated by affinities of languages, call for a serious consideration of the validity of all such reasonings. I am not without expectations that, before long, some competent linguist, possessed of diligence and perseverance, will arise to reduce ad absurdum all these fashionable theories. I greatly question if any such thing is possible as a science of language." While there are undeniable connexions and analogies, the incessant changes and fluctuations make futile all attempts at generalization. It may be said of every language and dialect that "labitur et labetur, in omne volubilis ævum," and this even where writing and printing are checks upon wanton innovation. Among uncultivated races languages spring up and perish

like mushrooms. Whence arises this irrational propensity? To me it seems quite unaccountable, except by referring to the Mosaic history of the confusion of tongues at Babel. I regard it as a perpetual miracle. S. T. P.

THE HANGMEN.-You have on more than one occasion allowed others as well as myself to record data respecting those peculiarly interesting servants of the public, the hangmen. I do not know if students in the line in question are aware of a reference to Mr. John Thrift, the "soul-sender" in office c. 1747, which occurs in the General Advertiser, June 19, 1747, p. 3, col. 2. There is an account of the funeral of this officer in the Covent Garden Journal, May 16, 1752, p. 3, col. 3, which may interest my fellow students, as it shows the influence of popular prejudices and crude feeling :

"On Monday evening the corpse of John Thrift, the late executioner, was brought in a hearse, without any coach, to St. Paul's, Covent Garden, where it was attended by a great concourse of people, who seemed so displeased with his being buried there that the attend. ants of the funeral, among whom was Tallis, the present hangman, were afraid that the body would be torn out of the coffin, which was therefore first carried into the church. However, about eight o'clock they got him

interred."

This is quoted from the London Daily Advertiser, and it is interesting not only on account of possible sympathy with the friends of the deceased, and especially with Mr. Tallis, that is, if this

person had prevision, but it supplies the name of Mr. Thrift's successor in office. F. G. STEPHENS.

are

INDISTINCT SIGNATURES.-Most persons subscribe their names hastily, and hence indistinctly. This occasions small inconvenience in the course of ordinary correspondence, but in matters of business it often leads to trouble. I am secretary of two societies, having together nine hundred members. The members remit to the respective again almost necessarily hand the letters, with the treasurers their annual subscriptions, and these remittances, to their bank clerks. The consequence is that, from indistinct signatures (which are especially common when the subscribers happen entered in the bank ledger from those of the actual to possess middle names), different names remitters. Thus Maclean is converted into Austin, Milner into Miller, O'Donnoven into Macdonell. My experience, extending over seven years, serves to handwriting to the extent of two per cent. Then show that errors in this way occur from indistinct some remitters are "surprised" and indignant that mistakes should occur, the fault being nevertheless should have his name in full printed on his letterI suggest as a remedy that every one At the top it might be done elegantly in the form paper, either at top or bottom of the first page. Sooner or later my sug

their own.

of a scroll or shield.

gestion, I feel certain, will in some shape be adopted. CHARLES ROGERS. Grampian Lodge, Forest Hill, S. E.

[A correspondent in America lately sent to "N. & Q.” a communication in which there is a name not to be made out. The writer has amended it by sending in its place a name still less resembling anything ever intended to be read, and still more defiant of being printed.]

EPITAPH.-The following quaint and happy quotation, which I have just met with in reference to a little girl buried at the age of five months, seems worth noting:

"But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot,

and she returned unto him into the ark" (Gen. viii. 9). JOHN W. BONE.

A

EARLDOM OF PEMBROKE.-Under this title, in the Historic Peerage, Mr. Courthope says that William de Valence, when banished by the Parliament of Oxford in 1258, was certainly not possessed of this earldom, which was probably conferred upon him between 1262 and 1264. calendar of documents relating to Ireland, well edited by Mr. H. S. Sweetman, has been recently published under the authority of the Master of the Rolls, and contains the following entry from the Memoranda Rolls of the Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer, under the date of Michaelmas, 1251 :"Bond by James de St. Martin to Sir William de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, for 55l. 16s. 8d.,