Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 1.djvu/493

 io s. i. MAY 21, 1904.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

405

5. Isle of Man (of which they were lords) ;

6. Latham ; 7. Strange ; 8. Percy. ' The Scots Peerage ' merely blazons the achieve- ment, "First grand quarter," &c., without stating for which family each separate coat is borne. This, I think, is a serious omission, and I trust it may be rectified in the suc- ceeding volumes. T. F. D.

ARISTOTLE AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY. The fact that Shakespeare and Bacon appear to have shared the same error, of having mis- quoted Aristotle, in saying that young men are thought unfit auditors of moral philo- sophy, has been much commented upon from time to time. Mr. Sidney Lee, in his ' Life of Shakespeare,' refers to it, and says that this supposed erroneous interpretation of Aristotle's language is common among sixteenth and seventeenth century writers. Thatitwasshared by contemporary dramatists with Shakespeare is easily proved, although j I believe it has not yet been noticed. The \ evidence for this is to be found in Beaumont j and Fletcher's play of ' Valentinian,' Act I. J scene i., where Chilax says : And, as the tutor to great Alexander Would say, a young man should not dare to read His moral books, till after five-and-twenty.

E. F. BATES.

HAWKER'S ' TRELAWNY' ANTICIPATED. We have all heard of the ballad by Hawker of Morwenstow by which Macaulay was taken in (vide chap. viii. of his 'History of England'). A somewhat similar refrain was current two centuries before Hawker's time. In a letter printed in Thurloe's 'State Papers,' 21 July, 1653, reference is made to John Lilbourne's trial. The writer says : " There were many tickets throwne about with these words :

And what, shall then honest John Lilbourn die ? Three score thousand will know the reason why."

J. WlLLCOCK.

Lerwick.

CARTER BRAXTON. In his ' Autobiography ' (i. 16) Herbert Spencer says some compli- mentary verses addressed to his maternal grandmother, Jane Brettel, by Sarah Crole, " were written in Richmond, Virginia, to which place, some time after 1780, Jane went to take

charge of the house of a ' Carter Braxton, Esq r .'

It seems that Sarah Crole was a governess, and that the verses were addressed to my grandmother on her departure for England in July, 1788."

To some of those who tread the byways of educational history the name of the employer may be familiar as that of the " wealthy merchant of West Point, Virginia," whose service Andrew Bell, the founder of the

Madras system, entered as private tutor in 1779. Bell left for England in March, 1781, "in consequence of the political state of the pro- vince " (Southey's ' Life of Bell,' i. 29).

Though the two accounts speak of two places about forty miles apart, there can be no doubt that they speak of the same man, as successive letters from Carter Braxton, jun., to Bell, are dated, one from West Point, and the other from Richmond.

DAVID SALMON

Swansea.

ST. PAUL'S QUOTATION FROM EPIMENIDES. (See 9 th S. xii. 487.) At the reference indi- cated, under the heading ' Molubdinous Slow- belly,' MR. HEBB says : " ' Slowbelly ' occurs as a quotation from Callimachus, an^Alex- andrian poet of the time of the Ptolemies, in Paul's pastoral epistle to Titus." There is a double inaccuracy in this statement. St. Paul manifestly takes the quotation direct from Epimenides. His own words are ttTrev^Tis t auTwv tSios avT&v 7rpo<i/r7js (Tit. i. 12). Again, though it is true that a line of Calli- machus, in his ' Hymn Jto Zeus, 3 opens with the words Kp^rts <iet i/'evo-rat, he says nothing whatever about "slowbellies." Possibly Cal- limachus was consciously quoting from Epi- menides ; but it is equally possible that the words may have become a proverbial phrase by the time of Callimachus.

ALEX. LEEPER.

Trinity College, Melbourne University.

MR. HEBB states that the expression " slowbelly " occurs in St. Paul's epistle to Titus " as a quotation from Callimachus, an Alexandrian poet of the time of the Ptole- mies." I am no classical scholar, and have no books or means of reference at hand which might do away with the necessity of appealing to l N. & Q. ' ; but in my copy of the New Testament in Greek I find that I have made a note opposite the above- mentioned passage (Titus i. 12), " The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies," that the author of the resonant hexameter Kpi?Tes del T/reuo-rcu, KOKCI Oypia, yao-rfpes

apycu,

of which this was a translation, was Epi- menides, and not Callimachus. St. Paul himself states in the same verse that the author was "one of themselves, even a prophet of their own."

It must be in the memory of some reader* that this passage had a very interesting historical significance given to it at the time when the recent internal trouble in Crete, engendered by the dangers of the political