Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 1.djvu/66

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NOTES AND QUERIES. iw s. i. JAN. 10,

3. And the primeval Apsu-ma (? or mu) who begat

them,

4. And Chaos, mu-um-mu Tiamat, the mother of

them both, &o.

See 'The Seven Tablets of Creation,' by L. W. King, 1902, p. 3 et seq.< and 'The Religions of Babylon and Assyria,' by Morris Jastrow, 1898, p. 105. One seems justified, therefore, in assuming that the mother of Ninus, after the divinity of both the former and the latter had become an established belief, was his own wife Semiramis, whose attributes, when deified after death, gradually became identified in the eyes of ner wor- shippers with those of Mu-Mu or Ma-Ma, the Mother of All.

J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.

IMMUREMENT ALIVE OF RELIGIOUS (9 th S. xii. 25, 131, 297, 376, 517). The interest of historic truth must be my excuse for taking exception to MR. H. Q. HOPE'S version of the Bruntisfield mystery. " The venerable man- sion" was not "demolished in 1800"; it stands at this day, and is still inhabited, a well-preserved example of Scottish castellated building of the sixteenth century. My father rented it at one time, and part of my child- hood was spent there ; but the story of the secret chamber, as repeated by MR. HOPE, has deepened in gloom since my time. Miss Warrender, a daughter of the house, has given what may be considered the authentic ver- sion in her 'Walks near Edinburgh,' pp. 13-15. It may serve as a useful warning against too easy acceptance of fanciful variants if I quote what she says :

"After the purchase of Bruntisfield by George Warrender [in 1695], it remained for nearly a hun dred years in possession of the younger branch o. the family, which came to an end in 1820 by the

death of Hugh Warrender He was succeeded by

his cousin, my grand-uncle, the Right Hon. Sir George Warrender, M. P., who, on taking possession discovered the existence of a secret room. The house was then thickly covered with ivy. Lee, the Royal Academician, and an architect that Si George had brought down from London with him were the first to suspect its existence, from findini more windows outside than they could account for The old woman who had charge of the house deniec for a long time any knowledge of such a room ; but frightened by Sir George's threats, she at lengt showed him the narrow entrance, that was con cealed behind a piece of tapestry. This was tori down and the door forced open, and a room wa found just as it had been left by some former occu pant the ashes still in the grate. Whether, a, one story said, it had been used as a hiding-plac in troubled times, or whether, according to anothe legend, it had been the room of a dearly loved chile of the house, after whose death it had been hur- riedly shut up, never to be entered again by the broken-hearted parents, there are now no means of

nowing ; but the bloodstains on the floor point to ome darker tragedy, and a tradition still lingers hat, not long after the discovery of this room, a keleton was found buried below the windows."

It would have been most improper if that keleton had not turned up ; but there is no uggestion of immurement, as MR. HOPE ne or more of the following particulars : 1) the name of the convent ; (2) the name of /he nun ; (3) the name of the person or per- ,ons who "captured" her; (4) the means thereby the capture was effected ; (6) the name of the "recent book on life in America "; and at the same time to give a reference to any contemporary account of the events .lleged to have taken place at Charlestown, tfass., in 1835. The fact that the law (in nglaud as elsewhere) did in times past )unish heretics with death by burning does lot seem to me to be one from which the jrevalence of an illegal custom of burying ecalcitrant religious alive can be by any mown process of reasoning validly inferred. JOHN B. WAINEWRIGHT.

CARDINALS (9 th S. xi. 490 ; xii. 19, 174, 278, 334, 497). Mr.' Marion Crawford, writing of Rome in 1865, says of Cardinal Antonelli :

' He had his faults, and they were faults little becoming a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church. But few are willing to consider that, though a cardinal, he was not a priest that he was prac- tically a layman, who by his own unaided genius had attained to great power and that those faults which have been charged against him with such virulence would have passed, nay, actually pass, unnoticed and uncensured in many a great states- man of those days and of these." This passage occurs in the novel of 'Sara- cinesca,' but here Mr. Marion Crawford is evidently writing as an historian, and not as a novelist, and I think may be considered an authority on the subject, as he has made Italian life so much his own.

J. H. MURRAY.

Edinburgh.

THE WYKEHAMICAL WORD " TOYS " (9 th S. xii. 345, 437, 492 ; 10 th S. i. 13).' Winchester College Notions,' by Three Beetleites (Win- chester, P. & G. Wells, 1901), is the book from which the present generation of Wyke- hamists acquires its essential modicum of knowledge of notions, and is the immediate source of the "accepted derivation" cited at 1 acknowledgment in their preface to the work of previous writers, and say that "deriva-
 * the second reference. The authors give due