Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 11.djvu/118

NOTES AND QUERIES. [io B. XL JAN. so, 1939. Egypt occurs also near Burnham Beeches, Bucks.

The name Egypt will be found on the Ordnance map of the neighbourhood of Plymouth, as the designation of a place about a mile west of Beer-Ferrers.

1. Egypt is the name of a seacoast village and post office in Scituate, Massachusetts, 18 miles south-east of Boston.

2. It is also the popular name of the extreme southern part of Illinois, tributary to Cairo, Ill.

Further details, and quotations, will be given as to either of these, upon request.

I would refer to my note on 'Egypt as a European Place-Name' in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. i. pp. 52-4 (1888), and to a supplementary note by Mr. Henry T. Crofton in the New Series of the same Journal, vol. i. p. 89 (1907). In several cases—for there are many instances—the name is associated with gypsies, formerly called "Egyptians." To what extent this is the case has yet to be shown.

I may add that the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society for April, 1909, will contain an article by myself on 'Egypt as a British Place-Name.' The two instances furnished by are new to me, and I shall feel indebted to him and to any other contributor for further additions to my list.

(10 S. x. 309, 353, 413, 476).—If G. E. Edmundson whoever he be, published in The Saturday Review of 18 Jan., 1908, or anywhere else, the poem beginning

as his own, he has perpetrated a gross literary forgery—only less so than would be the republication of one of Tennyson's well-known lyrics in the same way; and for this statement I assume full responsibility. The poem was written by Mrs. Spalding in the early seventies, was widely copied by the press, and has been almost a classic ever since. It has been often re-published in the papers—as by me in one of my own in 1894; has been frequently included in anthologies, as Warner's 'Library of the World's Best Literature' in 1897; and has formed a part of almost every American courtship for a generation where the parties have come from distant places and cared for poetry (where again I can cite personal experience). I was familiar with it as early as 1874, and know the author and her work. It was included in her 'Wings of Icarus' in 1892.

If Mr. Edmundson has merely worked the first line (I have not a copy of The Saturday Review at hand) into a poem otherwise different, he has still imposed upon the paper.

De Quincey's quotations (ante, p. 49) are both from Coleridge:—

(10 S. x. 488; xi. 13, 54). I think that this phrase has most probably come to us from France, where it is, and has been for years, in constant use. It is thus defined in Hatzfeld and Darmesteter's 'Dictionnaire de la Langue Française': "Le moment psychologique, le moment où l'âme est dans l'attente de quelque chose qui doit s'accomplir" (vol. ii. p. 1832). Critical moment is defined as " moment qui decide du sort de quelqu'un. Le moment critique est venu " (vol. i. 595). Littre gives " moment critique " as meaning " moment difficile, dangereux, decisif." He does not speak at all of " moment psycho- logique." We may reasonably infer from this that, at the time he wrote his dictionary, the phrase "moment psychologique " was not much used.

Mentalite is just now a very favourite word in France, and it, too, is finding its way to England, though still generally printed, I fancy, between inverted commas. M. HAULTMONT.

GOWER, A KENTISH HAMLET (10 S. xi. r 10). It is most likely that the hamlet obtained its name from one of the Kentish Gowers. See Macaulay's edition of Gower's works, vol. iv. p. 10, where he shows that the poet was an " Esquier de Kent," and that there were " several other persons of the name of Gower mentioned in the records of the time in connexion with the county of Kent." There were also " well-known Gowers of Stitenham in Yorkshire " (p. vii).