Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 12.djvu/164

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. xii. AUG. u, im

happy pupils, including Nicholas Nickleby, to Dotheboys Hall, the inn having been the head-quarters of Squeers when he visited London. The aspect of the inn in its latter days is graphically described in the fourth chapter of ' Nicholas Nickleby ' ; but surely Charles Dickens the Younger, in his ' Notes on some Dickens Places and People' (Pall Mall Magazine, July, 1896), means " The Saracen's Head," and not " The Belle Sauvage," when alluding to a Dickens spot which disappeared with the construction of Holborn Viaduct.

J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.

I have met the name of one real person who made use of the old " Saracen's Head " near St. Sepulchre's. This was the humble, but remarkable soldier's daughter and wife Mary Anne Wellington, whose adventurous career was written by the Rev. R. Cobbold. She was the daughter of George Wellington, a private in the Royal Artillery at Gibraltar, where she was born in 1789. She there married Thomas Hewitt of Hingham (son, it is said, of a Norfolk squire), who was in the band of the 48th Regiment. In 1808, being ordered to Lisbon to take part in the war against France, Hewitt sent his wife to Portsmouth. Passing through London, on her way to her mother-in-law's in Colchester, she stayed at " The Saracen's Head " (p. 73). She afterwards returned to Portugal, and with her husband passed through many adventures during the Peninsular War, behaving with courage and ability in all. She died, a widow, and aged, at Norwich.

As " The Saracen's Head " was a very old London inn, it suggests the possibility of its having been named after the renowned Roger the Saracen, celebrated by Ariosto (' Orlando Furioso,' Books I., II., III.), who, according to the genealogists (Halliday, ' House of Guelph '), was an ancestor, through Charlemagne and the house of Este-Guelph, of Edward VII. D. J.

MR. HIBGAME is evidently aware of the fact, but it may be as well to note, that the " old hotel immortalized by Dickens in ' Nicholas Nickleby,' and also by the fact that Lord Nelson slept there when on his way to join the Navy," had no connexion with the modern hotel that finally closed its doors on the 3rd of July, except that it bore the same name. The new " Saracen's Head " was not nearly on the same site. The " Saracen's Head " of Dickens and of Nelson was one of the coaching inns, with a spacious inn-yard, and was situated upon

old Snow Hill, of which not a vestige now remains, I believe, except a portion of the roadway and the church of St. Sepulchre, to which the old inn was almost adjacent. F. A. RUSSELL. 4, Nelgarde Road, Catford, 8.E.

BRIDGWATER BOROUGH : BRIDGEWATER DUKEDOM (10 S. xii 88). MR. R. J. WHIT- WELL should communicate with the Vicar of Bridgwater (Rev. Dr. Powell), the best authority on the charters of the borough.

I should like to ask how the Egerton family came to assume the title of Bridgewater for its earldom and dukedom, consequently transmitting the name to the Bridgewater canal, the Bridgewater treatises, and Bridge- water House, London. D. K. T.

T. L. PEACOCK : GEORGE MEREDITH (10 S. xii. 88). For many years before his death Peacock lived at Halliford, as I can attest from personal knowledge. It was there that he wrote his Shelley articles in Fraser, as well as ' Gryll Grange.' My father, who was his colleague in the Ex- aminer's Department in the East India House, was one of his most intimate friends, and often spent a Sunday with him at Halliford. I have a vivid recollection of the old gentleman, with his keen eyes and enormous nimbus of white hair, wearing, as he usually did, a white tie and old- fashioned tail-coat. From his youth Pea- cock had an intense love of the river. His ' Genius of the Thames ' was published in 1810, and a second edition, with a frontis- piece after Westall, in 1812.

W. F. PRIDEAUX.

Peacock died on 23 Jan., 1866, at Lower Halliford, near Shepperton, Middlesex, in the house which he had constructed out of two old cottages more than forty years before. The fact that Chertsey is at no great distance has probably led Mr. J. A. Hammerton into placing Peacock's residence in that town. A. R. BAYLEY.

RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH (10 S. xi. 448). In Burke's ' Landed Gentry,' i. 337, Lovell Edge worth of Edgeworthstown, J.P. and D.L., High Sheriff of co. Longford 1819, the son of Richard Lovell Edgeworth by his marriage in 1773 with Honora Sneyd, is said to have been born 30 June, 1776, and to have died unmarried in December, -1841. This does not agree with Gent. Mag., which at vol. xix. p. 222 (New Series), contains the following obituary notice: 23 Dec., 1842, " at Bangor, aged 66, Lovell Edgeworth,