Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 12.djvu/315

 10 S. XII. SEPT. 25, 1909. J NOTES AND QUERIES.

259

NOTES ON BOOKS, &c.

Johnsonian Gleanings. By Aleyn Lyell Beade. Part I. Notes on Dr. Johnson's Ancestors and Connexions, and illustrative of his Early Life. With Frontispiece and seven Plates. (Printed for the Author. )

MR. BEADS' s little book is mainly a reprint from our own columns, but we cannot forgo the oppor- tunity of remarking that it is one of the very few contributions which are genuine additions to our knowledge of Johnson's life and circle. The ordinary writer and speaker goes to Boswell's ' Life ' or Boswell's critics, and simply repeats what pleases him. Mr. Beade here and in his 'Beades of Blackwood Hill and Dr. Johnson's Ancestry ' has done such good original work that we regret the circumstance of private and limited printing. We hope that he will publish for the world at large, perhaps, a rehandling of his material.

The present ' Notes ' include reproductions of seven unpublished portraits of members of the Johnsonian circle at Lichfield, some of which are charming as well as interesting. A dip into the text almost anywhere will afford the admirers of the great Doctor some light on his personal habits, his friends, kindred, or property. Our readers know this, but we hope Mr. Beade will have due credit beyond the wide community of ' N. & Q.' hi quarters less precise about meum and tuum for the zeal and success of his labours.

The Preface promises us a second Part next summer concerning Johnson's black servant, Barber, " the fruits of much curious research." The Index is admirably thorough and helpful.

Chapters of my Life. By Samuel Waddington.

(Chapman & Hall.)

MR. WADDINGTOX is known as a writer and collector of sonnets. Like other literary lights, he has had a long career at the Board of Trade, and met Cosmo Monkhouse and Mr. Austin Dobson in the second morning of his official attendance. The office must have been quite a nest of singing birds, who were not the less efficient servants for their devotion to the Muse.

Mr. Waddington's is not a " Musa Jocosa," and the frequent small beer of his narrative is not relieved by much humour. Indeed, we have seldom read a modern volume written in a more portentous style. A specimen of what we mean confronts us in the following passage from the Introduction :

' What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue,' observed Edmund Burke ; but the history of the evolution and education, the growth, culture, progress, of any human being, from the cradle to the grave, could hardly fail to be of interest and value if written with perfect truth fulness and sincerity. And this would appear to be more manifestly the case if the life of the person whose history is narrated has been one of a some- what unique type, or has been passed amid con- ditions and environments unusually favourable to the development of independence of thought and character."

Complacency couched in a style like this does not attract us, and there is a good deal of that

useful quality about Mr. Waddington. He finds significance in small events which have happened x> many, in holidays which lead to places familiar and oft described, and in the common compli- ments which literary men pass one to another, Ee has clearly a genuine love of nature. On "lis retirement from official cares he received profuse congratulations as if he had come into a large fortune or was on the verge of matrimony. But the fortune, he explains, was a life of leisure, and " a fair and lovely bride was indeed awaiting me attired in the classic garb of thought and study."

There is ample evidence of both the last qualities in these pages, but conveyed in so heavy a form as to be almost unreadable.

Mr. Waddington does not believe in unsigned reviews, and declares that he was spitefully used on personal grounds by a reviewer in The Athe- nceum. The evidence offered for this statement is by no means convincing to one who knows how frequently authors are deceived in such cases.

There is a good deal concerning science in the book, and one chapter is devoted to ' Spiritual Wayfarings.' We find several allusions to people of note in one way or another, but we cannot say that they said or did particularly notable things.

Mysore and Coorg from the Inscriptions. By B.

Lewis Rice, C.I.E. (Constable & Co.) MR. RICE is well known to Indian antiquaries for the excellent work he has done as Director of Archa3ological Researches in Western India, especially for the remarkable discovery which he made in 1892 of the edicts of that enlightened monarch King Asoka. In the present volume he gives a resume^ of the inscriptions which have been published during the last twenty years in the great collection known as the ' Epigraphica Carnatica/ particularly of those found in the district of Mysore and Coorg. These inscriptions are either engraved on stone monuments or written on copper plates, and generally commemorate the erection of temples or other public works and their endowments ; but incidentally they furnish historical information as to the kings by whom they were erected. Important matter has thus been preserved, which extends back to the third century B.C.

The accounts given of these royal dynasties, showing wide technical knowledge of the subject, are, it must be confessed, of interest only to those who are students of the remote history 'of India ~, but the too brief chapters on Customs, Literature, and Religion, comprised in twenty-five pages, will appeal to a wider circle. We venture with diffi- dence to question some of Mr. Rice's conclusions. He thinks that the thunderbolts (dsani-sanndha) with which the infantry of the Seuna army were furnished may have been fire-arms (p. 171). They are more likely, we suggest, to have been the iron tridents, the well-known conventional form of the thunderbolt, which were used as weapons in early times. Mr. Rice believes that the peculiar use of the word Devanam-priyah, "god-beloved," origin- ally an honorary title of the Maurya kings, as in- later times synonymous with a fool, was due to a feeling of political resentment (p. 13). This is an unnecessary supposition, as the idiot in many countries has been popularly considered to be the peculiar favourite of Heaven, and scores of examples could easily be quoted.. The book is illustrated with fifteen representative inscriptions.