Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/192

 156

NOTES AND QUERIES. [10* s. n. AUG. 20, im.

a coarse and contemptible character, who was drowned on a dark night by falling into the basin

near the New Pier,

after having been in

company with a Jew dealer from London, with whom he had some mineral transactions."

P. J. ANDEESON. University Library, Aberdeen.

LADY ELIZABETH GERMAIN (10 th S. ii. 88). I should say that a portrait of this lady, the Lady Betty Germain of Horace Walpole, who died in 1770, could be found at Drayton, near Thrapston, co. Northants, the seat of Mr. Stopford-Sackville ; and supposing an engraving of her to be in existence, it would most likely be in the Hope Collection at Oxford. She was the daughter of Charles, Earl Berkeley, and wife of Sir John Germain. There is a small brass plate to her memory in Thrapston Church.

Pursuant to her will, Lord George Sack- ville assumed the name of Germain, and was created in 1782 Baron Bolebroke and Viscount Sackville. He was distinguished as a soldier and statesman, and was supposed by some to have been the author of ' Junius.' There is a portrait of him by Komney at Drayton. JOHN PICKFORD, M.A.

Newbourne Rectory, Woodbridge.

A portrait of "Lady Betty Germaine" hangs in the University Galleries, Oxford.

S. B.

NAMES COMMON TO BOTH SEXES (10 th S. ii. 66). In the extract noted by MR. DIXON, the writer is in error in supposing that the name Evelyn is a female Christian name, or, for the matter of that, a masculine Christian name either. It is an instance of the use of a surname as a Christian name, and until the nineteenth century its possession almost invariably indicated descent from the well- known family of Evelyn, to which John Evelyn, the diarist and author of * Sylva, belonged.

There is a very similar name, Eveline, or in its earlier form, Aveline, which came in with the Normans. The sister of Gunnar the great-grandmother of William the Con queror, bore it. The wife of the last Ear of Lancaster was Avelina, and was mothe of Avelina or Eveline, the wife of Prince Edmund Plantagenet (Crouchback). It wa never in very frequent use, however, unti Miss Burney's novel 'Evelina' caused it t be revived as an ornamental name, as Char lotte Yonge points out in her * History o Christian Names.' Then, partly by uncon scious confusion of the two, and partly because the name Evelyn was prettier in form and in aristocratic use, from the reason

given above, the older form began to give- place to the surname form. Men or women of Evelyn descent may bear that form appro- priately, but the one and only Christian name, the old feminine name of song and romance, is Eveline. There is no masculine- equivalent. Eveleen is an Irish form assimi- lated to the ancient Celtic Aevin or Evin.

The first persons to bear the surname- Evelyn as a Christian name were Evelyn, Duke of Kingston, who died in 1726, and an ancestor of my own, Sir Evelyn Alston^ Bart., of Chelsea, who died in 1750. The mother of the former was Elizabeth, daughter and coheir of Sir John Evelyn, Kt., M.P., of West Dean, and the mother of the latter was Penelope, daughter and coheir of Sir Edward Evelyn, Bart., of Long Ditton.

LIONEL CRESSWELL.

THE EVIL EYE (10 th S. i. 508). This belief is indeed still prevalent in many counties, one might almost say in all the counties, of England, and bodes well to become extinct about the same time that the workman shall elinquish his pagan habit of spitting on his- uck money, or of pouring a modicum of his 'avourite beverage on the floor as a propitia- ,ory libation to secure protection from the evil eye ; when the waggoner ceases to adorn the breast of his horse with a dangling row of phalarce ; and when, in fact, a hundred and one such remnants of a primitive dualism have been forgotten by a populace nob xx> anxious to sacrifice an ingrained credulity to the sentiment expressed by Virgil con- cerning the happiness of him who can trace- things to a natural cause, and can trample his fears and an inexorable fate under foot ('Georgics,'ii. 420).

Kemble, in his ' Saxons in England ' (vol. u p. 431), refers to what may perhaps be con- sidered the earliest allusion in English litera- ture to the evil eye. It occurs in the poem, of 'Beowulf (1. 3520), where Hro<5gar, warn- ing Beowulf of the frail tenure of human

life, adds "eagena bearhtm" (the glance of the eyes) to the many dangers the warrior has to fear. A deeply rooted belief in the power of the witch, and consequently also of the evil eye, still lingers in the remote districts of Cornwall (see Ilobt. Hunt's 'Romances of the West of England,' 1881, p. 314 et seq.). Camillus, in his speech to- Doriclea in the Lancashire dialect (Braith- waite's 'Two Lancashire Lovers/ 1640, p. 19), tells her, in order to gain her affections, " We han store of goodly cattell ; my mother, though shee bee a vixon, shee will blenke blithly on you for my cause." See also 4 Traditions of Lancashire,' by John Roby,,