Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/421

10* s. ii. OCT. 29, 1904.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

345 as the authoritative life of 'John Russell, R.A.' (1894), we are told at p. 81 that this blameless and beautiful woman "was an actress who possessed a somewhat battered reputation." Then some lines from an epigram of doubtful taste are cited, the sting of which lies in a pun on the surname "Waring," which the second Mrs. Scott never bore.

Permit me then to state that the second Mrs. Scott (not "Scott-Waring," as the writer erroneously styles her) was Elizabeth, daughter of Alexander Blackrie, a surgeon-general on the Indian establishment, who, on retiring from active service, fixed his residence at Bromley in Kent. She married Major John Scott, M.P., who is known to history as the amiable but feather-brained gentleman to whose "officious and injudicious zeal" Warren Hastings owed most of his troubles. Dying in 1796, in her fifty-first year, she was buried in Bromley Churchyard under a marble monument, with a long and quaint epitaph, which is still decipherable. The elder of her daughters, Anna Maria, married John Reade, of Ipsden House, Oxfordshire, and became the mother of eleven children; her fifth son being Edward Anderdon Reade, a distinguished Anglo-Indian official, while her seventh son and youngest child was Charles Reade, the famous novelist and dramatist. "I owe the larger half of what I am to my mother," Charles Reade said of her. The younger daughter, Eliza Sophia, married George Stanley Faber, the well-known Evangelical divine.

Two years after the loss of his charming (second) wife Major Scott inherited the Waring estates in Cheshire, and thereupon took the additional surname of Waring. A year or two later he purchased Peterborough House at Parsons Green, Fulham, where he lavished hospitality on very mixed company. At length (on 15 October, 1812) Major Scott-Waring took it into his head to marry the notorious Mrs. Esten, "formerly of Covent Garden Theatre," and on this mésalliance the coarse epigram alluded to was penned.

—It may be thought worth noting that on Thursday, 22 September, I saw in one piece of ground three teams of horses, three teams or oxen, ploughing, and a steam plough at work. This was near Chiseldon, not far from Swindon, in North Wilts.

(See ante, p. 260.)—Allow me to correct a mistake in your review of the 'Clarence King Memoirs.' It was not King, but his friend Horace F. Cutter, who wrote the poem 'Though Lost to Sight, to Memory Dear,' which he published as written by one Ruthven Jenkyns in the fictitious Greenwich Magazine for Mariners for 1707.

—The Rev. Thomas Norris, Chaplain to the Forces, sailed from Quebec, 11 June, 1815, on board H.M.S. Acasta, forty guns, Capt. Kerr. This ship and H.M.S. Leander and Perseus were convoying fifty-four sail of transports to England, and they reached Portsmouth 15 July. Mr. Norm left a short MS. journal of the voyage, from which I take this note. On 5 July, when they were in long. 17° 26′, lat. 46° 58′, 543 miles from Scilly,

On subsequent days they received further intelligence from passing ships, and on 7 July each of the three warships fired a salute of twenty-one guns "in consequence of Lord Wellington's victory." It will doubtless be considered that in their circumstances they received the news in a remarkably short space of time after the event.

—Nearly thirty years ago, a well-known Bath journalist, put a query (5ᵗʰ S. iv. 108) as to the origin of the terms "leading article" and "leader," and suggested the possibility of their having grown out of the printer's term "leaded," "applied to matter that is made to show a white space between the lines by placing thin strips of metal between the lines of type." I can trace only one reply, and that from another journalist,, of Sunderland, who (ibid., p. 176) rejected the suggestion as impossible. I had been inclined to agree with this opinion until discovering the very term "leaded article" in a London newspaper of three years before the earliest quotation for "leading article" given in 'H.E.D.'

In 'The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1804' (p. 74) is an extract from the Oracle which refers to "a remarkable passage in