Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/465

 s. ii. NOV. 12, 1904.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

381

LONDON, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER It, 190k.

CONTENTS.-No. 46.

NOTES : Webster and Sir Philip Sidney, 331 Mr. Ralph Thomas's 'Swimming,' 382 High Peak Words, 384 Allan Ramsay Gretna Green Marriage Registers, 386 "Tomahawk " Dunstable the Musician, 387.

QUERIES i-'Assisa de Tolloneis,' &c., 387 " What if a day," &c. " Poet/a nascitur non fit" How to Catalogue Seventeenth-Century Tracts D'Budemare " Cag-mag Thomas Gladstone and Bread Riots in Leith Authors of Quotations Wanted Saying about the English Spirit Manifestations Brass in Winslow Church, 388 Shake- speare's Wife John Kerne, Dean of Worcester Index Society Fulling Days Emernensi Agro Loutherbourgh Sanderson Family Blood used in Building, 389.

EEPLIKS : H in Cockney, Use or Omislon, 390 Corks, 391 Holborn, 392 Northern and Southern Pronunciation John Tregortha, of Burslem London Cemeteries in 186C, 393 Cricket Vaccination and Inoculation, 394 One-armed Crucifix Kissing Gates, 395 Antiquary r. Antiquarian The 'Decameron' Thomas Blacklock Epitaphiana Nine Maidens, 398 Cape Bar Men, 397 'Omar Khayyam' Tracts for the Times 'Tom Moody,

NOTES ON BOOKS :-' Epistles of Erasmus ' Pepys's Diary Sir T. Browne's 'Christian Morals' Birmingham Midland Institute and Archaeological Society ' New Shakespeariana.'

Notices to Correspondents.

JOHN WEBSTER AND SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

(See ante, pp. 21, 261, 303, 342.) WHEN Bosola is courted by Julia, and he tells her that she must not expect from him, a, blunt soldier, the compliments and soft phrase of a lover, she replies :

Why, ignorance

In courtship cannot make you do amiss, If you have a heart to do well.

' The Duchess of Malfi,' V. ii. 197-9.

A part of the speech is taken from Sidney's charming description of Lalus, one of many perfect gems in writing to be found in the ' Arcadia' :

" He had nothing upon him but a pair of slops, and upon his body a goatskin, which he cast over his shoulder, doing all things with so pretty a grace that it seemed ignorance, could not make him do amiss because he had a heart to do well." Book I.

The last speech in ' The Duchess of Malfi ' has this beautiful sentiment, which Webster claims as if it were an old companion :

/>dio. I have ever thought

Nature doth nothing so great for good men As when she's pleas'd to make them lords of truth. 4 The Duchess of Malfi,' V. v. 144-6.

It may be that a * perfect copy of the
 * Arcadia ' will show that not only these

lines, but other parts of the speech in the play, are stolen. My ' Arcadia ' is split into two portions, one professing to contain all Sidney's prose, the other his verse, and neither is connected with the other. The editor of the prose 'Arcadia,' in his intro- duction, says :

" We are told in a sentence which speaks to the heart of a good man as a trumpet does to that of a soldier, 'Nature had done so much for them in nothing as that it had made them lords of Truth, whereon all other goods were builded.' "

The sentence is not in my copy of the book, and I should have missed it if it had not been quoted in the introduction.

I have no space now to deal with parallels in the 4 Arcadia' and 'A Monumental Column'; but I am bound to mention a discovery I have made since writing my last article. In 'A Monumental Column ' and * The Duchess of Malfi ' there is a line almost identically the same. I quoted this line in my first contri- bution (p. 223), and said that it was not in Sidney, although in his style. It was familiar to me, and I had a distinct recollection of having read the matter in the preceding lines of * A Monumental Column ' elsewhere. The following will show that the line in question is copied from Ben Jonson, and that Webster treats Ben's prose in the same way as he has treated Sidney's : Some great inquisitors in nature say. Royal and generous forms sweetly display Much of the heavenly virtue, as proceeding From a pure essence and elected breeding : Howe'er, truth for him thus much doth importune, His form and virtue both deserv'd his fortune.

Lines 23-8.

Jonson is addressing the same Prince Henry whom Webster mourns over in his poem :

" When it hath been my happiness (as would it were more frequent) but to see your face, and, as passing by, to consider you ; I have with as much ioy, as I am now far from flattery in professing it, called to mind that doctrine of some great inquittcr in Nature, who hold every royal and heroic form to partake and draw much to it of the hfarrnly virtue. For, whether it be that a divine soul, being to come into a body, first chooseth a palace for itself ; or, being come, doth make it so ; or that Nature be ambitious to have her work equal ; I know not : but what is lawful for me to understand and speak, that I dare ; which is, that both your rirfne and your form did deserve your fortune." Dedication, ' The Masque of Queens,' 1609.

Jonson's phrasing and his definition of the doctrine are taken direct from Edmund Spenser's * An Hymne in Honour of Beautie,' especially from 11. 120-40 of that poem. A reference to the poem will show conclusively that Ben was thinking of a brother-poet's lines, and not of a dryasdust philosophical