Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/494

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [10* s. n. NOV. 19, 1904.

There is no date, but several of the pieces are said to have gained a silver medal in various years, the latest being in 1769. Many of the contents would not be tolerated in any public hall to-day or any decent society, but there is one number, ' On the Death of the Duke of Cumberland,' which is remarkable as forming the foundation of Braham's famous song. The words are :

O'er WILLIAM'S Tomb with silent Grief opprest ^BRITANNIA mourns her Hero now at rest Not Tears alone but Praises too she gives Due to the Guardian of our Laws and Lives nor shall that Laurel ever fade with Years whose leaves are water'd with a Nation's Tears.

The music, by Thos. Norris, organist of St. John's, Oxford, is far inferior to Braham's melody, and the name of the author of the words is not given; but assuming that the William referred to is the Duke of Cumber- land, who died 1765, and the book was pub- iished about 1770, we have the opening lines of 'The Death of Nelson' slightly altered from a monody published over thirty years before. AYEAHR.

SPLIT INFINITIVE. (See ante, p. 359.) Since Mr. Lang's happy outburst against the split infinitive, our younger journalists have followed suit. It is quite the thing nowadays to throw out a disapproval of this locution. But I have not noticed any endeavour to account for its use, which has grown certainly during very recent times. Is this to be accounted for by our increasing acquaintance with French literature and fuller intercourse with the French people 1 It is an absolutely correct French idiom. A perusal of Du Maurier or of Max O Rell, in whose English pages the split infinitive naturally abounds, leads one to believe that this is the sort of " corruption " inevitable in the circumstances.

EDWARD SMITH. [It is several centuries old.]

FLYING BRIDGE. This is correctly de- scribed in Voyle's * Military Dictionary ' as consisting of one or more barges moored by a long cable to a point in midstream. When the barge is properly steered it is swept by the current from one bank to the other. According to the Rev. Edmund Chishull, who travelled as a member of Lord Paget's (the English Ambassador's) suite from Adrianople to Vienna in 1702, such a flying bridge was then plying between Buda and Pest. In the English translation of John George Keysler's travels it is also stated (iv. 242) that in 1730

there was "betwixt Pest and Buda a kind

of a flying stage caravan." Another bridge of this kind plied across the Danube, at

Pressburg, in the eighteenth century, and a picture of it is shown on the title-page of Michael Klein's ' Sammlung merkwiirdigster Naturseltenheiten,' published at Pressburg in 1778. L. L. K.

TWIN CALVES. A short time ago a farmer's wife in the parish of Llangybi, near Lam- peter, Cardiganshire, informed me that one of the cows had twin calves, and that she was very anxious to sell the animal at once, as such an incident was considered an omen of ill-luck or a very great misfortune to the family or the owner. I find that this super- stition is very general, even at the present day, in Cardiganshire and other parts of South Wales. JONATHAN CEREDIG DAVIES.

GREEN CARNATION IN SHAKESPEARE'S DAY. Mr. Charles I. Elton, in his fascinating book 'William Shakespeare : his Family and Friends,' says (p. 162), speaking of pied gilly- flowers :

" The gardeners, as Shakespeare has shown, pro- fessed to create all their varieties by grafting and change of soil ; but Ray learned in the next genera- tion, from a Dutch farmer named Lauremberg, that the flowers were coloured red and green by water- ing the plants with certain chemicals for a month and preventing exposure to the dew."

This practice was revived in the early nine- ties of the last century. Instead of the sunflower of the preceding decade, one saw carnations the colour of absinthe or arsenic, and others of a terra-cotta shade. The green variety gave its name to a roman a clef, the first novel of a clever writer. These flowers certainly lived longer, in water or in the buttonhole of golden youth, than did their virgin sisters of the garden.

The clove gillyflower or carnation is often found in Elizabethan decoration upon the carved coffers and ceilings of the period. There is a fine chest, ornamented with this beautiful flower, now in the birthroom at Stratford-on-Avon. A. R. BAYLEY.

DAVID MONTAGU ERSKINE, second Lord Erskine of Restormel Castle, is stated in the 'D.N.B.j'xvii. 401, to have been "educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford." This statement contains two errors.

1. It is true that he appears as a West- minster boy in Messrs. Barker and Stenning's (published 1892), but that is solely because the authors relied on the 'Dictionary.' So presumably did G. E. C. in his ' Complete Peerage,' iii. 277. Lord Erskine was, in fact, a commoner at Winchester (school rolls, 1787-92), and took an active part in the presentation which was made to Dr. Warton
 * Westminster School Register, 1764-1883'