Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/254

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NOTES AND QUERIES, [lo* s. 111. MAKCH is, 1905.

1886) I find mungili, mungile, munguli. In Canarese there is also a contracted form, ftiungi, which perhaps explains why the Portuguese called the animal mungo.

JAS. PLATT, Jun.

PARLIAMENTARY QUOTATION. In the -course of his speech in the debate on the Address in the House of Commons on 14 Feb- ruary, Sir Henry Campbell - Bannerman quoted "two lines of an old writer in some- what archaic language," which he had heard cited by John Bright with great effect. The quotation I think it is from George Wither, but I am unable to verify appears to have puzzled the Press Gallery reporters. In The Times, Morning Post, Manchester Guardian, and Glasgow Herald, the couplet was printed (I assume correctly) as follows :

There is on earth a more auguster thing, Veiled though it be, than Parliament or King.

The Daily Telegraph, Birmingham Post, and Yorkshire Post omitted from their reports of the speech both the lines and the explanatory sentence in which Sir Henry stated that the '" auguster thing " meant the " public con- science. " The Standard and Daily News furnished their readers with the following version :

There is a real, a more auguster thing, Fleet though it be, than Parliament or King.

The Daily Chronicle gave the following : There is a real, a more auguster thing, Veiled though it be from Parliament or King.

~The Scotsman differed from The Times only in giving the word " fleet " instead of " veiled." 'The most amusing version was that in The Morning Advertiser; but one should not, perhaps, expect poetry in that quarter. It was as follows :

There was on earth a more auguster thing

Than Parliament and the King.

Some reader of ' N. fe Q.' will be able to state if the couplet is actually Wither's.

J. GRIGOR. 105, Choumert Road, Peckham, S.E.

SIR GEORGE GROVE ON C. H. SPURGEON'S SCHOLARSHIP. In Mr. Graves's 'Life and Letters of Sir George Grove' (1903) I have come upon a very slighting and also very unjust criticism of the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon's .scholarship. On p. 56 of the work, in an extract from Grove's ' Reminiscences,' the .following passage occurs :

" I do not remember that I ever heard more than

one sermon from him. That was at Exeter Hall

3t was interesting, but not very flattering to his .-scholar-ahiip. The text was: 'They shall never -peris-h, 'neither shall any pluck them out of my hand.' He said : ' You will observe here how definite the promise is. It does not say they icill

never perish, but it is the definite form of the future they shall never perish.' It gave me rather a shock, because I was well aware that there is no definite future in Greek, and, whether the English is 'shall' or 'will,' it is the plain future in the Greek."

I cannot pretend to say what was the extent of Spurgeon's classical scholarship ; but that he learnt Greek as a young man is stated in at least one of his biographies. It is also well known what great pains he gave to the preparation of his sermons. In this case he certainly showed a better ac- quaintance than his critic with the original Greek. The expression in the Gospel is ou l*.r) aTroAtoVTat (John x. 28). Almost all gram- marians agree in regarding ou //TJ with aor. subj. as the most emphatic form of future denial. Prof. Goodwin (' G.M.T.,' 295) says :

"Thus ou /Jirj TOUTO yerrjTat means This

surely will not happen." Prof. Blass, in his 'Grammar of New Testament Greek," writes on p. 209 : " The most definite form of a negative assertion about the future is that with ou /ny, which also appears in classical Greek." Prof. Burton, of Chicago University, writes : "A predictive future is sometimes made emphatically negative by the use of the negatives ou /oj " (' New Testa- ment Moods and Tenses,' p. 35). It is needless to accumulate further authorities. The inci- dent may serve as a warning against that hasty criticism of which the clergy are so often the victims at the hands of us lay folk.

ALEX. LEEPER.

Trinity College, Melbourne University.

JACOBEAN HOUSES IN FLEET STREET. The appearance and history of No. 17, Fleet Street, are now so familiar to the public that the fact of an equally fine Jacobean house having existed at the other end of Fleet Street will probably be of interest. It is mentioned in a letter from W. Bray to John Gough Nichols, bearing date 9 September, 1829:

" [I] cannot suppose that the room so much ornamented as that which has been found in a house, the present corner house at the entrance to the new Fleet Market, should have escaped your observation, so near as it is to that spot where your good father and yourself lived so long. It seems it was thought that this house would be left stand- ing, but that it is now to go the way of common brick and mortar.

"The first notice I heard of it was, that it was part of a Palace of King John ; a friend of mine, however, who went to see it, ascertained that for King John we should read King James, ascertained by the date of 1617.

"But \yhether you do know it or should by some strange circumstance still have to go it [a] pilgrim- age to see it, i hope t-Q see some account of it in) your next number,"