Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/359

 iii. APRIL is, 1905.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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Clerks in their quaint old hall, I am very loth that such an idea should get abroad. Their original building perished in the Great Fire of London in 1666, but they erected the present hall in Silver Street soon after that date. Apparently it has done duty as their headquarters ever since. Not only do they possess many interesting books and docu- ments relating to the Bills of Mortality, but they have several valuable oil paintings, one of which is a portrait of William Roper, husband of Margaret Roper, daughter of Sir Thomas More. Another interesting heir- loom is a chamber organ purchased by the Company in 1737.

A long account of the Company and an interior view of their hall appeared in The Illustrated London Neivs of 15 February, 1890. In The City Press of 9 September, 1891, '' A Parish Clerk's Guest 1 ' gave an interesting account of Parish Clerks' Hall.

JOHN T. PAGE.

West Haddon, Northamptonshire.

ST. SEPULCHRE (10 th S. iii. 101, 172). Let me note the following illustration in regard to the pronunciation of this word from * The City Shower,' a poem by Swift, which gra- phically describes the state of London in the early part of the eighteenth century, before much attention was paid to drainage :

Filths of all hues and odour seem to tell

What street they sailed from, by their sight and

smell.

They, as each torrent drives with rapid force, From Smithfield to St. Pulcre's shape their course, And, in huge confluence joined at Snowhill ridge, Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn bridge. Sweepings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts and

blood, Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in

mud, Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down

the flood.

Streams run down the sides of the "oiled umbrella" of the "tucked-up seamstress," proving the antiquity of that useful article.

I can remember an old parish clerk reading the verse in the Psalms, "Their throat is an open sepul'chre." JOHN PICKFORD, M.A.

Newbourne Rectory, Woodbridge.

Perhaps I ought to have said " was com- monly called Spooker Gate some fifty years ago." I note what is said by E. G. B. as to the present day. J. T. F.

ST. THOMAS WOHOPE (10 th S. ii. 209, 275). This was not St. Thomas of Canterbury, but a former rector of Smarden, according to a will proved in the Consistory Court (vol. x.) at Canterbury, which I have come across : "To the Light of Sir Thomas Wohope,

sometime parson of the same church, 4d." (John Saunder, of Smarden, 1510).

The Rev. T. S. Frampton, of Dover, has kindly informed me that Abp. Simon Mepham, under thedate 22 May, 1332, gave a commission "D'no Thome de Woghope thesaurario n'ro Can't.," with four others, to examine candi- dates for ordination. ARTHUR HUSSEY.

Tankerton-on-Sea, Kent

SPLIT INFINITIVE (10 th S. ii. 406 ; iii. 17, 51, 95, 150, 210). I am sorry if my quotation from Disraeli seemed ungracious to your Mantuan correspondent. I have no wish to assume the mantle of Carbilius Pictor, who directed against Virgil the shafts of the /Eneidomastix. If critics have done some harm in the world, they have doubtless done some good of a sort. But, as a wise man said, "Like Zoilus, they entangle an Author in the Wrangles of Grammarians, or try him with a positive Air and barren Imagination, by the Set of Rules they have collected out of others." As Disraeli wrote on another occasion, "Abuse is not argument," and to call a writer who won the admiration of Burke and Johnson "flabby" does not ad- vance the question much. I fail to see how a writer can be shown to have deliberately selected a certain form in preference to another, except on the evidence of the writer himself. But if a writer adopts a certain form, which he retains in successive editions of his works, it may be safely assumed that that form has his deliberate preference. My attitude towards critics is like that of MARO towards philologists. It is possible that in the case of the former the " sesthetical sense," which, in MARO'S opinion, is blurred in the latter, may occasionally overstep the common variety of that faculty. I could quote many examples in support of my position ; but one may perhaps be sufficient. In a very well- known poem there is a beautiful stanza which runs as follows :

Too white, for the flower of life is red ; Her flesh was the soft seraphic screen

Of a soul that is meant (her parents said) To just see earth, and hardly be seen,

And blossom in heaven instead. The writer of these lines was not only a man of taste, well versed in the technique of music and painting, but he was also a man of genius, lofty as that of the Mantuan bard. By the position which he assigns to the adverb " just," I maintain that he deliberately set himself to secure the three conditions of precision, emphasis, and euphony. Had he written "To see just earth," the qualifica- tion would have been transferred from the predicate to the object, and the sense of the