Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/482

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. m. MAY 20, IMS.

I cannot speak with certainty ; but you un- doubtedly stand a fair chance of hitting other wayfarers. The spitting is omitted by very refined persons, and I am not aware that their luck has suffered.

FRANK REDE FOWKE. 24, Netherton Grove, Chelsea.

The old lady was undoubtedly right, so far as there is any right about the matter at all, in acquiring any stray scrap of iron which she may have casually encountered. Pro- bably the belief in the good luck which the possession of a horseshoe brings is trace- able merely to the fact of that object being the most frequent form in which iron is met with on the part of the wayfarer. I have observed the cherishing of the merest remnant of a horseshoe. Rusty nails and sickles are equally prized. Mason, in his 'Anatomie of Sorcerie,' 1612, 4to, mentions among omens of good luck "if drink be spill'd upon a man, or if he find olde iron." One cannot help thinking that a superstition so universal had, in its origin, some connexion with solar worship that this amuletic virtue ascribed to scraps of old iron had its birth in the iron age, and was suggested perhaps by the metal's malleability for useful purposes when subjected to the solar fire. Of similar origin probably is the treasuring of a piece of coal as a charm. J. HOLDEN MACMICIIAEL.

UNMARRIED LADY'S COAT OF ARMS (10 th S. iii. 348). In the case assumed it would be perfectly correct for the lady to bear her father's arms (quartering with them the arms of her mother, if the latter were an heiress or coheiress) : the arms of the daughters of a family are not differenced by marks of cadency, as in the cases of their brothers.

The lozenge on which a lady's arms are emblazoned is of the same form whether she be single or married, although artists and engravers of bookplates occasionally take liberties ; but of course the achievement of a married woman or a widow shows the arms of her husband (on the dexter side) impaled with her paternal coat. If the lady be an heiress or coheiress, her arms are em- blazoned on an escutcheon of pretence charged on the fess point of her husband's bearings.

A. C. S. can obtain further information by consulting Cussans's ' Handbook to Heraldry ' (published by Messrs. Chatto & Windus), chaps, xi. and xii. R. L. MORETON.

There is no reason except custom why either unmarried women or widows should bear their arms on a lozenge. Matilda d'Artois, Jeanne de France, and Margaret of Flanders bore their arms on shields. See

Didron, ' Annales Archeologiques,' vol. xvu p. 362 ; vol. xvii. pp. 43, 44. The arms of a woman on a shield are mentioned in Marryat's ' Year in Sweden,' vol. i. p. 300. I have met with many English examples of which I have failed to take notes. ASTARTE.

NAVY OFFICE SEAL (10 th S. iii. 329). "An anchor with another smaller one on each side within the beam and fluke" are the arms on the seal of the Navy Office, according to- Papworth's 'Ordinary.' G. J. W.

NOTES ON BOOKS, &c.

John Knox and the Reformation. By Andrew

Lang. (Longmans & Co.)

MR. ANDREW LANG'S biography of John Knox is a continuation of those historical labours which constitute an important part of the literary baggage of the most zealous, erudite, and enlightened of modern writers. It is a natural outcome of, or sequence to, his studies of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, and in part an answer to the biography of the great Scottish Reformer by Prof. Hume Brown. Those who read between the lines- will find in it, in addition to other matter, a, counterblast the use of such a word is natural when dealing with Knox to the more or less dogmatic utterances of Carlyle. To the literary craftsman it will specially recommend itself. We have to go back to the days of Gibbon to find a work written with so much earnestness of pur- pose, so much apparent persiflage, and so much scarcely veiled irony. Not at all an easy book to- deal with is it for one who has the " misfortune," to use a Scottish phrase, " to be born south of the- Tweed." Largely, and even mainly, controversial i aim, it furnishes something like an analysis, accom- panied with comment, of that * History' of Knox upon which estimates of his character are naturally based. The style of thinking about Knox introduced by Carlyle Mr. Lang describes we had almost said "brands" as "platonically Puritan,"' and he complains that the passages in Knox's works which a writer in The Edinburgh Review for 1816, with whom he finds himself able to agree, describes as shocking, are omitted, as a rule, by modern biographers of the Reformer.

To give in the most condensed form what is Mr. Lang's estimate of Knox, we will take the fol- lowing: "As an individual man he [Knox] would not have hurt a fly. As a prophet he delibe- rately tried to restore, by a pestilent anachronism, in a Christian age and country, the ferocities attributed to ancient Israel." His influence on Scotland was abidingly evil, and subsequent massacres (Dunavertie, 1647), " the slaying of women in cold blood months after the battle of Philiphaugh," and the slaughter of Cavaliers taken under quarter, are " the direct result of Knox's intellectual error, of his appeals to Jehu, Phinehas, and so forth." It is to the chapters dealing with' the relations between the Queen of Scots and John Knox, which, however, constitute neither the- longest nor the most important section of Mr, Lang's work, that his admirer* will most readily