Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/137

 io* s. iv. AUG. 5,1905.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 109 blood in their veins? Is it through the Bavarian Modenas, or through Princess Mary of Hesse, who married Alexander II. ] A. A. N. BASIL MONTAOU'S MSS.—This busy littfra- teur is now best remembered by Macaulay's essay on his edition of Bacon ; but he left at his death, in 1851 (according to Charles Knight's 'Cyclopaedia of Biography '), " about a hundred volumes of MISS., including a Memoir of himself and a Diary." Montagu's wide acquaintance with politicians, lawyers, and men of letters ought to make his memoirs and his diary interesting enough— or, perhaps, too interesting—for publication. Can any of your readers say in whose posses- sion these MSS. now are? No information about them is given in the recent account of Montagu in the ' D.N.B.' UYKIL. KYNASTON'S TRANSLATION OF CHAUCER.— Can any of your readers give information as to the present owner of the MS. of Kynaston's translation into Latin of Chaucer's 'Trpilus' ? It was sold with James Crosstab's library, Manchester, 1884. Has any edition of this ever been printed ' and are there other MSS. known? HARRY H. PEACH. BOOK-PLATE MOTTO,"TORCULAR CONCULCAVI SOLUS."—Can any one tell me to whom this fairly common book-plate belonged, and what were the place and date of the sale ! C. S. POEM BY SIR THOMAS WYATT. (10th S. iv. 70.) IT is clear that there are two versions of the lyric " Lo ! what it is to love !" and that the one is a deliberate adaptation from the other. The earlier is Sir Thomas Wyatt's, grouped as one of his odes, and the later is assigned in the Bannatyne MS. to Alexander Scott, whom Pinkerton called " the Scottish Anacreon." Wyattdied in 1542 ; and although little is known of Scott, it is almost safe to say that he was born about 1520, and pro- duced his poems between 1545 and 1568. One of his most ambitious efforts is entitled 'Ane New Year Gift to the Queue Mary, qnhen scho come first Hame, 1562." In 1568, when the plague was raging in Edinburgh, George Bannatyne, a young business man of the city, secluded himself for a period, and occupied his leisure in transcribing into a volume of about 800 pages " nearly all the ancient poetry of Scotland now known to exist." He had, as a matter of course, many difficulties to encounter ; and " he complains, says Sir Walter Scott, " that he had, even m his time, to contend with the disadvantages of copies old, maimed, and mutilated, and which long before our day must, but for this faithful transcriber, have perished entirely. Allan Ramsay drew upon the Bannatyne MS. for his ' Evergreen' in 1724, and he was followed in 1760 by Lord Hailes with his carefully edited 'Ancient Scottish Poems, and by Pinkerton, Sibbald of the ' Chronicle of Scottish Poetry,' and others of later date. The poems known as Alexander Scott's are those assigned to him by Banuatyne, and one of these is " Lo! what it is to love! to which the transcriber duly appends his countryman's name. Scott's poems were edited from the MS. in 1821 by Dr. David Laing, the greatest of Scottish antiquarian editors, and a reprint of this was privately issued in 1882. In this volume the lyric prompted by Wyatt's ode has its own hrst line for title, as it also has in Bannatyne, but Lord Hailes, Pinkerton, and Sibbald enter it in their anthologies as a 'Rondel of Luve. A cursory glance at the Bannatyne MS. shows that, even now, it would profit by careful sifting. The copyist, in his assiduous zeal, had not always exercised an exact dis- crimination in the choice of his material, and occasionally allowed the work of others as well as Scotsmen to creep into his neatly and closely written pages. It is not necessary to labour this point now ; but it is apposite to mention that one of the lyrics included is bir Thomas Wyatt's ode 'The Recured Lover, which opens with the line, "I am as 1 am, and so will I be." Had "Lo! what it is to love !" been in the form in which it appears in Wyatt's works, it would have been easy to say that Bannatyne had given it to Scott by mistake, and the matter would have rested there. As it is, however, the one poem is undoubtedly a compressed re-cast of the other, as if the later poet had tried to give a, fresh and impressive setting to what the earlier had elaborated. Wyatt's poem is entitled 'The Abused Lover admonishes the Unwary to beware of Love,' and consists of five stanzas of eight lines each, while in Scott's there are four stanzas, each containing but six lines. In both the opening stanzas are practically identical, but Scott utilizes Wyatt's fifth, third, and second respectively for his second, third, and fourth. The first stanza of each may be given, to show how closely the one movement follows the other, and Scott's fourth and Wyatt's second may be placed together to illustrate the greatest