Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 4.djvu/576

 478 NOTES AND QUERIES. [io» a. iv. DEC. 9, iocs. become as much a lost art as the famous " heather ale " brewed of old by the Picts, it may perhaps be permitted to one of the few survivors—if indeed not the only survivor— of those to whom the secret has descended to regret the disappearance of a most palatable and wholesome beverage. T. F. D. I have not got the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, but I think that the word punch is in a song in one of them. If so, the date of it must be earlier than what is supposed to be " the first notice of the English word " by Ligon about 1647. The following are the verses as I remember them :— Three jolly postboys drinking at the Dragon ; And they determined to push about the flagon. Punch cures the gout, the colic, and the phthisic, And is allowed to be the very best of physic. Is jmnch the word in the song t Is the song Fletcher's? In trusting to memory, as I am doing, I may make a mistake. But what can the word be if not punch 1 Is the song an interpolation ' £. YARDLEY. NOTES ON BOOKS, Ao. The Playt and Poems of Robert Greene. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by J. Churton Collins, Litt.D. (Oxford, Clarendon Press.) AN important and appetizing addition is made in this edition of Greene to the fine series of dramatic reprints undertaken by the Clarendon Press. The poems and plays only are given, and it would indeed be too much to hope for the inclusion in such a work of the prose romances, now barely ac- cessible in Urosart's very limited " Huth Library." So far as regards the plays and poems—which after all constitute the most important portion of Greene's literary baggage, and that in which alone any large section of the public is interested—Prof. Churton Collins's aspiration to make the edition final and definitive may well be gratified. Possessor of unsurpassable taste and animated by a rigid con- servatism, he has gone in every instance to the oldest quartoes, permitting such change only as is indispensable,andenclosing in brackets all variations or additions, even when such consist in supplying the ac-U and scenes—matters in which the early quartoes are not seldom remiss. Should no further discovery await research into Tudor literature (and discovery in Greene's case is improbable, though of course not wholly impossible), the edition may well prove to be lastingly authoritative. Byce, to whom the existing editions of Greene are due, is in many respects an ideal editor. His views, however, which he more than once communicated to us viva voce, were the opposite to those scholarship now entertains, and his aim was to supply a text legible and accceptable rather than exact. Such views may again be held, but at present the impulse is in the other direction. It is pleasant, however, to read the recognition awarded by Prof. Collins to a predecessor whose services to Tudor literature are not easily overrated. Some additions are now made to our know- ledge of Greene, yet what we learn concerning him is not much. One of the most turbulent and, in a sense, " pestilent " spirits of a turbulent and pestilent crowd, he was always in hot water, and his prose works at least are as polemical as they are autobiographical. A great question, indeed, which is treated by the latest editor with com- niendable sanity, is how much personal significance is to be attached to the revelations made in his romances. The only case in which we fail to follow him is when a suggestion that the mention of a date in a play has the slightest value as fixing that of the performance finds a kind of hall approval. The period covered by Greene's dra- matic production is short, being easily comprised in the last decade of the sixteenth century. His imitation of Marlowe is at times servile, but his improvement in style is remarkable. It is difficult to believe that the' Honorable Historic of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay' and 'James the Fovrth' are by the same hand that wrote ' Alphonsus' and ' Orlando Furioso.' Prof. Collins regards 'James the Fovrth'as Greene's masterpiece. Individually we give the preference to the ' Honorable Historic.' It seems a curious freak on the part of Greene to give a name such as 'James the Fovrth ' to a piece which virtually has no connexion with that monarch. The suggestion in the loves of Lacie and Margaret in the'Honorable Historic'of the story of the Earl of Burleigh is interesting. Very quaint, too, in the same play, is the use of bkeltonian forms of verse. The foundation of ' James the Fovrth ' is seen in a novella of;;Giraldi ,< 'inthin, which is given in full in the introduction to that play. It is apropos of this work that Prof. Colfins gays that when we compare it with the novel "we not only see how and to what extent he [Greene] was one of the masters of Shakespeare, but how near he came to being a really efficient dramatist." The use of "skipjack" as a term of contempt ap- pears in ' Alphonsus' and elsewhere. In the same play occurs the saying, subsequently familiar, He that will not when he may, When he desires shall surely purchase nay. In 'A Looking Glasse" we have, Act I. sc. iii. 1. 197, an interesting reference to a " dog whipper." In ' Orlando Furioso' are given, in the original, lines from Ariosto which Milton imitated in ' SamgOD Agonistes.' Prof. Collins's task is admirably accom- plished, and we can but hope that his labours in regard to the Elizabethan dramatists will be con- tinued. Peele awaits him. In appearance and in all respects the edition is ideal, and the lover of fine books and fine editions is equally interested in a series such as that to which the volume belongs. The Secret of the Totem. By Audrew Lang. (Long- mans & Co.) RECENT observations in Australia made by autho- rities such as Spencer and Gillen, Howitt, and others have had far-reaching influences on the study of primitive religion, have led to the reconsidera- tion of many questions by anthropologists auch as Mr. Frazer and Mr. Lang, and may be held to cast some gleam of light—or, at least, of suggestion- even upon Eleusiuian rites. With the question of totemism Mr. Lang hag long been concerned, and though he concedes to another the first place in the study, we place him, necessarily, in the first rank