Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 5.djvu/277

 ws.v.MAKCHM.1906.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

225

the successive translations by MM. "A. B." and Charles des Guerrois.

The closing years of Mrs. Browning's life were full of excitement on account of the fight for Italian freedom, and when Florence was mourning over the treaty of Villafranca, Elizabeth Barrett Browning sent her poem commencing

My little son, my Florentine, to The Athenceum. This appeared on the 24th of September, 1859. With it she wrote :

"The good and true politics of this poem you, being English, will dissent from altogether ; say so, if you please, but let me in. Strike, but hear me/'

To this challenge the editor replied :

" We need not say how much we respect the poetess -for we insert her tale nor, though we give it circulation, how far we dissent from her present reading of the Sphinx."

Mrs. Browning all heg life suffered from weak health, yet her death, on the 29th of June, 1861, came as a shock to her friends. I well remember the telegram being received at The Athenaeum, and the sorrow it caused. At the request of Hepworth Dixon I at once went off to Chorley, and broke the news to him, asking him to write the obituary notice for us. It appeared on the 6th of July, and records how in early life she had been for years "the inmate of a darkened room doomed, as was thought, to slow death " ; how faithful she was to her friends, and " the most loving of human beings to all her kinsfolk" :

" Those whom she loved, and whom she has left, will remember her (so long as life lasts) by her womanly grace and tenderness, yet more than by her extraordinary and courageous genius."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning rests in the cemetery at Florence. She was buried as the sun was sinking behind the western hills, and

" the distant mountains hid their faces in a misty veil, and the tall cypress trees swayed and sighed as Nature's special mourners for her favoured child."

Florence sorrowed as for one of her own children. As the mourners took their last fond look they saw a double grave, and uttered the prayer, " May it wait long for him!" A battalion of the National Guard was to have followed the remains to the grave, but a misunderstanding as to time frustrated this testimony of respect.

The Florentine authorities requested that the poet's young son, Tuscan born, should be educated as an Italian, when any career in the new Italy should be open to him ; and over the door of Casa Guidi the municipality

of Florence have placed this inscription (6 th ' S. vi. 406), in gold incised capitals on a white- marble tablet :

" Qui scrisse e mori

Elisabetta Barrett Browning

che in cuore di donna conciliava

scienza di dotto e spirito di poeta

e fece del suo verso aureo anello

fra Italia e Inghilterra

Pone questa memoria

Firenze grata

1861. '

JOHN C. FBANCI&

go M<

LAMB ALLUSION EXPLAINED. In lately oing over the pages of The Neiv Monthly Magazine for 1826 I came across a paragraph in the June number, extracted from a daily newspaper, in which the following occurs : l< Great merit is due to Mr. Lamb junior for his exertions to relieve the weavers of Nor- wich." This, I think, explains Lamb's allu- sion in his letter to James Gillrnan, 8 March, 1830 :

" Your friend Battin must excuse me for advo- cating the cause of his friends in Spitalfields. Th& fact is, I am retained by the Norwich people, and have already appeared in theirpaper under the signa- tures of 'Lucius Sergius,' 'Bluff,' 'Broad-cloth, ' No -Trade-to-the- Woollen-Trade, 5 ' Antiplush,'&c.^ in defence of druggets and long-camblets."

With the exception of the late Canon. Ainger, who remarked that " Lamb's infor- mation concerning the Norwich people is r of course, what would in his day have been called 'raillery/ and in our day ' chaff, 3 " none of Lamb's editors have offered any explanation of the allusion.

As his 'Reminiscences of Juke Judkins, Esq.,' was printed in the same number of the Magazine, Lamb's attention would no- doubt be arrested by the remarks about hi& namesake, which would probably be retained in his memory, to be used subsequently, as occasion served, in mystifying his friend.

It will thus be seen, if my explanation is the right one, that Lamb's "raillery" was bottomed on fact, twisted though it may have been to suit his own purpose.

S. BUTTERWORTBT.

WILTON : THE NAME. At the last meeting of the British Academy the Bishop of Salisbury asked Dr. Furnivall the meaning of the Wil of Wilton. He, not knowing it, referred the question to a high authority, Mr. W. H. Stevenson, Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, who answered thus :

" I cannot explain the name Wilton. It occurs* as Wiltun in the late ninth-century MS. of the Chronicle ' (Parker or A MS. at Corp. Chr. Coll.,. Camb.). There is, it is true, an O.E. wil meaning- 'pleasant,' &c., but it is known only in poetry and