Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 7.djvu/325

 10 s. vii. APRIL G, 1907.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

265

I have no other data in the history of this venture perhaps it was stillborn ; but its reception by the cabmen of those days is a thing to be imagined, not described.

ALECK ABRAHAMS.

39, Hillmarton Road, N.

[The spelling of the name of the indicator seems to be in doubt. Taximeter has appeared in many notices of the new cabs. It may be well to record that these vehicles began to ply for hire on Satur- day, 23 March.]

ISHAM FAMILY. Among the marriages in December, 1747, given in The London Magazine for that year (vol. xvi. p. 580, the name Isham, however, being omitted in the index), occurs that of " Sir Edward Isham, Bart., to Miss Arnodson [indexed as " Arnoldson "] of Grosvenor Street." Now no Sir Edward Isham ever existed, either as baronet or knight ; but Sir Ed- mund Isham, Bart., was then alive and aged about fifty-seven, and, though he was a married man (his first wife surviving till July, 1748), it would seem, prima facie, to refer to him. We have, however, his own statement to the contrary, inasmuch as in a letter dated 26 Dec., 1747 (preserved among the Isham papers at Lamport, co. North- ampton), addressed to his wife, who had evidently sent him a copy of this notice, he writes : " My name is not Edward, so you may be sure it was not me you found marry'd in the Papers." The above entry is one of (unfortunately) many instances where the contemporary notices in the papers and magazines of the eighteenth century are strangely deceiving. G. E. C.

" GOVERNESS." MR. LYNN (10 S. ii. 424) believes that governess has never been used except in the technical sense of female teacher. But Queen Elizabeth was fre- quently called " governess " ; and the ruler of the Netherlands, when a woman, was generally called so. C. C. STOPES.

" Powwow " : ITS MEANING. The man in the street, when asked the meaning of powwow, in nine cases out of ten defines it as a conjuration or palaver. Yet this is quite a secondary sense. In the Massa- chusetts Indian language, from which we derived it, pauwau as a noun denotes a wizard or diviner, while as a verb it means to use divination. When Dr. Murray comes to the slips for this word, he will, I suspect, find that all old authors employ it in the Indian way. My experience is that in old books, when a conjuration is indicated, it is by the verbal noun powwowing ; and

perhaps our modern powwow in this sense has been arrived at by merely dropping the termination -ing. This secondary sense has now become so common that when modern writers revert to the original use they are apt to emphasize it by some old-fashioned spelling. This is the reason, for instance, why Whittier in ' The Bridal of Pennacook ' calls the priest a powah :

Of the strange land she walks in no Powah has

told, It may burn with the sunshine, or freeze with the

cold.

In ' Mogg Megone ' he affects another free spelling :

Shook from his soul the fear of harm, And trampled on the Powwaw's charm.

In Job Durfee's ' What Cheer ' (1832, p. 128) an archaic pronunciation is insisted on :

And oft he thought o'er thickets dark he saw Wave the black fox-tail of the grim Pawwaw. This is the true Indian sound of the word,, but would Duifee have retained the stress upon the last syllable if he had been using the term in its modern signification ? It is an interesting point of style. I believe he retained the archaic sound just because he was retaining the archaic meaning.

JAS. PLATT, Jun.

PAMELA. Some time ago (see 9 S. xii. 141, 330 ; 10 S. i. 52, 135, 433, 495 ; ii. 50, 89, 196) there was a correspondence regarding, the proper pronunciation of this name. In further corroboration of the contention that in Elizabeth's time the second syllable was long, I will venture to quote the first four lines of a short poem entitled ' A Super- scription on Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, sent for a Token,' which will be found on p. 43 of Mr. Bertram Dobell's recently published ' Poetical Works of William Strode,' a work which I will not forestall the reviewer in extolling. The lines are :

Whatever in Philoclea the fair

Or the discreet Pamela figur'd are,

Change but the name, the virtues are your owne,.

And for a fiction there a truth is knowne.

W. F. PRIDEAUX.

[CoL. PRIDEAUX'S note and the copy of the review printed in last week's 'N. & Q-' reached the office about the same time.]

NELSON RECOLLECTIONS. At 10 S. iv. 322 I gave some recollections of John Burt,. an old friend of mine at Launceston, who fought under Nelson in the Swiftsure at the battle of the Nile in 1798, and who after- wards was for a time a prisoner of war in the hands of the French. It may now interest some of your readers if I add that