Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 8.djvu/186

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. VIIL AUG. 24, 1907.

rendered either to the king or to the lord by the yeoman, whom, as a " free-born man that may dispend of his own free land in yearly revenue the sum of forty shillings sterling," Camden places next in order to gentlemen. And although the phrase may have been employed at first in allusion to this " backbone of the country," and to the high appreciation in which their military capacity was held, it is not at all improbable that it became associated later with the services rendered to the king by that particular body of men known as the Yeo- men of the Guard, instituted by Henry VII. This monarch, to the end, says Speed, of securing his own person,

"institutes a certaine number of choise Archers, with allotment of fees and maintenance, which under a peculiar Captaine, and the name of Yeoman or the Guard, he assigned to that service for him and his successors, Kings and Queenes of England."' Hist, of G. Britaine,' 1650, p. 741, section 9.

Shakespeare's allusion to " yeoman's service "* was no doubt, to judge from his frequent mention of the " lusty " yeoman " whose limbs were made in England," in reference to the yeoman farmer, or " gentleman farmer," as one capable of rendering very effectual service in local or national emergency service which thus became proverbial, and remained so until the phrase came to have the sense merely of regular hard work or service effectually performed. In a modern sense the expres- sion is used by Shorthouse in his ' Sir Percival ' (p. 56) : " The whole training of Port Royal did him yeoman service."

J. HOLD EN MACMlCHAEL.

Tyrwhitt, as quoted by Prof. Skeat (' The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer,' vol. v. p. 11), says of yeoman :

"As a title of service it denoted a servant of the

next degree above a garson or groom The title

of yeoman was given in a secondary sense to people of middling rank not in service. The appropriation of the word to signify a small landowner is more modern."

ST. SWITHIN.

Of the Knight in Chaucer's ' Canterbury Tales ' it is said : "A yeman had he " ; and Tyrwhitt in his note says : " Yeman or yeoman is an abbreviation of yeongeman, as youthe is of yeongtfie." E. YARDLEY.

[E. A. also refers to 'Hamlet.']

princely, " but, sir, now It did me yeoman's service " (Act V. sc. ii.).
 * Hamlet tried to forget his "learning" as un-

ALBERT MOORE AND THE ' D.N.B.' (10 S. viii. 46). Did Whistler ever make a " pea- cock room " for Mr. Lehmann in Queen's Gate ? The famous " peacock room " was in Prince's Gate. The owner of the house was Frederick Richards Leyland, ship- owner, of Liverpool. Whistler decorated the famous room about 1877. Leyland and Whistler quarrelled about the cost, but Whistler got his own price. The " peacock room " cost Leyland 20,OOOZ. He died in 1892. He was an extraordinary man, who had risen from obscurity to great wealth, a liberal patron of the fine arts, an excellent linguist, a keen business man, and a dandy. He had few friends, and was disliked by a very large circle of acquaintances. He was the last man in Liverpool (probably in England) who wore frills habitually. The fine cambric frill on his shirt front, the Charles-the-First face, the quick, energetic walk, constituted him " a character." He was the possessor of many celebrated pictures among others, ' The Blessed Damozel ' by Dante Gabriel Rossetti ; ' Venus 's Mirror ' by Sir E. Burne- Jones ; ' St. Agnes' Eve ' by Sir J. E. Millais ; ' El Corregidor di Madrid ' by Velasquez ; and three works by Albert Moore.

THOS. WHITE.

Liverpool.

J. THOMPSON, PORTRAIT PAINTER (10 S. vii. 469 ; viii. 56). MR. LEWIS'S reply led me to adopt the view that the artist he mentions was the painter of the portrait of 1849 in my possession, at a time when the subject and his parents were living in Bradford. Since then I have been kindly put on the right track by Mr. M. E. Hartfey, Deputy Librarian of Bradford Public Free Library. It seems that, as I had originally imagined, the artist was a local one. I have been directed to The Bradford Antiquary, vol. ii., 1895, wherein there is a very useful and carefully com- piled article, entitled ' Some Old Bradford Artists,' by Butler Wood. Therefrom it seems that John Hunter Thompson was born at Belfast in 1808. The boy's father (an Ulsterman of Scottish descent, and a mechanic) moved first to Scotland, then to Bingley, and finally to Bradford, where he settled. There young Thompson was ap- prenticed to house-painting, an occupation that served as a stepping-stone to painting of a higher order. He was instructed in a course of anatomical drawing by a Bradford doctor, and ultimately placed himself under the tuition of Mr. William Robinson, of