Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 8.djvu/506

 420

NOTES AND QUERIES, no s. vm. NOV. 23, 1907.

however, well fitted for his task, for he possesses military as well as topographical knowledge. We do not think that many of our readers realize that it was the object of the allies all of them, we believe, except England to establish " in France a weak re- public which eventually might be dismembered like Poland." This dream occurred once more, a short time after the fall of the Second Empire ; but then it was indulged in only by utterly irresponsible persons who knew little or nothing outside the politics of their own country, while on the former occasion really great statesmen were carried away by the delusion.

'The Gentle Craft,' by Major Broadfoot, is an admirable article, which will be attractive to many persons who take little delight in other sports or games. We have met with men devoted to angling who had probably never seen a pack of hounds in their lives, and had assuredly never played a single game at cricket. Angling has been a sport from early times. Who was the first man to catch and eat a fish we shall never know ; perhaps he was some cave-dweller. Whoever he was, he con- tributed not a little to the sustenance as well as the happiness of the generations who have come after him.

Miss Caroline F. E. Spurgeon's paper on ' Mys- ticism in English Poetry' is very attractive, but "mysticism" is one of the vaguest words in our language : hardly two people are to be found to whom the term conveys precisely the same mean- ing. In a region so loosely defined it is possible, without any intention of misleading, to misstate facts, to call nearly every poet a mystic, or to limit the faculty to a very few. We believe that no man was ever a poet without some degree of mysticism entering into his nature, though we think that Donne had the faculty in restricted measure. Some of the most interesting mystics are the followers of Sufiism in Persia.

' The Gardens of Italy,' by Mr. H. Sneyd, has <nven us great pleasure. There are very few who have investigated the history of these gardens as Mr. Sneyd has done, and still fewer who have appreciated their beauty with such pleasing results. The Romans may have been, and probably were, the discoverers of what has been called the " pattern garden " ; and the inhabitants of Italy, even in the most unhappy periods of their history, never seem to have lost this pleasing art, which eventually spread northwards as far as Scotland. Whether among the almost countless gilds which existed in this country until the beginning of the reign of Edward VI. there were any gilds of gardeners, we do not know ; but there was one at Lille, of which St. Paulinus was regarded as the patron saint. It is generally assumed that the pattern garden was introduced into England about the middle of the reign of Elizabeth ; but it is not unlikely that it came in at a somewhat earlier date. There was a flower-garden at Berkeley Castle in the early part of the fifteenth century, but we do not know what was the manner of its beauty, There are few of these old pattern gardens yet left to us ; most of those we have are more or less injured by time or the hands of the improver ; nearly all of them were swept away when George III. was king. Fulke Greville of Wilberry, who wrote his Maxims, Characters, and Reflections ' in 1756, evidently had a contempt for them ; he was in favour of what was looked upon as an imitation of nature which was then becoming the fashion, for he speaks of gardens

he knew as " still full of green peacocks, green pyramids, green minced pyes, and green statues."

Mr. Sidney T. Ir win's paper on Oliver Goldsmith is worthy of praise, as it does not exaggerate his merits or weigh too heavily on his defects.

The paper on the letters of the late Queen approaches too near the boundary line of modern politics to be dealt with here.

THE later numbers of L'Intermediaire deal with the game of diabolo and with inscriptions on sun- dials. They also wander from the descendants of Marshal Lefebvre and "Madame Sans-Gene" to historical diamonds, and thence to the natural colour of the hair of great men. Are creative

feniuses, such as Rabelais, Moliere, Napoleon, hakespeare, Darwin, and Kant, usually dark or fair? Another question discussed is, How many words are needed for speech ? and Max Miiller is quoted as to the paucity of words found among rural people who have never been to school. That the vocabulary of a day labourer or peasant farmer of a thinly populated district in any part of Europe has ever oeen so limited as his social superiors often imagine is, however, doubtful. Simple as the plenishing of an old-fashioned dwell- ing-room used to be, each part of each object in it had its own name ; and so with the neighbouring sheds, the garden, the implements for work, the cattle, and the land itself. Many substantives must always have been needed in connexion with different kinds of soil, streams, woods, quarries, acclivities and declivities. A countryman of the early half of the nineteenth century might be

Glaringly deficient in dictionary language, yet ave a rich vocabulary so far as his own narrow life was concerned.

JJottws J0 Comspontonts.

We must call special attention to the following notices :

WE cannot undertake to answer queries privately, nor can we advise correspondents as to the value of old books and other objects or as to the means of disposing of them.

ON all communications must be written the name and address of the sender, not necessarily for pub- lication, but as a guarantee of good faith.

To secure insertion of communications corre- spondents must observe the following rules. Let each note, query, or reply be written on a separate slip of paper, with the signature of the writer and such address as he wishes to appear. When answer - ing queries, or making notes with regard to previous entries in the paper, contributors are requested to put in parentheses, immediately after the exact heading, the series, volume, and page or pages to which they refer. Correspondents who repeat queries are requested to head the second com- munication " Duplicate."

T. W. R. (" I sit on a rock "). For this riddle see 1 S. ii. 10, 77 ; xii. 365, 520. MR. J. P. OWEN gave his verse solution of it at 9 S. v. 332.

NOTICE.

We beg leave to state that we decline to return communications which, for any reason, we do not print, and to this rule we can make no exception.