Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 8.djvu/71

 10 s. VIIL JULY 20, loo?.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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.Royal Academy Schools, and gave him opportuni- ties for studying classical art. He exhibited a .great many times at the Royal Academy, but his work was always somewhat hard and formal, espe- cially in his subject pictures. His best productions were landscapes of Cumberland or Westmorland, -especially of his own country, for the scenery of which he had a peculiar affection. He possessed some small means of his own, and was a very .abstemious and retiring man. He was a member of the Society of Friends, and in his own place very influential, but hardly known outside the limits of that Society. He spent little time in London, quickly returning to Cumberland, where he lived -quietly for nearly forty years, and died in 1879. Llewellynn Jewitt wrote his Life in 1882."

ALFRED SYDNEY LEWIS. Library, Constitutional Club, W.C.

GEORGE I. : THE NIGHTINGALE AND DEATH (10 S. vii. 409). Herrick in his '* Hesperides ' has the following :

To the Nightingale and Robin Redbreast. When I departed am, ring thou my knell, Thou pittifull and pretty Philomel : And when I 'm laid out for a corse, then be Thou sexton (redbreast) for to cover me.

Routledge, 3rd ed., 1887, p. 89. But is not this melancholy an unfounded attribute of the nightingale ? or is the belief founded on the story of Philomela and Tereus ? The Thracians say that the night- ingales which build their nests about the sepulchre of Orpheus sing sweeter and louder than others of their tribe (see note to verse 21, bk. vi., of Southey's ' Thalaba,' Longman, 1847, p. 266*) ; and in Nathaniel Lee's. ' Theodosius ' the prima donna of bird-song

With piercing moan does her lost young bewail ; Which the rough hind observing, as they lay Warm in their downy nest, had stol'n away : But she in mournful sounds does still complain, Sings all the night, tho' all her songs are vain, And still renews her miserable strain.

It is, however, impossible to associate "the beauteous notes of Philomel with emo- tions of melancholy, unless for some especial reason, whether she broaches them on the glades of Southern England or in the groves of Thrace. Her joyous night-song was anything but a distressing experience on a certain occasion some few years ago, when my wife and I were cycling from Brighton 'to Horley. Our attention was arrested about 2 A.M. by her exultant voice, and offering as it did an excuse for a rest, we sat on a bank and spent half an hour eaves- dropping in nightingale-land. It was, I think, near Cuckfield, and from the woods

'the bird's "melancholy."
 * Coleridge also, I think, alludes somewhere to

opposite came a flood of harmony, such as, one would have thought, could be in the experience of few but the nocturnal naturalist, for there must have been a large colony of them, not one of whom could " get a word in edgeways." There was certainly no melancholy there, and nothing to suggest death. J. HOLDEN MACMICHAEL.

Gilbert White in a letter to the Hon. Daines Barrington, No. xxvii., says : ' 'Night- ingale, Luscina, sings first in April : usually silent middle of June." It may have been in song till the 21st of that month if it was a late season. JOHN P. STILWELL.

"DUMP" (10 S. vii. 426, 498). The in- formation at the latter reference is incom- plete. A reference to ' N.E.D.' (ignored as usual) will show that there are not two substantives thus spelt, but four. And the quotations there given are surely worth consulting. WALTER W. SKEAT.

BARTON GRAMMAR SCHOOL, WESTMOR- LAND (10 S. vii. 488). One Rev. Thomas Myers was vicar of Stannington, North- umberland, from 1815 to 1845. One Rev. Henry Thompson was perpetual curate of Garsdale, near Kendal, from 1838 to about 1880.

One Rev. Henry Thompson was head master of Cartmel Grammar School from before 1824 to about 1868. Baines's ' Lan- cashire,' vol. i. p. 594, gives an account of this school, and says that " the present head master is the Rev. Henry Thompson, and the rents of land, interest of money, and cock-pence yield him about 130Z. a year." As to cock-pence see 7 S. ix. 7, 90, 156, 273. JOHN B. WAINEWRIGHT.

"BETTY," A HEDGE-SPARROW (10 S. vii. 469). In similar circumstances I remember well the nest of the hedge-sparrow being called a " hedge-betty's " nest by village lads in Essex, but only the compound word was used. I never remember to have heard the bird spoken of as a " Betty."

C. V. H. S.

The ' E.D.D.,' s.v. ' Betty,' gives " 4. The hedge-sparrow," on the authority of Sharp- Halli well's ' Glossary,' Warwickshire.

DOUGLAS OWEN.

FRENCH - CANADIAN LITERATURE (10 S. viii. 29). Reference should be made to the annual ' Publications relating to Canada,' which contain an admirably full record of literature of all kinds. F. C. L.