Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 1.djvu/153

 ii s. i. FEB. 19, 1910.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

145

In 1732 the pamphlet was issued reset, but with identical lines and pagination, only a different title-page being provided. It read :

" Truth in Rhyme, To suit the Time ; or, The Parish Guttlers. A Merry Poem. As it is acting every day with great applause near the Poors House, Gray's-Inn Lane. With the Comical Adventures of Simon Knicky Knocky, Undertaker, Church-Warden, and Coffin-Maker. London : Printed in the year of Guttling 1732. [Price one Shilling.]"

This is aimed at the Select Vestry of St. Andrew's, Holborn.

Copies of these pamphlets are before me, but, unless the announcement is itself a satire, there was a still further issue. In the second edition of that scarce work ' Love at First Sight; or, The Gay in a Flutter,' 1751, the following appears as a supposed advertise- ment culled from some new^aper of recent issue :

" After the Whitsun-Holidays will be published. A Parochial Print ; representing a General Vestry, as it was held on Easter-Monday last in the Parish Church of Saint Andrew Undershaft, Leadenhall Street, London, in which the Characters of the Persons there present, who held up their Hands in Defence f an antient favourite Custom of theirs, viz., Gutling and Winebibing at the Ex- pence of their Neighbours ; against Justice and Humanity towards the Poor, will be carefully Executed by an Eyewitness," &c. In transcribing I have filled in the hyphens, as the identity of the place is unmistakable.

Probably there were other issues of the pamphlet ; if so, they would be worth noting in these pages, both for the historians of Poor Law administration and the local chroniclers of the parishes at which they are aimed.

The 'N.E.D.,' s.v. guttler, quotes the 1732 pamphlet as the. second example of the word, but the edition of 1722 should have been cited. ALECK ABKAHAMS.

ROYAL BILLIABD TABLES. It would seem that the first billiard table set up was for Prince Henry in 1606-7. It is classified in the Wardrobe Accounts among "Divers necessaries " :

"To Henry Waller f, M . .-, Billiard Board of VTalnutt tree covered with uTr.-n <-l.,tli, with four great ' Vnralls of iron, 17.

" To him tor thiv- ^ivat Skrmv.-s ,,f wood to

iakc the position of the table higher or lower 8s

To the same for the Billiard Sticks and Balls

the pins of Ivory to play at Billiards, 70s."

Probably through the loss of books

recording the facts, I find no further notice

f this jraine until much later :

" A warranttoyopn.at Wardrobeforyesetting up <-J a Billiard Table covered with -iven doth.

to be the same size and fashion with that of Denmark House, and to be set up at St. James's, Sept. 21, 1631."

Another warrant of the same date for a billiard board to be set up at Whitehall follows this, L. C. V. 93, p. 266 :

" Billiard Balls. A warrant to ye great Ward- robe, for three dozen of Billiard Balls of Ivory perfectly round, and fifteen boxes of Amber, Jet, and Ivory for pictures in ye Cabinett at St. James, to bee made by John Reeve. Feb. 14, 1632."

" A warrant to Nicholas Read, his Majesties- Joiner, to take down the Billiard Board in the Queen's Withdrawing Chamber at Whitehall, and convey the same and sett it up at Richmond, the Queen's pleasure for the same being signified by the Marquis of Hertford. Oct. 26, 1641." L. C. V. 96.

Thereafter the King is in the wilderness* and no records are kept of London palaces, because there was no Lord Chamberlain.

C. C. STOPES.

"SPINNEY." This interesting word, meaning a copse (see ' E.D.D.'), is not given in my Dictionary. Perhaps the earliest quotation for it is from ' Gawain and the Grene Knight, 1 1. 1709, where it is spelt spenne. It is adapted from the Anglo- French espinei, from Lat. spinetum. Cot- grave gives the equivalent F. espinoye, " a thicket, grove, or ground full of thorns, a thorny plot." Spinetum is included amongst the " Latin words that had entered into place-names before the Norman Conquest " in MacClure's 'British Place-Names,' p. 118, merely because there is a place called Spinney in Cambs ; but the name de Spineto is only a Latinized form for "of Spinney, " and I cannot find this name earlier than 1228. From Roman times to 1200 is about 800 years, and the Romans did not speak French. WALTER W. SKEAT.

MEREDITH'S ' LAST POEMS.' In one of the four fragments among Meredith's ' Last Poems,' beginning " A wilding little stubble flower," the last word of 1. 2 is in the obvious position to rime with " street " (1. 4), which it as obviously fails to do, the word printed being " corn." Now I wish to draw atten- tion to the fact that no verse-maker, and decidedly no great poet, would hesitate to fulfil the simplest laws of euphony, especially when these are as lightly fulfilled as in the present instance, duty and inclination going as it were hand-in-hand. Nothing is more likely than that Meredith jotted down the little verse from memory, and considering at that moment only the sense, apart from the sound, substituted " corn " for " wheat, " as by a slip of the mind. Such a blunder