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NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. i. MA*. 20, 1910.

be made and annexed to a formal petition to the President, signed by literary men of standing, that reasonable access should be granted. I have not the slightest doubt that such a petition would be successful. That records from the year 1475, kept at the public expense, should never be open to public inspection, can be due to nothing but unconscious inadvertence.

GEORGE SHERWOOD.

CAXTON AND EDWARD IV. (11 S. i. 209). The picture which MR. PEET seeks is ' Caxton showing the First Specimen of his Printing to King Edward IV. at the Almonry, West- minster,* by D. Maclise, exhibited at the Royal Academy of 1851, No. 67, and en- graved by Fred. Bromley. See W. Blades, ' Books in Chains, and other Bibliographical Essays,* 1892 (Book-Lover's Library), pp. 212-21. The picture was the property of Mr. J. Forster, who lent it to the Great Exhibition held in London in 1862, No. 413 presumably Dickens's John Forster ; but it was not included in the Forster Bequest .to the South Kensington Museum, where, however, there is a pencil sketch by Maclise of ' Caxton's Printing Press. 1 Bromley's engraving is not scarce, and has been repro- duced on a small scale in recent years in one of the printing-trade journals.

W. ROBERTS.

A large and handsome woodcut of this picture was presented by Messrs. Cassell about twenty-five years ago to purchasers of the first part of one of their well-known publications (I believe one of the editions of The Popular Educator). The picture is called ' The Cradle of the People's Literature,' and in it is represented a man at the press, while Caxton is standing near, showing proofs of his work to the king.

A. L. HUMPHREYS.

"STANDING FOR PARLIAMENT" (11 S. i. 87). The verb " to stand " appears to have been very commonly used in this connexion during the general election of 1678/9, to which the first letter quoted by MR. ROBBINS refers. Samuel Pepys", writing to his cousin Thomas Pepys of Lynn Regis on 1 February of that year, says, " As for those two worthy persons who now stand for their favours n ; and in a letter to Col. Legge on the 13th he has "Col. Norton having, as you write, finally declined standing for the town. 11 In a letter of the Earl of Danby to Col. Legge of the same date, which was trans- mitted through Pepys, we read "hearing that Sir John Kempthorne designs to stand. 11

On the 23rd of the same month Humphrey Prideaux writes to his friend John Ellis with reference to the very same election in the University of Oxford mentioned in the letter cited by MR. ROBBINS : " William- son first stood, but found such opposition that he was forced to desist n (p. 66 in the Cam. Soc. edition of Prideaux ? s letters to Ellis). The editor, Sir E. M. Thompson, quotes from Wood's ' Life, 1 p. Ixxxiii, a passage under 19 Feb., 1679, in which the following words occur : " Dr. Eadisbury, of Brazennose, who audaciously, and with too much conceit of his own worth, stood against the said Mr. Finch, 11 &c.

In a letter of Thomas Povey to Pepys, dated 31 Aug., 1672, we have "Cook, a youth of the principall estate in Norfolk, stands at Lyn.' 1

But " stand " in the sense of to be a candi- date is found far earlier.* See, e.g., Cooper's ' Thesaurus Linguae Romanse et Britannicae,* where, s.v. Peto, " honores petere ?1 is ren- dered by "To stande for offices,' 1 and Ambio by " sue or stand for an offyce " (quoted from ed. of 1573). How much further back can this usage be traced ?

EDWARD BENSLY.

' ANNE OF GEIERSTEIN ? : THE COMMAND- MENTS (11 S. i. 185). I think we ought to make quite sure before we amend "fourth commandment 11 to "fifth commandment ll in chap. x. How did such a variation arise at all ?

It may have been intentional, as the speaker was a Swiss of the fifteenth c entury, when it was usual to number the Command- ments differently from now. In chap. ix. Sir Walter quotes Chau er, and had surely read ' The Pardoner's Tale,' where that great poet explains to us that ' ' the seconde heste " is this : " Tak nat my name in ydel or amis. 21 See my note on ' The Cant. Tales, 1 C 641.

I wonder when the commandments were first numbered as they are now.

WALTER W. SKEAT.

MR. BAYNE forgets that the division of the tables of the Decalogue into four and six, instead of three and seven, was effected at the Reformation, If Sir W. Scott represented a* person in the fifteenth century as speaking of the first commandment with promise as the fifth, he must have done so by a slip, and the later editor did well to make the correction. F. NEWMAN.

consulships?" from 'Coriolanus' (II. ii.).
 * Johnson ('Diet.') quotes "How many stand for