Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 1.djvu/319

 ii s. i. APR. 16, 1910.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

RICHARD HENRY ALEXANDER BENNET (11 S. i. 189, 238). MR. BEAVEN is assuredly too positive in stating that R. H. A. Bennet was at no date member for Newport, Corn- wall. According to the official return of Members of Parliament, issued in 1878 (part ii. p. 138), " Richard Henry Alexander Bennett (sic), Esq., of Beckingham, county Kent,* 1 was returned for that borough on 12 Feb., 1770, for the vacancy caused by the resignation of William de Grey, the Attorney- General, in order to stand for Cambridge University in place of Charles Yorke, the new Lord Chancellor, who committed suicide three days after his appointment. Bennet held the seat until the next general election, which took place in October, 1774. Four years before he became member for Newport, and at a time when he is described in Burke as of Babraham, Cambs, he had married Elizabeth Amelia, eldest daughter of Peter Burrell, Surveyor-General of Crown Lands, who resided at Beckenharn, and who had sat for the adjoining borough of Launceston from a by election in 1758 to the dissolution of 1767. And this connexion is of the more importance to be noted because Burrell's second daughter, Isabella Susannah, was married in 1775 to Algernon, first Earl of Beverley, and his third, Frances Julia, in 1779, as second wife, to Hugh, second Duke of Northumberland, the former's elder brother, who, by purchase of the Werrington estate from the last Humphry Morice in 1775, had become " patron " of both Launceston and Newport. It is therefore no surprise to find Capt. Richard Henry Alexander Bennet, R.N., returned for Launceston at the general election of July, 1802. He was not re-chosen at that of December, 1806 ; but on 14 Jan., 1807, he was elected for Enniskillen for a vacancy caused by a double return. At the general election of the following May he was not again chosen for this Irish borough, having offered himself in the Whig interest for Ipswich, where he was placed last on the poll. But on 17 July he was once more returned for Launceston, in place of the Duke of Northumberland's eldest son, Earl Percy, who chose to sit for the county of Northumberland ; and Bennet continued to represent this one of the Duke's Cornish constituencies until May, 1812, only four months before the next general election, when he accepted the Chiltern Hundreds (not improbably because his ducal patron had now joined the Tory party), and disappeared from Parliamentary life.

If MR. BEAVEN'S statement is correct that

this " Post Captain, R.N.," as he is described in his last electoral return, died in October, 1818, at the age of 37, he could not have been, of course, the Richard Henry Alexander Bennet who sat for Newport in 1770-74 ; but the quotation by MR. W. ROBERTS from the contemporary ' Memoirs of Eminent English Statesmen 2 (1806) dates the post- captaincy itself at 1796 ; and this despite the added erroneous statement that Bennet was then sitting in Parliament for the first time would seem the more likely to be correct. ALFRED F. ROBBINS.

' THE CANADIAN BOAT SONG' (11 S. i. 81, 136, 256). Some discussion has taken place in Canada as to the authorship of the familiar ' Boat Song l ; but it appears to me that it is impossible to arrive at the conclusion that any one but Moore wrote it, if his own words are accepted. In the published letters ascribed to him and I am not aware that their genuineness is disputed he writes as follows with reference to the song :

" I wrote these words to an air which our boatmen sung to us frequently. [He had been travelling down the St. Laurence.] The wind was so unfavourable that they were obliged to row all the way, and we were five days in descending the river to Montreal .... Our ' voyageurs ' had good voices and sung perfectly in tune together. The original words of the air to which I adapted these stanzas appeared to be a long incoherent story of which I could understand but little from the barbarous pronunciation of the Canadians. It begins :

Dans mon chemin j'ai rencontr^ (bis) Deux chevaliers tres bon montes. I ventured to harmonize this air, and have pub- lished it."

L. A. M. LOVEKIN.

Montreal.

In addition to MR. BAYNE'S contention at p. 136 that Lockhart's statement of having received the verses ' ' from a friend now in Canada n cannot be accepted as establishing a fact, it may be noted that if Lockhart's words are to be taken literally they could not apply to John Gait at the time of publication, for not only was Gait not in Canada in Sep- tember, 1829, but he had then been in London for some months. This is plain from an examination of letters to be found in the Appendix to Gait's ' Autobiography,' in the memoir prefixed to Messrs. Blackwood's issue in one volume, in 1844, of ' The Annals of the Parish ' and ' The Ayrshire Legatees,' and in Mrs. Oliphant's ' William Blackwood and his Sons.' In the first-named place there is quoted a letter from Robert Troup, an American, to an English M.P., dated