Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 1.djvu/80

 NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 s. i. JAN. 22, 1910.

Montpellier in Franc is the seat of an ancient and celebrated School of Medicine, and, to quote the language of ' Murray's Guide, 2 " it bears a name familiar as the type of salubrity and mildness of climate," and was at one time a favourite resort of con- sumptive patients. I believe it will be found that Montpellier as a street-name is generally met with in watering-places, and that it is intended to suggest a resemblance to the climate of the French town. In London the principal streets and squares bearing this name are at Brompton, which was at one time supposed to be specially suitable for the treatment of consumption. H. A. HARBEN. [MB. W. SCOTT also thanked for reply.]

AUTHOKS OF QUOTATIONS WANTED (US. i. 30). The ' Elegy on the Death of Jean Bon St. Andre l in the * Poetry of the Anti- Jacobin ? contains the following verse :

Poor John was a gallant Captain, In battles much delighting;

He fled full soon

On the first of June But he bade the rest keep fighting.

" St. Andre, deputy to the Convention for the Department of Lot during the Reign of Terror, rivalled Marat and Robespierre in cruelty. Having been appointed to remodel the Republican Navy, he was present at the action of June 1, 1794, in which he showed excessive cowardice."

See the ' Poetry of the Anti- Jacobin, with Explanatory Notes by Charles Edmonds, 5 2nd ed., 1854, p. 154, where there is a note which gives a short account of St. Andre, and explains the meaning of other parts of the ' Elegy.*

See also Larousse's ' Grand Dictionnaire,' vol. ix. p. 934, " Jean-Bon-Saint-Andre (Andre Jeanbon, dit)."

HARRY B. POLAND.

Inner Temple.

The lines are from ' An Elegy on the Death of Jean Bon St. Andre, 2 by Canning, Ellis, and Frere, to be found in ' Works of J. Hookham Frere* (2 vols., Pickering, 1872), vol. i. p. 205.

St. Andre was Commissioner of the Con- vention on board the French flagship La Montagne on 1 June, 1794, and the legend ran that before the action began he took refuge below, and that the ship very early made sail out of the fighting line. See Alison's ' History of Europe ? (7th ed., 1847), vol. iv. p. 324 (chap xvi.). The apocryphal story of St. Andre's murder while consul at Algiers gave occasion for these very humorous verses. W. H. CLAY.

The lines have been ascribed to Canning, Gifford, and Frere (see 1 S. iii. 348).

DAVID SALMON.

Swansea.

[G. E. C. and Y. T. also thanked for replies.]

GRAMMATICAL GENDER (11 S. i. 29). Is not grammatical gender merely a rough-and- ready classification of nouns according to their terminations ? In Latin, for instance, the names of male beings end (mostly) in -us, those of females in -a. Many names of inanimate things have the same forms, so the grammarian calls them masculine to denote that, though not of male sex, they are declined as if they were ; similarly, to describe a thing as feminine is a handy way of assigning it to the first declension.

Unfortunately, this aspect of the system is obvious only in languages like Latin, which preserve the old suffixes. In French and German genders are quite irrational, and must ultimately disappear. In Dutch the genders are habitually confused in speech, though preserved in writing. In English there were many changes in them before they were discarded, as I showed some years ago in a paper published in Anglia (vol. vi. p. 173). JAS. PLATT, Jun.

Dr. Morris put the matter into a nut- shell when he wrote :

"Gender is a grammatical distinction, and applies to words only. Sex is a natural distinction, and applies to living objects." ' Historical Outlines of English Accidence,' p. 82.

In modern English thought gender and sex are apt to be confounded, but it was not always so. As Prof. Earle remarks :

" In the Saxon period the two things were still distinct. If MAN was masculine, so also was ivoman, WIFMAN : wife, WIF, and child, CILD, were neuter. So in modern German Weib and Kind are neuter." ' The Philology of the English Tongue,' pp. 369-70.

The author quotes (pp. 372-3) an amusing and instructive paragraph from The Globe of 26 July, 1886, which deserves to be remembered :

"The German genders are enough of them- selves to prove that considerations of sex have little to do with this branch of grammar, and that the principle involved is only that of the harmonical agreement of endings in words. A German gentle- man, for instance, writes a masculine letter of feminine love to a neuter young lady with a feminine pen and feminine ink on masculine sheets of neuter paper, and encloses it in a masculine envelope with a feminine address to his darling, though neuter Gretchen. He has a masculine head, a feminine hand, and a neuter heart. A masculine father and feminine mother have neuter children. They eat neuter bread, feminine butter, a'nd mascu-