Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 10.djvu/30

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 s. x. JCLY n, m*.

tlon such tyred stuffe, that like Kentish post- horse they cannot go beyond their ordinary stage, should you flea them."

This downright abuse incensed John Stephens so highly that, before the year was out, a second impression of his book was issued, with an angry ' To the Reader ' aimed at his detractor, in addition to which a friend of Stephens's, J. Cocke, wrote a long epistle in prose and verse, intended to expose the meanness of the actors' friend. Cocke availed himself of this opportunity to claim the authorship of three of the Characters printed in the same volume with those of that unknown botcher.* Stephens, truth to say, asserted that he had meant no insult to the London com- panies, but that his description dealt solely with strolling players. Whatever his ad- versary may have thought of this explana- tion, he seems to have chosen promptly to pretermit the controversy, as the offensive lines were deleted f from the ensuing edition of the ' Characters,' the penultimate essay ^' A Purveyor of Tobacco ') at the same time being omitted, never to be reprinted in the many subsequent editions of the collection.

By identifying Stephens's adversary with John Webster, we can partly account for the bitterness of Henry Fitzgeffrey's attack on Webster in his ' Notes from Blackfriars ' <1617 not 1620, as Dyce printed it), for Among the commendatory verses con- tributed by the satirist's friends some are signed John Stephens ; so the invidious feelings of this set of barristers against the ^tage - players' champion had not subsided two years after the offence, and we may consider ' The Devil's Law-Case,' in which the foul proceedings of Contilupo and Sanitonella are exposed and branded, as the dramatist's final retort on his enemies. B ON A. F. BOURGEOIS.

says Stephens, ' malevol ac rudis suse calumniae fretus, alieni nominis ruina .... my poor detractor, who is like the slow-worm, venomous but blind." Cocke calls his adversary " an obscure vagrant," and adds :
 * " Unusquisque turpis et inscius et ventosus,"

.... all was penn'd

Them to protect from shame, who thee defend

From want,

an allusion to the author's connexion with the stage.

t Prof. Morley, in his ' Character Writing in the Seventeenth Century' (London, 1891), men- tioned that Stephens was probably attacked by an unknown adversary, but failed to detect the allusion to the sixth edition of the ' Characters,' And did not notice the deletion of the offensive paragraph and of the ' Purveyor of Tobacco.'

ANNE BRONTE. (See 8 S. xii. 403, 471 ; 9 S. ii. 151.) I am led to return to these somewhat ancient references of my own (the second excepted) through happening on the following in Mr. Clement Snorter's recent fascinating volume 'The Brontes and their Circle ' (p. 188) :

" The tomb at Scarborough bears the following inscription :

Here Lie the Remains of

Anne Bronte,

Daughter of the Rev. P. Bronte, Incumbent of Haworth, Yorkshire. She Died, Aged 28, May 2-, 1849. The inscription on the stone is incorrect. Anne Bronte died, aged twenty-nine, May 28th, 1849."

There are two inaccuracies here : the lines of the inscription are wrongly divided, and the 8 is omitted in " May 2-." In- significant errors of transcription they may be, but call for correction all the same. In September, 1897, I copied the inscription, and inserted it in the article at the first reference thus :

Here Lie the Remains of

Anne Bronte Daughter of the Rev. P. Bronte,

Incumbent of Haworth, Yorkshire. She died, aged 28, May 28th, 1849.

Mr. Shorter's transcription, is either first or second hand : if the former, I am at a loss to account for the double misreading ; if the latter, " verify transcriptions " is as valuable as " verify quotations."

J. B. McGovERN. St. Stephen's Rectory, C.-on-M., Manchester.

" SANDWICH SPOILS " IN 1457. Hall's ' Chronicle ' records an incident in the history of this ancient port in the above year, when Sir Piers Bressy, a great ruler in Normandy and a lusty captain, was coasting along the Kentish shore on mischief bent. Having received information from his spies that Sandwich was neither peopled nor fortified, and that its chief rulers had departed on account of a " pestilenciale plague," he landed his troops, occupied the town and port, and secured some booty, but had to withdraw before night set in. According to our chronicler, the enemy did not get much for his trouble, althoiigh " French authors make of a little much."

One of these writers, I find, was the author of the Chronicle of Charles VII. of France, a book often attributed to Alain Chartier, under whose name it is entered in the British Museum Catalogue. The day's proceedings are described with some detail,