Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 10.djvu/340

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [11 s. x. OCT. 24,

Chancery Lane occurs in Pepys's Diary 12 July, 1660, which in Stow's day was called New Street.

Petty France is given in Ogilby's mip, 1677, and New Broad Street in Roeque's map, 1746. This street runs parallel with London Wall. Tha thoroughfare from Lon- don Wall to what is now Liverpool Street -appears in Noorthouck, 1772, as Broad Street Buildings. TOM JONES.

"CORDWAINER" (11 S. x. 247, 296.) I can bring the use of the word down to a later date than 1845, as given by J. F. T. "When I was curate of Hurworth-on-Tees in the sixties the parish clerk was in the habit of entering names, &c., in the register, to be signed by the clergyman. In the ' Profession ' column he always entered cordwainer in the case of a shoemaker. Pos- sibly that use may still obtain.

SEYMOUR R. COXE.

The Precints, Canterbury.

" THE HERO OF NEW ORLEANS " (11 S. x. 248, 273, 298). Webster defines a hero as one who is a prominent or central personage in any remarkable action or event, and unless MR. T. WHITE can cite some special authority for the statement that Benjamin Franklin Butler is the person referred to as " the Hero of New Orleans " (ante p. 298), I do not find that there is any evidence to support it.

If " the Hero of New Orleans " was not, as I stated, General Andrew Jackson (and I am still of the opinion that it was he), no one can deny that Jackson was the central personage in a most remarkable event, viz., the defeat of 12,000 British veterans, most of them trained in the Napoleonic wars, by his vastly inferior force of less than 6,000.

If the title applies to any one taking the principal part in an event of the American Civil War, then it most certainly belongs to Admiral Farragut, who, against great odds in the way of fortifications, strong iron chains stretched across the Mississippi, and these guarded by gunboats, fire-rafts, and a floating battery, passed through with his fleet, and captured New Orleans, 28 April, 1862.

In Appleton's ' Cyclopaedia of American Biography,' under ' B. F. Butler,' it says :

" The fleet under Farragut having passed the forts 24 April and virtually captured New Orleans, Gen. Butler took possession on 1 May."

It seems to me that the central personage in this remarkable event was he who, amid great difficulty, captured New Orleans, and not he who quietly took possession.

QUIEN SABE.

NOTES ON WORDS FOR THE ' N.E.D.' : THE TAILOR'S HELL (11 S. x. 264). In the second column of the page above men- tioned MR. RICHARD H. THORNTON quotes the following from John Day's ' The He of Guls ' : " His pocket is like a Taylors hell, it eates vp part of euery mans due."

A " sic " is appended to " hell," and the xtraet offered as an illustration of the early use of the word " ell."

Evidently nowadays the time-honoured gibe at tailors does not corns home to every reader, but one would have thought that Charles Lamb at least might have secured it from neglect. In his essay ' On the Melan- choly of Tailors ' he remarks that

" the tailor sitting over a cave or hollow place, in the cabalistic language of his order, is said to have certain melancholy regions always opea under his feet."

Ainger quotes a letter of Lamb to Words- worth in which he calls a man " a demoniac tailor," adding : "A greater hell than his own must have a hand in this." The essay is signed " Burton, Junior," and Ainger con- jectures that the mention of cabbage in the ' Anatomy ' as a " melancholy diet " may have suggested the whole paper. He ob- serves :

" Cabbage in its double sense of the vegetable so called and of stealing has long been a calum- nious jest at the expense of tailors, from a sup- posed inclination in them to appropriate odd scraps and remnants of the cloth entrusted to them. This expression, and the grim title (referred to in this letter) given to the dark cavity beneath a tailor's working-board into which the fragments of ' cabbage ' were dropped, were favourite jests with Lamb."

On looking up ' Hell ' in the ' N.E.D.' I see that this special meaning is defined as

" a place under a tailor's shop-board, in which shreds or pieces of cloth, cut off in the process of cutting out clothes, are thrown, and looked upon as perquisites."

The illustrative quotations are this very same from the ' He of Guls,' and one earlier from Greene's ' Upstart Courtier' (1592).

DEVOTIONS ON HORSEBACK (11 S. x. 171, 233). The number 365 at the latter reference was due to a faulty memory. According to the legend followed by Carlyle, the illegitimate offspring of the " Saxon Man of Sin " amounted to 354. I have seen the figure given elsewhere at two less than this. His only legitimate child was his successor, August III.

EDWARD BENSLY.