Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 11.djvu/187

 11 S. XI. FEB. 27, 1915.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

177

the chief feature of its design bore some adaptation of the respective city or municipal arms. In some of the districts the labels were brought into use, but Government suppression speedily followed, though not before wide public attention had been drawn to a real necessity that existed for the adoption of a lower rate of postage than Id. for the circulation of printed matter. The Act of 1870 resulted, which provided the fc?. ("miniature") British adhesive stamp of 1 Oct., 1870, and an accompanying post card.

On the suppression of "the labels of the Circular Delivery Co., &c,, the large re- mainders left over, together with the stocks prepared for use, but never brought into circulation, were either destroyed or dis- posed of to stamp-collectors, and are to be found in many old-time collections. Speci- mens genuinely used are now valued by British specialists. Counterfeits of the Delivery Labels also came upon the market to meet a demand for the quasi-philatelic originals. These are still plentiful ; it was no one's business to suppress them, and their manufacture may very possibly still be going on.

In addition to the Delivery Labels of the several civic districts, those of the Uni- versities of Oxford and Cambridge (1870-85) and the Court Bureau (1890) are of no small interest. They, too, got upon the wrong side of the law and disappeared.

WlLMOT COBFIELD.

Royal Societies Club, S.W.

LUKE ROBINSON, M.P. (11 S. xi. 9, 55, 70, 111). I should have added to my former reply that there are several very interesting references to Luke Robinson in

"The Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq., Member in the Parliaments of Oliver and Richard Cromwell from 1656 to 1659, now first published from the original autograph manuscript, with an introduc- tion, and edited and illustrated with notes, his- torical and biographical, by John Towill Rutt. London, 1828. 4 vols."

187, Piccadilly, W. A - L - HUMPHREYS.

FRANCE AND ENGLAND QUARTERLY (US. x. 281, 336, 396, 417, 458, 510; xi. 50, 74, 96, 138). I should like to remind His HONOUR J. S. L^DAL and others interested in this discussion that, as far as the blazon of fleurs-de-lis in the Royal Arms of England was concerned, the change from " semee of fleurs-de-lis " to three took place in 1405, when Henry IV. limited the number to make his bearing accord with that adopted by the King of France de facto, Charles VI.

ST. SWITHIN.

PUNCTUATION : ITS IMPORTANCE (11 S. xi. 49, 131). In ' Recollections of the Old Foreign Office,' at p. 81, the late Sir Edward Hertslet, K.C.B., says of Lord Palmerston :

" He had a great objection to persons ' sowing Commas,' but still more did he dislike despatches written out for signature in true lawyer style without any stops whatever. He once wrote the following minute on a batch of letters being sent up to him without being properly stopped :

" ' Write to the Stationery Office for a sufficient supply of Full Stops, Semi-colons, and. Commas; but more especially Semi-colons, for the use of the copying clerks of the office ; I furnish these things out of nay own private stores when I have time to look over despatches for signature, but I am not always sufficiently at leisure to supply deficiencies. p i/ 6 /51.' "

Lord Palmerston's own punctuation appears to be not above reproach.

One might have imagined that in so venerable a document as the Nicaeo- Constantinopolitan Creed it would not have been possible for errors of punctuation to occur. However, in a vast number (I should say the great majority) of the books of devo- tion containing the Ordinary of the Mass published for the use of English-speaking Catholics, there is a wrong punctuation of the Latin in one clause, and a consequent mistranslation into English. The clause I allude to is perfectly clear in the original Greek, viz., crravpaiBevra re virep ?}/AWI/ ITTL HOVTLOV HtAarov, /cat Tra^oVra, /cat raei/Ta. The Latin runs " Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato passus et sepultus est." The comma ought to come after " Pilato," but these books I am speaking of put it after " nobis."

I will quote three instances. I do not know how far Cardinal Manning and his suffragan bishops, who drew up a Manual of Prayers for Congregational Use ' at Easter, 1886, are responsible for the Supplement usually annexed thereto, but, at any rate, in this Supplement, at pp. 80 and 81 of Messrs. B. &T. Washbourne's edition, we find this wrong punctuation in the Latin, and so a mistranslation into English. Similarly, I do not know how far Cardinal Gibbons and the Archbishop of Philadelphia, who authorized 'The New Kaccolta ' in 1887, are responsible for the edition of 1892, which, on p. 545 of the Appendix, makes precisely the same mistake ? which recurs on p. 33 of ' The Holy Week Book,' published by Burns & Gates in 1913, with the Nihil Obstat of Abbot Bergh, O.S.B., and the Imprimatur of Canon Surmont.

This wrong punctuation of the Latin is sung, to my own knowledge, in a large