Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 12.djvu/294

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

as she calls them, is to be found in " An Appeal to the Public on the Conduct of JMrs. Gooch, the Wife of William Gooch, Esq. .... London, 1788," which is dated from the Fleet Prison, 1 Jan., 1788, and the ' Life ' which your correspondent mentions. Mrs. Gooch was alive in 1804, when she published " Sherwood Forest ; or, Northern Adventures. A Novel in Three Volumes," which, she says, was written under the heavy pressure of calamity, severe illness, and deep distress of mind.

G. THOBN-DBUBY.

THE VIRTUES OF ONIONS (11 S. xii. 101, 149, 167, 209, 245). Probably the oldest praise of the onion is in 'Iliad,' xi. 630, where it is said to go well with drink- ing. One of the convives at Xeno- phon's Symposium accordingly calls for one. Much fun in that feast of repartee is made of that gourmandise by Socrates and others, and there first occurs the now vulgar joke about the objection to kissing an onion eater. H. C N.

I now remember that the substance which the post-mortem revealed was made into a fruit-knife, and the doctor said to be of Derby taking it in a hurry to cut an onion, found the blade dissolve in his hand. It is quite sixty years since I heard the story. THOS. RATCLIFFE.

AUTHOBS WANTED (11 S. xii. 200).

If every raindrop, &c.

In the ' Socialist Sunday School Hymn- Book ' there is a hymn beginning Suppose the little cowslip,

the words being by Fanny van Alstine. The second verse of this runs :

Suppose the glistening dewdrop

Upon the grass should say,
 * What can a little dewdrop do ?

I 'd better roll away," &c.

This is the substance of what MB. J. F. CBOWLEY wants, though the form is slightly different, C. B. WHEELEB.

(US. xii. 220.)'

' Scarsdale ; or, Life on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Border, Thirty Years Ago,' was written by Sir James "Phillips Kay- Shuttleworth (1804-77), and published in three volumes in 1860 at 31s. 6d. Another novel by him is ' Ribblesdale ; or, Lanca- shire Sixty Years Ago,' 1874, 3 vols. Other l>ooks of his are ' Public Education as affected by the Minutes of the Committee of Privy Council from 1846-52,' 8vo, London, 1853,

500 pp. ; * Four Periods of Public Educa- tion as reviewed in 1832, 1839, 1846, 1862,' 8vo, London, 1862, 644 pp. ; ' Thoughts and Suggestions on Certain Social Problems } contained chiefly in Addresses to Meetings of Workmen in Lancashire,' London, 1873, 346 pp. ; ' Cynedrida,' ' A Masque,' ' The River of the Underworld,' and other poems, 8vo, 96 pp. (privately printed in 1842); and numerous pamphlets on educational and social questions, the chief of which are embodied in the three volumes mentioned above. Shuttleworth was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, and is known as the founder of the English system of popular education. See also lengthy article in ' D.N.B.'

ABCHIBALD SPABKE, F.R.S.L.

The author of * Scarsdale ' is Sir James P. Kay - Shuttleworth, Bart., who wrote another novel called ' Ribblesdale.' He also wrote on social topics, and was an authority on questions of education. Born at Roch- dale in 1804, he eventually became a physi- cian, and practised in Manchester under his surname of Kay ; but in 1842 marrying Janet, the only child and heiress of Robert Shuttle- worth of Gawthorpe Hall, he assumed by licence the additional surname of Shuttle- worth. . RICHABD LAWSON.

Urmston.

[MR. R. GRIME, MR. J. LANGFIELD WARD, and J. H. S. thanked for replies.]

CAT QUEBIES (11 S. xii. 183, 244). In gratitude for the many, full, and useful replies to my cat queries, may I give the following notes in the hope they too may be useful ?

When I was a boy at the Cape, about 1882, we had five cats, one a she tortoise- shell I cannot remember about her kittens. For a short period we moved out of our house into another, and I think the cats went with us ; certainly the tortoiseshell one did, and she stayed at the new home until my mother went away from it on a visit. Then this cat disappeared, but turned up after a week (?) covered in the red dust of the main road, and we concluded she had been trying either to get back to our old house, or to find my mother.

On 12 April, 1908, we had a great loss in the death at the age of six years of Tommy I., a tabby which one winter weighed 131b. 12oz. He was a most affectionate cat, and preferred lying on my knee to sleeping on a chair or rug, as most cats do. In his younger days he greatly enjoyed a " fight " with me. For this purpose I kept a pair of thick leather