Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 2.djvu/43

ii s. vni. JULY 12, 1913.] NOTES AND QUERIES. David Masson, who transferred his services to Macmillan's Magazine, and was succeeded by Mr. W. Fraser Rae. On that gentleman retiring through illness, the company which owned the paper was wound up, and The Reader came into the hands of the Mr. Bendysshe referred to by Mr. Escott. According to a contemporary writer, one of its latest features was

"an unintelligible 'religious and philosophical romance,' with the sensational title of 'Papers of a Suicide.' These chapters nearly brought about the destruction of the paper, but 'the deathblow was given by a blundering review of Dr. Latham's edition of Johnson's Dictionary." G.

AUTHORS WANTED (US. vii. 208, 273). In Otho Melander's ' Jbcorum atque se- riorum liber secundus,' 1604. p. 9, is another variety, with a specially hideous false quantity, of the " Dat Galenns opes " lines. Here the name of Bartolns, the great mediaeval jurist, has displaced that of the Roman emperor :

Dat Galenus opes, fulvuni dat Bartolus aurum, Pontiflcat Moyses cum sacco per civitatem. EDWARD BENSLY.

(11 S. vii. 428.)

The source of the quotation asked for by one of your correspondents :

And shall not this night with its long dismal gloom, &c.,

is ' The Tempest,' by Sir H. Davy.

B. PAUL. (11 S. vii. 489.) The lines beginning

The fields in blossom flamed are from ' The Ballad of Babe Christabel,' by Gerald Massey, born 1828.

J. FINCH.

WILDERNESS Row (11 S. vii. 428). I have a curious little newspaper cutting referring to a chapel of some kind or other (Roman Catholic, I imagine, as a priest is referred to in it) in Wilderness Row. It is almost all more or less conjectural, but Southwark appears to be the locality from the following :

"Crossing over the new iron bridge, past the Church, we arrived at Wilderness Row, after much meandering through many low and dirty streets. How horrid is the south of the metropolis ! After all, would the priest be there ? What a place to select for one's residence a Wilderness ! Is it Wilderness Road or Row ? Well, we found it at length, as I said before."

Whether this is of any use in discovering Wilderness Row I do not know, but there certainly appears to have been such a place in Southwark or the vicinity in the early part of the nineteenth century.

FREDERICK T. HIBGAME.

Unthank Road, Norwich.

MATTHEW ARNOLD'S POEMS (US. vii. 349, 397, 478). May I point out that ' Requiescat' cannot have been written for Rachel, as suggested at the last reference, for the poem appeared in 1853, and Rachel died on 3 Jan., 1858. C. B. WHEELER.

80, Hamilton Terrace, N.W.

' STAMFORD MERCURY ' : EARLIEST PRO- VINCIAL NEWSPAPER (11 S. vii. 365, 430, 471). MR. J. B. WILLIAMS'S authority is to me sufficient to dispose of the claims of Berrow's Worcester Journal and the Stam- ford Mercury to have been founded in the years 1690 and 1695 respectively ; but MR. A. ADCOCK'S facts support MR. WILLIAMS. I have long had misgivings about those claims, and, although no discoverer. I have years ago put forward in Bristol the claim of this city to the distinction of starting the first general newspaper in the provinces, excluding the Oxford Mercurius Aulicus (1643) and the Oxford Gazette (1665), which, as MR. WILLIAMS says, stand in a class apart.

The copy of The Bristol Post-Boy to which I referred is in the possession of the family of the late Mr. Thomas David Taylor, formerly senior proprietor of the Bristol Times and Mirror. It is bound with some later copies and a large number of other eighteenth -century Bristol newspapers col- lected by the late Mr. William Tyson, F.S.A., himself a Bristol journalist for many years, and a friend of Mr. Taylor's. The title-page runs :

Numb. 91.

THE BRISTOL POST-BOY,

Giving an Account of the most Material NEWS both FOREIGN AXD DOMESTICK.

From Saturday August the 5th, to Saturday

August the 12th, 1704. And the imprint is :

Bristol, Printed and Sold by W. Bonny in Corn Street, 1704.

The copy is in a good state of preservation, but creasing accounts for some difficulty in reading a few lines. The Duke of Marl- borough's message to the Duchess (written on horseback just after the Battle of Blenheim) has suffered from folding. There are two pages, and the size is 12 in. by 7 in., two columns to the page. All the news relates to the war and to the movements of ships.