Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 2.djvu/45

ns.viiLJuLYi2,i9i3] NOTES AND QUERIES. law, ecclesiastics of all degrees, feudal lords and their vassals, tradesfolk, artisans, and a great array of women—pass before our eyes in a motley throng. It is tempting to transcribe, not so much documents of high political importance, as a sheaf of the numerous passages which give sudden, vivid glimpses of curious turns in the ordinary life of the day. We will content ourselves with but two.

On 14 Feb., 1268: "Whereas the king is informed on trustworthy testimony that John son of Aylric atte Brok of Meullinges, while still a little boy lying in his cradle lost his ear by the bite of a ravenous sow for whose attack the way lay open by the carelessness of his nurse, and not by any fault of his own; he testifies this for the said John lest sinister suspicion be had of him hereafter on this account."

On 13 Feb., 1269: "Whereas the gallows upon which thieves and other persons condemned in the town of Gippeswyc are hanged at Wyvelesdon without the said town of Gippeswyc, are situated opposite the manor of William de Thornbegg to the very great nuisance of the said William and his household dwelling in the said manor; grant to him and his heirs that the said gallows shall be removed from the said place for ever and set up elsewhere in some place within the liberty of Gippeswyc, where they can be set up without nuisance to him and his heirs and the said manor."

six little volumes of "The Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature" now before us keep well up to the standard of their predecessors. A particularly attractive one is Dr. Craigie's Icelandic Sagas. Icelandic learning—one of the conquests of the latter half of the nineteenth century—still carries with it something of the freshness of discovery, and loses none of this in Dr. Craigie's hands. More than most literatures it needs explica- tion, a disentangling of parts, and tracing up of elements to their origin ; and the scholar who deals with it has also to enable his readers, by giving them some measure of ulterior under- standing, to discount the general inadequacy of translations. All this is here satisfactorily accomplished. Good also is Mr. Allen Mawer's Vikings a work, again rendered possible by the labours of scholars during the last fifty years. Of the many secondary civilizations in nearly every case longer-lived and more extensive than had once been suspected which modern research has brought to light, none should interest English people more than that of the Vikings. It not only bears directly upon part of our own develop- ment : it is informed also with a spirit now alien from, now closely akin to, our own in both aspects fascinating to the imagination and instructive.

Mr. Hamilton Thompson's English Monas teries compresses within 142 small pages a surprising amount of detailed information. Bead as carefully and thoroughly as it has been written, this short book would give the student a very clear and well-filled picture of the life in the religious houses of England before the Re- formation. The different characteristics, posi- tion, and use of the buildings of the various orders take up the greater part of the book, but there is added a good chapter on the discipline and daily life of the religious. Dr. Caroline

Spurgeon's Mysticism in English Literature f despite its acknowledged indebtedness to recent much-discussed works, has a refreshing note of originality about it. We may here and there dissent from a dictum of Hers, and there is a certain inadequacy, which seems more than mere- want of space, in her account of " devotional and religious mystics," but, on the whole, as a summary illustration of one aspect of English literature, we like the work much. The writer is; at her best in her introductory chapter and when treating of Wordsworth and Blake.

The introductory and the concluding chapter of" Mr. Sydney Eden's Ancient Stained and Painted Glass, dealing with the fragmentary and diminished state in which what remains of ancient glass has come down to us, and with the methods by which' these remains might be better preserved, we should like to recommend to the attention of alt authorities who have the fate of these treasures in their hands. Between them is a concise but satisfactory history of the manufacture and use of stained and painted glass, and its relation to other architectural decoration from 1050 to the end of the seventeenth century.

Dr. Johns in Ancient Babylonia gives us a really wonderful summary of a long and com- plicated history. It is, of necessity, chiefly a serried array of statements of fact, but we know of no popular book on this subject so closely- packed with matter as this, nor one to be recom- mended before this, for any one desirous of' attacking a rather tough but fascinating study.

The Imprint is always interesting, and the part for June 17 contains an account of the pioneers' of photogravure by Mr. Donald Cameron - Swan. It was Thomas Wedgwood, son of the potter,, who first produced fugitive "profiles by the- agency of light" on sensitized paper, and Talbot, following in his footsteps, endeavoured to add the quality of permanence to the receptive surface while further increasing its sensitiveness. The application bf Swan's carbon process to the Talbot method of photo -etching was mada some years later by Karl Klic, and this combina- tion resulted in one of the most practical and* successful methods of photographic engraving,, now widely known under the comprehensive name of "Photogravure." All matters relating to- photography are of special interest to us, as the record of photographic discovery. Now we can treasure portraits of our friends, knowing them to be permanent. Our founder was not so fortu- nate, and on the llth of October, 1879, appeared in our pages a pathetic appeal from him, lamenting the fading portraits of his old friends, and asking the Photographic Society to make a small return for the services rendered to photography in its early days by ' N. & Q.' and discover " some simple mode of printing photographs to ensure their nob fading."
 * N. &; Q.' was the first journal to open its pages to

Among the other contents of The Imprint are a 'Plea for Reform of Printing,' by " Typoclastes, " and 'Old Books and their Printers,' by Mr. J. Arthur Hill. Mr. Everard Meynell writes on ' Signs and Posters,' and complains that not a single sign in Bond Street is admirable. Oxford Street is a still less likely place ; and in the City you may wander a whole day under the swinging notices of the trades without finding anything to please you..