Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 3.djvu/341

 ii s. in. APRIL 29, ion.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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mostly taken from the lips of singers, together with many thousand lines of associated traditional verse. A publica- tion issued by Mr. Gardner, of Paisley, is also in the line of what is wanted " Vagabond Songs and Ballads of Scotland. With Notes and Music. Edited by Robert Ford." This is a new edition of a work originally issued in 2 vols. SCOTUS.

"SKOLPYNE" (11 S. iii. 269). The fish mentioned by E. L.-W. under this spelling may be the skulpin or dragonet, known to naturalists as Callionymus lyra. It is a marine fish ; and the sexes are so unlike in colour, and in the size of fin-rays and head, that they were formerly regarded as distinct species. EDWARD STEP, F.L.S.

A reader of O. W. Holmes's ' The Pro- fessor at the Breakfast-Table ' cannot help remembering that a creature bearing practi- cally the same name is there described {chap, i.) :

" Now the Sculpin (Coitus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs about the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing the bait and hook intended for flounders. On being drawn from the water, it exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a surface so full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the naturalists have not been able to count them without quarrelling about the number, and that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil, do not like to touch them, and especially to tread on them, unless they happen to have shoes on, to cover the thick white soles of their broad black feet."

EDWAKD BENSLY.

Aberystwyth.

Richard Carew in the ' Survey of Corn- wall,' 1602, p. 35, says whitings in the east parts are named scalpions. See the ' N.E.D.' under scalpin. TOM JONES.

[The date given by E. L.-W., the reign of award IV., is too early for the American sculpin. The locality named is Exeter, which fits in well with the first quotation for scalpin in the ' N.E.D.' viz., from the ' Little Red Book of Bristol ' c. 1400. Replies acknowledged from MB. R. V. GOWER and MR. F. P. MARCHANT.]

BARABBAS A PUBLISHER (11 S. ii. 29, 92). Owing ^ to my absence in Italy, I did not ee J. D.'s query until a few days ago. The origin of Byron's joke, which appears to have stuck fast in the public mind, will be found in Leigh Hunt's ' Lord Byron and flome of his Contemporaries,' vol. i. p. 53 {second edition, 1828). Byron used the words " B^.rabbas was unquestionably a bookseller", in conversation with Leigh

Hunt. He does not appear to have had Murray in his thoughts at that time, for he certainly expressed a very high opinion of him. Byron, in one of his whimsical moods, seems to have alluded to booksellers in general as "of the tribe of Barabbas, who was unquestionably a bookseller."

RICHABD EDGCUMBE. Edgbarrow, Crowthorne, Berks.

SMALLPOX AND THE STARS (11 S. iii. 167, 211). The poem sought by A. S. P. may be that of William Cartw right on Charles I.'s recovery from smallpox in 1633, from which Mr. W. J. Courthope quotes the following lines on p. 61 of his * Life of Pope ' (Pope's 1 Works,' vol. v.) : Let then the name be altered, let us say They were small stars fixed in a Milky Way ; Or faithful turquoises which Heaven sent For a discovery, not a punishment ; To show the ill, not make it ; and to tell By their pale looks the bearer was not well. Chalmers's ' English Poets,' vol. v. p. 515.

This is an obvious parallel to the poem of Dry den's on Lord Hastings' s death.

EDWARD BENSLY.

Dry den's poem ' Upon the Death of the Lord* Hastings ' was imitated by Oldham, ' To the Memory of my dear Friend Mr. Charles Morwent ' (1675), stanza 40 : Those asterisks, placed in the margin oi. thy skin, 1'oint out the nobler soul that dwelt within : Thy lesser, like the greater, world appears All over bright, all over stuck with stars.

L. R. M. STRACHAN.

Heidelberg.

"BARNBURNER": "HUNKER" (11 S. iii. 229, 314). Barnburners and Hunkers were the two sections (each so nicknamed by the other) into which the Democratic party in the State of New York was split in 1847 by the Free Soil issue opposing the extension of slavery beyond the States which already had it. The Barnburners were the Free-Soilers a small part so from conviction, the rest joining them from policy, to punish the national pro-slavery administration under Polk for interfering with the State "machine's" control of patronage. The whole were headed by ex- President Martin Van Buren, whom they nominated for President in 1848 to defeat the national Democratic candidate Cass, which they did. The Hunkers were the conservative wing, comprising incidentally nearly all the " brute vote" who hated new ideas ; hence the term has become classic throughout the country for that genus. The former name is conventionally derived