Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 4.djvu/291

 ii s. iv. OCT. 7, mi.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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plunder during the Mutiny, and I was able to restore to the family a miniature of a poor lady who was one of the many victims.

The presence of the Napoleonic relic may possibly be thus explained. Mr. Fraser, the Resident at Delhi, who was assassinated there some little time before the Mutiny, was, it was related, a great admirer of Napoleon. He visited him at St. Helena when going home on furlough, and made the prisoner a present of his library. In recognition of this, Napoleon sent Fraser his bust by Canova, and his Cross of the Legion of Honour. On Fraser' s death these came into the possession of his successor Sir T. Metcalfe (a brother of Lord Metcalfe), from whom they descended to his son Sir T. Metcalfe, who was magistrate of Delhi at the time of the Mutiny, and the story of whose escape will be remembered by some of your readers. After the siege, the bust was found in the Metcalfe house at Delhi and the Cross of the Legion of Honour in a drawer of an old bureau, where it had escaped the notice of the plunderers. It seems not improbable that the sketch above alluded to may have formed part of a Napoleonic collection of Fraser' s. The Cross, I may mention, came later into the possession of Lady Clive Bayley, daughter of Sir T. Metcalfe, who was good enough to show it to me on more than one occasion.

The purchaser of the picture in the bazaar had a shrewd notion of its value, as he offered it to me at the time at a price far beyond what I was inclined to give.

J. H. RIVETT-CARNAC.

Schloss Rothberg, Rougemont, Switzerland.

" CH " : ITS PRONUNCIATION IN EARLY ENGLISH. It is worth noting that the pro- nunciation of the ch in Early English was precisely that of the modern ch in church. Thus the statement made ante, p. 233, col. 2, that " the Saxon after the Conquest would pronounce the ch as sh ; we say ' cat,' the Frenchman chat" is evidently founded on the assumption that the Norman sounded ch as in modern French. Yet English has preserved a large number of words which prove the contrary, such as chafe, chain, chair, chalice, chamber, &c. The pronuncia- tion of ch as sh, as in champagne, chamois, and the like, is only possible in the case of words borrowed from French in compara- tively modern times ; suppose we say, after 1500. The Early English ch was never pronounced as sh, either in native or Norman words.

The only difficulty that can arise is in the case of Domesday Book and some very early Norman documents, in which we often find ch used to denote the sound of k when the^ vowel e or i follows, precisely as in modern Italian. All this has been explained more' than once, as, e.g., in an article at the end of my ' Notes on English Etymology.' Seer also the article on ch in the ' N.E.D.'

WALTER W. SKEAT.

STATUES IN LONDON : WILLIAM III. AND RICHARD I. ' Haydn's Dictionary of Dates ' (25th ed., 1910) gives a list of the " chief statues in London," but omits that of William III., which was presented by the German Emperor in 1907, and afterwards set up in front of Kensington Palace, a very appropriate place for it. But it is in the middle of a locked enclosure, and although I have a tolerably long sight, I could not read the inscription, except the first line, " William III." I was glad, therefore, to see the late MR. HARLAND - OXLEY'S transcript of it at 10 S. x. 371. He remarks that it is, "I fancy, a trifle too far off for comfortable inspection or perusal of the inscription ; at least I found it to be so.' r Surely this arrangement ought to be altered ;. an inscription should be in a place where it can be read by all.

The ' Dictionary,' besides omitting this- statue from its list, gives that of Richard I, twice over, describing one as "in Old Palace Yard," and the other as " near Westminster Abbey." W. T. LYNN.

Blackheath.

LEARNED HORSES. We had the German Hans a short time ago among us. Jonson- mentions

Old Banks the juggler, our Pythagoras,

Grave tutor to the learned horse.

Dr. Hudson in a note to ' Love's Labour's Lost' ("Era Shakespeare," p. 15), quoting this epigram and Sir Kenelm Digby's state- ment as to what the beast could do, adds that Banks, with his horse, is said to have had a narrow escape from the Capuchins, who suspected him of being in league with the devil.

Adam Kiraly de Szathmar, a Hungarian traveller, has left us information about an English horse which he saw performing in the fair at Saint-G ermain in 1 7 1 7. The beast could correctly tell the time, the value of a coin, and the number o pips on a card, giving its answers by knocks on a board with its hoof, and then restore the coin to the owner, and the card to the individual who*