Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 4.djvu/98

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NOTES AND QUERIES. fii s. iv. JULY 29, 1911.

a considerable resemblance to his. Med- win's ' Nugse ' does not appear to be well known. It is not mentioned in the ' D.N.B.' There is no copy in the British Museum or the Bodleian. Medwin, it may be added, is indebted in more than one place to Wake- field.

Welsh.

There is a translation of the ' Elegy ' by Thomas Lloyd Jones in his ' Beauties of Welsh Poetry,' Denbigh, 1831, pp. 178-83. EDWARD BENSLY.

ST. EXPEDITUS (11 S. iv. 45). I believe ST. SWITHIN is right, and that the story which I told in my article on ' Some Imagi- nary Saints' about St. Spedito must have been grafted on to an already existing St. Expeditus. Indeed, a correspondent assures me that a figure of St. Expedit is to be seen in one of the churches in Brittany, with a banner on which " Hodie " is in- scribed, and trampling on a raven, from the beak of which issues the word " Cras." The idea embodied is evidently that of promptitude or expedition.

My story was founded on an article which appeared in The Fortnightly Review by a Roman Catholic writer some five years ago. Further information will be found in P. Saintyves, ' Les Saints Successeurs des Dieux,' 1907, p. 144.

A. SMYTHE PALMER.

PITT'S BUILDINGS : WRIGHT'S BUILD- INGS (US. iv. 50). It would be difficult to identify these houses, as they have all been pulled down some within quite recent years and the sites are covered with the ugly streets and red-brick monstrosities which now disfigure the parish of Kensing- ton.

Pitt Buildings, as they were usually called, were situated to the south-east of Campden Hill, in an area now bounded on the south by Kensington High Street, on the east by Church Street, and on the west by Campden House Road and Hornton Street. At the beginning of the eighteenth century this property belonged to a copyholder of the manor named Orb ell, who built the houses and called them Orbell's Buildings. In Faulkner's time the Buildings consisted of several large houses with extensive gardens. In one of the oldest of them Sir Isaac Newton took up his residence in 1725, and here he died on 20 March, 1727. The house was called Bullingham House, after Nicholas Bullingham, Bishop of Lincoln and after-

wards of Worcester, who died in 1576, and was buried at Kensington. I doubt if the house was so called in Newton's time. Leigh Hunt, who in his ' Old Court Suburb ' describes it as "a large old brick house, which stands in a curious, evading sort of way, as if it would fain escape notice, at the back of other houses on both sides of it," calls it Newton House. It was pulled down in 1895, and Bullingham Mansions were erected on its site.

A Kensington landowner named Stephen Pitt, who is said to have married Orbell's daughter, inherited the property, and gave his own name to the Buildings. He was also the possessor of Campden House, and resided for a time at Little Campden House, which had been built by the Princess Anne of Denmark, afterwards Queen Anne, and which is, I think, the only old house still existing in that neighbourhood, with, of course, the exception of Holland House. He afterwards moved into Pitt Buildings, where his descendants resided for several years. His memory and that of his Build- ings are perpetuated in Pitt Street.

Wright's Buildings were a row of red- brick Georgian houses at the south end of Wright's Lane, which were erected by Gregory Wright about 1774. This property had also formerly been in the possession of Sir Isaac Newton, who bought it the year before his death, but did not build upon it. Blocks of modern buildings with fantastic names obscure the site of this vanished row of picturesque houses.

W. F. PRIDEAUX.

CROWN AGENTS (11 S. iii. 467). This query is of interest to Americans, but it relates really not to one subject, but to two subjects " Crown agents " and " Colonial agents." The term " Crown agent " is apparently a comparatively modern one, and would not have been either used or understood in the American Colonies pre- vious to 1776. Its meaning is thus explained in a marginal note on p. 6 of Sir Penrose G. July an 's ' Memorandum on the Origin and Functions of the Department of the Crown Agents for the Colonies,' in Govern- ment Paper C. 3075 of 1881, mentioned by MR. PEACH : " The Appointment of Agents-General for the Crown Colonies, afterwards styled Crown Agents for the Colonies." According to the same authority,

" each Governor had his own agent or representa- tive in London, who generally acted as an inter- mediary between himself arid the Crown, besides performing the miscellaneous services required of