Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 5.djvu/105

 11 S. V. FKB. 3, 1912.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

81

LOXDOX, SATURDAY. FEBRUARY 3, 191!.

CONTENTS. -No. 110.

NOTES: Charles Dickens, 81 Inscriptions in Burial- Ground of St. John's, Westminster, 83 Centenary of a Swedenborgian Magazine, 84 Bernard Gilpin's Will, 86 The Naval Salute -Dickens : Unpublished Letters, 86 The Superfluity of Books Miers, Silhouette Artist " Caulker," a Dram of Spirits, 87.

QUERIES : Latin Vice - Admiralty Commissions, S7 Edmund Combe : Christian Jarman Beauvoir, Normandy, and De Belvoir, England "Sung by Rey. nolds in 1820 " Cleopatra's Portrait Sash Windows ' Dombey and Son ' : Reference to Arabian Story Lord George Gordon in ' Barnaby Rudge,' 88" Truth " : Henry Labouchere Veturia, Mother of Coriolanus Bran- don, Duke of Suffolk : Brunt -Women and Tobacco, 89 Major James Killpatrick Bream of Bream's Buildings Biographical Information Wanted Authors of Quotation 8 Wanted Peveril Family Royal Mint at Guildford, 90 Beaupuis Arms for Identification Panthera Knives as Presents Dallas, 91.

REPLIES : The United Service Club, 91 Families : Dura- tion in Male Line Drummond of Hawthornden, 92 Napoleon's Imperial Guard, 93 Theophilus Leigh, D.D. Robin Hood, 94 "Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum" Grise : Grey : Badger, 95 King's Theatre (Opera- House), Haymarket Bishops addressed as " My Lord " Du Bellay, 98 Penge as a Place - Name Pot*>os Gelly- feddan, Cynghordy, and Llettyscilp Pepvs's 'Diary': Braybrooke Edition, 97 Skating in the Middle Ages Biographical Information Wanted, 98 Beaupre Bell " Samhowd," 99.

NOTES OX BOOKS : 'The Oxford Shakespeare Glossary' ' Life in Shakespeare's England ' ' Cameo Book-Stamps ' . ' The Cornhill ' ' The Fortnightly.' OBITUARY : Mr. Myer D. Davis. Notices to Correspondents.

CHARLES DICKENS.

BORN FEBRUARY TTH, 1812 ; DIED JUNE 9m, 1870.

To many this celebration must come with a note of sadness. There is a shadow over it which cannot pass until the five grand- daughters of England's beloved son are freed from penury. The Pall Mall Gazette of January 19th well says :

" One of the truest chaplets on the novelist's grave is The Daily Telegraph's admirable fund in aid of the grandchildren. We agree with The Aihenccum that it ought to be made to yield the five beneficiaries a hundred a year apiece, and until that is done we shall feel that all ' -centenary festivities are utterly beside the mark."

The amount requisite to this end is certain to be raised, but one feels regret, and almost shame, that aid from our American brothers should have been requisite when but a small sum from English readers would have sufficed. How Capt. Cuttle, who gave us our motto, would have grieved over this ! By the way, we can almost hear him saying that if the press reader of ' N. & Q.' had read the proofs of ' Dom- bey and Son ' there would have been no occasion for our friends MR. JOHN T. PAGE and W. C. B. to call attention to the mistakes made as to whether the hook was on the right or left wrist.

Those of us who take part in the celebration of this centenary cannot fail to direct our thoughts to the early years of Dickens ; for of all England's great sons not one has passed through a more severe ordeal and kept himself more unspotted from the world. No one seemed to care for him, or what became of him. Very pathetic are the accounts given by him to his friend and bio- grapher John Forster "a queer small boy," " a very little and a very sickly boy," " never a good little cricket player," " never a first-rate hand at marbles, or peg-top, or prisoner's base" ; but he had great pleasure in watching other boys, reading while they played. He was subject to violent spasms of pain which disabled him from active exertion, and he always held the belief that this early sickness had brought him one inestim- able advantage in the fact that his weak health strongly inclined him to reading. It was his mother who inspired him with a love of study, and she taught him the rudiments first of English, and also a little later of Latin. At the age of seven, for the last two years of his residence at Chatham, he was sent to a school kept by a young Baptist minister named William Giles, who, on his young pupil leaving with his family for London, gave him as a keepsake Goldsmith's 'Bee.' Then, as readers of Forster will remember, the

" anguish began for while he describes his father as being ' proud of him in his way,' but in the ease of his temper, and the shortness of his means, he appeared to have utterly lost at this time the idea of educating me at all, and to have utterly put from him the notion that I had any claim upon him, in that regard, whatever. So I degenerated into --leaning his boots of a morning, and my own ; and making myself useful in the work of the little house " in Bav! am Street, Camden Town " about the poorest part of the London suburbs then, and the house a mean small tenement, with a wretched little back garden abutting on a squalid court."