Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 5.djvu/430

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NOTES AND Q UERIE8. ui s. v. MAY 4, 1912.

SAKUM MISSAL : OFFICE OF ST. WERBURGH (11 S. v, 163, 233). If J. T. F. is interested in this matter, as appears by his communi- cation, he may like to know that an office of the saint is contained in the MS. Tanner 169* in the Bodleian Library (p. 171). The manuscript appears to date from St. Wer- burgh's Abbey at Chester, c. 1188. The saint's name is inserted in the calendar on 3 February, with an octave on the 10th ; also on 21 June. Was this latter the Transla- tion ? J. B.

QUOTATION FROM EMERSON (11 S. v. 268).

-The quotation referred to occurs in " English Traits,' chap, iv., ' Race/ The passage has always appeared to me to be one of the most characteristic specimens of what is sometimes called " Yankee bunkum " that have ever appeared in print, and to detract from the value of many of Emerson's statements and conclusions in this and other of his writings. It is a pre- judiced and one-sided view of the matter, and shows a very superficial acquaintance with the history and ethnology of the par- ticular race he is writing about. The Nor- mans of that period, whatever their short- comings, were undoubtedly, as Macaulay says, " the foremost race of Christendom." The epithet " filthy thieves " is not argu- ment, but rather implies a lack of it ; and it is impossible to ignore the greatness of a ruler who permanently reformed both Church a.nd State, who placed both civil and ecclesiastical law in the country on a firm basis, and founded a dynasty which has lasted 800 years. The further state- ment that, ever since the time of the Norman incursions in Europe, Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula have been reduced to second-rate powers, is hardly consistent with the inconvenient fact of the existence, at a much later period, of a certain King Charles XII. of Sweden.

J. FOSTER PALMER.

8, Royal Avenue, S.W.


 * I give this citation with the deepest

chagrin; I was half praying I might not recover the culpable passage ! I trust your correspondent will peruse the entire essay the fourth in the series of Emerson's ' English Traits ' from which the extract is drawn. In Routledge's edition the passage will be found on p. 296.

I would, however, respectfully remind readers of this passage that when the mild, suave, tender-hearted Emerson penned those J " burning words " he was under the flaming

" daimon " of Carlyle and of his great book. ' Past and Present.' I could imagine our own Graetz writing in a similar strain of the Crusades as indeed he does. Those papers were read to Manchester working-men in 1847 to Radicals who demanded " hot stuff " of that kind ; and Emerson very un- willingly, but under Carlyle's pressure, was forced to gratify them.

M. L. R. BRESLAR. Percy House, South Hackney.

The passage inquired for may be found in the paragraph beginning " The Normans came out of France into England worse men than they entered it . ..." on p. 49 of vol. iv. of ' The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson,' 1893, Macmillan & Co., and about the middle of chap, iv., ' Race,' in the ' English Traits.' The exact words " filthy thieves " are near the end of the paragraph. DAVID ALEC WILSON.

[SiR ROBERT HUDSON and MR. HUGH S. MACLEAN also thanked for replies.]

SHEPHERD'S MARKET, MAYFAIR (11 S. v. 228, 318). This was formed about the year 1735, and was called after Edward Shepherd, an architect, the owner of Shepherd Market and other buildings in Mayfair. He lived at a house opposite Curzon Street Chapel in 1708. This place of worship was pulled down in 1899, and a mansion of the Duke of Marlborough now occupies its site. Shepherd died 24 October, 1747. T. SHEPHERD.

LAST WITCH BURNT (US. v. 251). At the Tipperary Assizes, held at Clonmel on 5 July, 1895. Mr. Justice Wm. O'Brien sentenced a man named Cleary, who had been indicted for murder and convicted of manslaughter, to penal servitude for twenty years. The prisoner had burnt his wife to death in the belief that she was bewitched. The tragedy had taken place on the previous 15th of March. At the same assizes seven other persons (including a woman) were convicted of assisting at the torture of the unfortunate young woman.

P. A. McELWAINE Dublin.

She was Bridget Cleary, burnt at Bathy- vaden, Tipperary, 15 March, 1895, for which crime her husband and five others were sentenced on 15 July at Clonmel Assizes (see Times, 15 and 16 July, 1895).

The last British judicial burning was in Scotland, 1727.

The last victim to the belief in witchcraft in England was a Frenchman, known as