Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 6.djvu/350

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

s. vi. OCT. 12, 1912.

contractor for many months during 1538 -and 1539, as part of his great undertaking, which included Hurst, Calshot, and other local castles. For the first time we read of reported that stone from the abbeys has been delivered there for " the Works " ; .and in Cromwell's ' Remembrances ' for that year we find a note that the 500 men at work in the Wight " must be paid " ; and in 1540 he again jots down the fact that lie must " remember the Co we."
 * ' Est Co we " in the year 1539, when it is

After many such references we find the first clear distinction made by Mylle between his two rapidly rising forts in his account for " works at Thest Co we and the West Co we." in 1541 ; and many such notes appear, till in 1542 he was paid for finishing the two fortresses, which in the very next year required to be repaired. In the war- rants to Mylle for these repairs, and for bulwarks to both fortresses, dated in March, June, and August, 1543, we find for the first time in the State Papers the double form by which the towns that sprang up later round these castles have ever since been known. It would seem to be natural to shorten the old form so often used of the Est Cowe and the West Cowe by merely writing of the " two Cowes " ; and although the old forms remained long in use, and all the appointments of gunners and soldiers are given as to the East and the West Cowe, the abbreviated forms of " the Kowes " and " the Cowes " crept slowly into use, and after 1553 we hear no more of either " Cowe." In this year the brief existence of " Thest Cowe " had come to an end, for the allowances for island garri- sons contain no mention of Mylle's work, nor was a vestige left when Elizabeth de- manded a full account of her island fortresses. There is no record of how it came to perish. Leland and Camden refer to it as but a legend, and all that remains of it is the racing course " off old Castle Point."

Y. T.

THE HOUSE OF JOHN MUBRAY. Sunday, the 29th of September, was a red-letter day in the house of Murray, and to the present John Murray we offer our hearty congratu- lations, for on that day a hundred years ago his great-grandfather removed his business from Fleet Street to Albemarle Street, where may it long remain !

Next door to the business house is the home of the Murrays, and full it is of

historic associations. These date from 1815? when in the drawing-room Scott and Byron met for the first time, and the two poets, much to Murray's delight, greeted each other affectionately, and entered into cordial conversation which lasted two hours. For some time afterwards they met in Albemarle Street almost every day, and John Murray the third, the father of the present head of the house, remembered seeing them (they were both lame)limping arm-in-arm down the stair- case. Mr. John Murray treasures many relics of those days. These include screens belong- ing to Byron, covered with the portraits of prizefighters, and of actors and actresses of the period ; but the greatest treasure of all is the poet's Bible. This shows that the statement often repeated, that Byron by an alteration made Barabbas a publisher, is false ; no such alteration appears in the book. MR. MURRAY explained in our columns in 1910 (US. ii. 92) that the joke was perpetrated by Campbell on another publisher.

Among the many who have visited the Murray home may be mentioned Gladstone, Disraeli, George Borrow, the Darwins, the Napiers, and Livingstone. I possess a letter of Livingstone's, written to my father, dated from Albemarle Street ; and among the mementoes Mr. Murray cherishes is a letter from the great traveller from Africa, when he had neither ink nor paper. It is on a copy of The Standard, and is written in red with a liquid he had made out of some vegetable substance.

There is now a fifth John Murray in the firm, Mr. Murray having taken his son John into partnership. That they may long be spared to work together, and that the firm may prosper for generations yet to come in the same unbroken line, is the w r ish of every Briton interested in the literature of his native land.

JOHN COLLINS FRANCIS.

AN INDIAN MONUMENT IN OXFORDSHIRE. Under the Chiltern Hills, and midway between Henley and Wallingford, lies the old-world village of Stoke Row, a typical English hamlet, in one of the most produc- tive farming districts of the Thames Valley. Here may be seen a truly incongruous erection, surrounded by orchards and hedge- rows and cultivated fields. It is an Indian dome covering an artesian well, and one may reasonably wonder how such an unusual object can have found its way to an English country-side.