Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 6.djvu/363

 us. vi. OCT. 12, i9i2.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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would find only pleasure in affording help out of their stores of knowledge.

The book opens with a bright cheerful Foreword from Sir William Purdie Treloar, whose name is a household word in the Ward of Farringdon Without. We congratulate Mr. Bell on having produced a book to which we shall often turn; he has certainly proved that the author whom he quotes was mistaken when he wrote, " No man can write the history of Fleet Street."

MR. F. MELIAN STAWELL contributes to this month's Burlington Magazine a neatly stated account of ' Kant's Theory of Art.' Mr. Aymer Vallance's fourth paper on ' Early Furniture ' deals with furniture for the most part coffers having metal-work applied to it. Mr. Simonson has an interesting article on Guardi in view of the centenary of his birth ; M. Georges Hulin de Loo discusses ' An Authentic Picture by Goossen van der Weyden and the Legend of S. Dymphna from Tongerloo ' ; and M. Jose Pijoan deals with a very attractive subject in ' A Signed Triptych by Bartolome Bermejo at Acqui,' tracing the influence of Flemish art upon that of Spain. M. Claude Anet, describing the exhibi- tion of Persian miniatures at the Musee des Arts decoratifs at Paris, enjoys, and enables his readers to enjoy, the pleasure of advancing into a hardly known field. Two or three echoes from former numbers of the magazine in the ' Notes ' and ' Letters ' may be mentioned : Heir Klein- berger's justification of the ascription of ' The Old Woman plucking a Fowl ' to Rembrandt ; Mr. Charles Oulmont's note on an unpublished water-colour study by Manet for the " Olympia " ; and Mr. Aymer Vallance's remarks on ' Les Trois Morts et les Trois Vifs ' at Raunds Church, Northamptonshire. Last, but not least, Mr. C. H. Wylde describes and illustrates the splendid twelfth-century Textus cover mentioned by Sir Martin Conway in his final article on ' The Treasury of S. Martin d'Agaune.'

(Dbituarg.

WALTER WILLIAM SKEAT.

IT is with very great regret that we, in common with the world of letters, have learnt the death of the most famous English scholar of his generation. Taken ill on 29 September Prof. Skeat passed away in the night between Sunday and Monday last in his seventy-seventh year. The outlines of his career have been recalled to public memory by the press : how he was a Londoner born, and educated at King's College School and Sir Roger Cholmeley's school at Highgate ; how he entered Christ's College, Cam- bridge, and distinguished himself first in mathe- matics ; how he became a Fellow of his College and took orders and married, and served in two country curacies for four years, when his health broke down, and with the future dark and doubt- ful before him he returned to Cambridge, and was there appointed mathematical lecturer. But his enthusiasm for English, the originality of his ideas and methods, the philological learning he had even then accumulated, could not long be hidden. He brought out as his first book a translation of the ' Songs and Ballads of Uhland '

U864) ; his second book shows him already in that path which was to lead him at once to so much good service and to so high a reputation. For the recently founded Early English Text Society he edited ' Lancelot of the Laik ' (1870 )~ From that date onward he published on the average two volumes a year ; and perhaps no other- scholar has given "to the world so vast a mass of erudition of value so high and equal. We have- space here only to mention the outstanding^ works : his ' Piers Plowman ' (1884), his ' Chaucer* (1894), and his great 'Etymological Dictionary' (1882). Last year he published the 'Place- Names of Bei'kshire,' and in 1910 the delightfuf ' Early English Proverbs,' while at this moment his last work is going through the press. In 1873 he founded the English Dialect Society ; in 1878 he became Elrington and Bosworth Pro- fessor of Anglo-Saxon.

There is one work of his which must be of closer- interest than all the rest to readers of ' N. & Q.' In 1896 he thought it worth while to collect into a volume his contributions of thirty years to our- columns. The first note from his pen had appeared on 20 May, 1865 (3 S. vii. 407); the first included in ' A Student's Pastime ' is from 1866 (3 S. ix. 379); the last, on flower-names,, from 1896 (8 S. ix. 163). What is perhaps yet more pleasing to those who have valued with gratitude the information he was so generous in- imparting he prefixed to this collection an account of his life as a scholar, a piece of lively autobiography which is remarkable for his wonted simplicity and precision of statement, and like- wise for a more intimate touch now and then which reveals something of the man.

He tells us how, a schoolboy at Highgate under Dr. Dyne of whom, as of others of his teachers, he speaks gratefully he received as a prize a- copy of Steevens and Malone's ' Shakespeare,' which had in it a glossary, of course without the- references, and these it was his amusement to- hunt out and insert. Urging, by arguments that have now an old-fashioned sound, the ad- vantages of knowing and loving English poetry,, he makes here and there a remark which hints at an unexpected artlessness of mind, as when he says that " some poets like Keats and Campbell and Milton and Longfellow wrote nothing that one would like to miss," and goes on to say that it is a good plan to include in one's reading Cary's- ' Dante.' There is throughout this Introduction a gentle good-humour which contrasts oddly and pleasantly with the severity of some of the Replies and Notes reprinted in the bulk of the- volume. That severity we fancy nlost readers of ' N. & Q.' had come to accept, even to appre- ciate. In a world all too tolerant of futility and inaccuracy, it was something to have among us- a scholar who would repudiate what was wrong with sufficient vigour to make people careful about what came under his eye, even though it must be- admitted that he himself enjoyed the hazardous game of etymological guessing. However, his kindness to ' N. & Q.' was not a compound only of information and severity; our pages contain examples too of his wit and humour ; and we- may mention here his considerateness all too- rare, and with him a principle in writing so- plainly that his MS. could be read at a glance,, and the printer have no trouble or doubt about it.

How great, in the years subsequent to ' A Student's Pastime,' is the debt of ' N. & Q.' to-