Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 8.djvu/489

 ii s. vii. JUNE 21, 1913.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

481

LONDON, SATURDAY, JUNE 21, 1913.

CONTENTS.-No. 182.


 * NOTES : John Dunton's " Characters," 481 Derived

Senses of the Cardinal Points, 482 Some Irish Family Histories Catholic Emancipation and the Stake Kensington Gravel Pits, 483 " Rummage " Hesba Stretton Fane : Vane : Vaughan Lines under a Cruci- fix, 484 Sheffield Plate Admiral Kodney saved from Drowning Crabb Robinson on Hazlitt, 485 Derby Day, 1913 Genoa Cathedral, 486.

^QUERIES : Richard Parkes Bonington Marriage of an English Prisoner of War at Cambrai First Duke of Northumberland : Natural Issue, 486 Ann Pollard Chilston Gironny Queries from Green's 'Short History' "Jiffle" Hudson of Osmerston, 487 " Raising Feast " Private Schools Muchmore Family Martin Cawsley of Cambridge Colour-Printing : Super- imposing Bolton of London, c. 1550 Pay of a Cardinal-Jethro Tull's Pedi- gree, 488 Nottingham Banker's Seal Medal : Great Britain and Ireland Authors of Quotations Wanted General Ingoldsby Beckett " Hollo ! " 489.

REPLIES : Double Flowers in Japan, 490 Izaak Walton and Tomb-Scratching Curious Colophon Blake and his Friend Butts, 492 Biographical Information Wanted Boys in Petticoats and Fairies Scott's ' Woodstock ' : the Rota Club-Fermat's Last Theorem The Sanctity of Royalty, 493 Policemen on Point Duty Shakespeare and the Bible Smuggling Poems " Cloudsley Bush," 494 Wilderness Row, 495 Wreck of the Jane, Duchess of Gordon Author of Quotation Wanted, 496 Parlia- mentary Soldiers and Charles I. " Quo vadis?" British Ambassador in France, 1595 Button - Makers, 497 Cotton's 'Angler': its Motto John Noorthouck " -plesham," 498.


 * NOTES ON BOOKS : Ireland under the Commonwealth '

' Caravanning and Camping Out' 'The Entail.'

Booksellers' Catalogues. .Notices to Correspondents.

JOHN DUNTON'S "CHARACTERS."

A CORRESPONDENT recently said (ante, f>. 33) :

" However, when, in calmer mood, Dunton drew the characters of the most eminent men of his profession, he wrote upon Harris the paragraph given us by MR. ROLAND AUSTIN at [11 S. vi.] p. 515."

Ever since the publication in England in 1705 of his ' Life and Errors,' and ever since the publication in New England in .1867 of his * Letters from New England,' Dunton's " characters " of his contem- poraries have been quoted again and again. Even at the time of the publication of the ' Letters from New England,' it was known that Dunton had " conveyed " passages from previous writers ; but in spite of that the portraits have been accepted as genuine. I should like to call the attention of English
 * scholars to an exhaustive, interesting, and

entertaining paper in which it is conclu- sively shown that Dunton's portraits are worthless. This paper, written by Prof. Chester N. Greenough of Harvard Uni- versity, is printed in the Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, March, 1912, xiv. 213-57. Prof. Greenough says :

" It remains to consider the most interesting part of the ' Letters,' the portraits of people. It is more than a coincidence that in speaking of these portraits Dunton almost always employs the same word. He uses it on his title-page, he uses it in outlining the third letter (for our immediate purpose the most important of them all), and he often uses it in introducing or con- cluding his accounts of particular people. That word is ' character,' as employed in the following sentence : ' And thus, Header, I have given you the Character of another of my Female Friends in Boston.' The ' character,' in this sense of the word, was a well recognized, prolific, popular, and influential form in PJnglish literature of the seventeenth century."

Prof. Greenough then goes on to quote from Ralph Johnson's * The Scholars Guide ' (1665) a definition of the character and three rules for making one, and with the aid of the " deadly parallel " proves that Dunton's oft- quoted portraits are merely extracts from the " characters " of Samuel Butler, Earle, Flecknoe, Fuller, Bishop Hall, Sir Thomas Overbury, ' The Ladies Calling,' and similar sources. Inter- esting and instructive is Prof. Greenough's conclusion :

" Historically considered, Dunton's ' Letters from New England ' have suffered a good deal in the course of this examination. Indeed, an historian might almost say that they are not letters, that they are not from New England, and that they are not by John Dunton. But I wish to suggest, in conclusion, that the trouble is not that the book is a bad one,, but that it has been wrongly catalogued. If we take it off the American History shelves where it never belonged and put it with English Fiction, we shall find, I think, that precisely those portions of it which were before the most absurd and deceptive are now the most significant.

" Few phases of the transition in English literature from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century are more important or more difficult to trace than the beginnings of English prose fiction. These beginnings have to be sought in a great variety of documents, including fictitious voyages, histories, and letters, imaginary adventures of animals, allegories, visions, and many other devices, which, although they often contain fact, do not aim to be true. Another matter vital to the transition is the development from the abstract character to the novel of character. It is well known that Addison and Steele, in The Tatter and The Spectator, mark a half-way point in several phases of this transition. They used fictitious letters and diaries, and in particular they made great progress in modifying the old abstract character, which they felt to be stiff, vague, and repellantly didactic. Accordingly,