Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 8.djvu/65

 ii s. vii. JAN. is, 1913] NOTES AND QUERIES.

arm-chair still standing in the chimney corner. Then he went down to the Durance, where in the village inn he was served by a bright, talkative old peasantwoman who had passed all her days on the banks of the great Alpine torrent. He asked her if she had ever known any elders who had seen Napoleon. " Napoleon," she replied in her broad Provencal accent, " connais-pas ce nom-la. Peut-etre bien c'est un voyageur de commerce."

In the brief sketch of the Institute of France Mr. Bodley says, in reference to Zola, that HaleVy told him that " it was not the coarse naturalism of Zola which prevented his election, but the feeling that, as he had used his great talent to slander France, it was not for the most autho- ritative body in the land to seal with its sanction his calumnies."

Mr. Bodley closes with words of optimism : " There is no reason for bemoaning the new age, even though it is making the world unlovely according to the noble standards handed down from antiquity. There never was such a time in the history of mankind when the whole of its future de. e tiny was. as it is now, in the hands of the younger generation. The coming race, born into a society in which all the conditions of life are changing, will differ from all past generations in having no need to look to the wisdom of its forefathers to guide it in directing the course of the world."

There is a fine portrait of Manning towards the close of his life, from the painting done for Mr. Bodley by Mr. A. D. May. It is just as we remember him when we heard him preach in the Pro-Cathedral at Kensington. Never to be for- gotten is the light that would illumine his face on Easter morning as he told, in his beautiful, simple language, the story of the Resurrection, or on a Christmas Day, when his subject would be the birth of the Prince of Peace.

The Lost Language of Symbolism. By Harold Bay ley. 2 vols. (Williams & Norgate.)

WE took up these two handsome volumes with pleasurable anticipations. They have all the outward seeming of an important work to which the publishers have been generous in the matter of paper, type, and illustrations. For the last, 1,418 in number, consisting of paper water- marks and printers' symbols, the author has laid M. Briquet's ' Les Filigranes ' under contribu- tion. The book is ostensibly designed to expound their hidden meaning, but the great bulk of it really consists of etymological speculations which it is difficult to characterize. If we say that they out-herod the wildest conjectures of Jacob Bryant, Godfrey Higgins, G. 8. Faber, A. W. Inman, and Morgan Kavanagh, we under- state the case. Mr. Bayley ingenuously confesses that some of his philological conclusions " were formulated almost against his common-sense " (i. 15) ; we can well believe it. That we may dp him no injustice we will let him speak for himself by presenting some average specimens of his researches.

Mr. Bayley believes that he has discovered certain hypothetical root-words which are common to all languages. If they only possess a very slight superficial resemblance when transliterated into English, they may, quite apart from their meaning, be regarded as identical. For example,

" the words Home and Heim both mean Om, the- sun, or Omma, the eye " (i. 314). One of these- key-words to the lost language of symbolism ia ak, " which must have meant great or mighty." Let us see by what proofs Mr. Bayley establishes its existence. It may be traced in Lat. aquila and Span, aguila, for " the core of both these words is evidently Huhi, an Egyptian term for God the Father, and both thus read ak Huhi la, ' the Great Father Everlasting ' " (i. 309). Per-ak, the Great Fire, is seen, not only in the East Indian Perak, but in the Greek Paraclete, the Comforter, which is radically per ak el, " the Fire of the Great God " ; and it " may well have been the origin of our adjective perky, meaning sprightly and full of fire " (i. 311). " The French for lightning, eclair, is phonetically ak dare, the 'great shine'" (i. 295); and " Chanticler is apparently compounded of chant and Eclair the singer of the lightning " (ii. 18). Cross stands for ak ur os, the light of the Great Fire (ii. 121) ; and why should it not, since caress is ac Eros, or great love (ii. 252) ; Cube, ac ube, Great Orb (ii. 181); apex is ap ekse, "great fiery eye "; and acme, ack ome, Great Sun (ii. 169) ? while im Occident we may recognize ok se den, the " re- splendent den of Okse the Mighty Fire " (ii. 45), and " ichneumon may be resolved into ik en Hu mon, the ' Great One, the solitary Hu ' ' (ii. 113). The same ubiquitous root ak is seen in globe, which " must originally have beenaflf eZ obe, the ' Great Orb of God ' " (i. 302) ; and in " the Anglo-Saxon word for bright, white, which was blqc, evidently Belac, the Great Bel" (i. 296), to say nothing of " a/cclamation or great clamour " (i. 298). Moreover, "Hawk is almost identical' with Ork, the Gaelic for ' whale,' the Great fish " (i. 310).

We need not quote more, but if the reader" has an appetite for these ingenious pseudologies, which he will not find in Skeat and Murray, he will learn that " the word emperor, or empereur, is, as the French pronounce it, om per ur, " Sun, Father, Fire " (i. 336) ; pigeon is pi ja on, "the Father of the Everlasting One " (i. 307) ; " the Anglo-Saxon law is el ate, ' Lord Aw'" (i. 348);. and that " Pa ur, the Father of Light, is the origin, of power" (ibid.). "The English word labour;. pronounced liber in London dialect, may be equated with Liber, the giver of all goods " (ii. 116).

Mr. Bayley reminds us that "Solon knew nothing of the findings of modern Philology " (ii. 355), for which he is much to be commiserated. On the other hand, "it is curious that Ety- mology, unable to account for the curiously fluctuating and seemingly whimsical variations of speech, is now perplexedly falling back upon old and discarded ideas." We acquit Mr. Bayley of any such error.

The Story of Architecture in Oxford Stone. By E. A. Greening Lamborn. (Oxford, University Press. )

IP we were asked for a first book to put into the- hands of an intelligent beginner in the study of architecture, out of all the mass of books on the- subject now offered, we believe we should recom- mend this. It is not without faults, but its merits largely outweigh these. Built up some- what in the way of an arch upon its centring, it expresses and, one may say, imparts a sense for construction unusual in a handbook,.