Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 9.djvu/433

 ii s. ix. MAY so, i9i4.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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liowever, must refer to some Nicaea, and the best -known, place of that name, which gives us the " Nicene Creed," is in Bithynia. " Ni- cean," therefore, at present seems to me de- cisive in favour of a reference to Catullus, though some of Poe's details are hazy. Catullus returned, " tired with foreign travel," to his beloved Sirmio (Poem 31) from Bithynia, and " the rich plain of burning Nicsea," which he was anxious to leave. Poem 46 has

Linquantur Phrygii, Catulle, campi

Nicsepeque ager uber sestuosse.

One would gather that Catullus travelled in his own " phaselus " (Poem 4), built in the .same regions.

References to Catullus are not common,
 * since that author was generally neglected in

the early part of the nineteenth century ; but Poe was clearly a forward boy in know- ledge, and his schoolmaster at Stoke New- ington had the reputation of being a good scholar. ' Al Aaraaf,' one of Poe's earliest poems, contains a reference to Sappho, the " Idea of Beauty " which " lit on hills Achaian," and a " Therasean reign," which in. the poet's own notes is explained as a reference to Seneca. V. KENDALL.

LONDON IMPROVEMENTS. There has been a considerable amount of publicity given to what claims to be a novel scheme for the provision of a central railway station to deal -with goods traffic for and from London, find most conveniently for goods in transit ^across London.

This is a revival of the well -considered .suggestion put forward by Charles Pearson in 1851 to provide a central station in Farringdon Street for very much the same purpose. Another proposal by a distin- guished London antiquary to provide treaded footpaths on St. Paul's Bridge also lacks novelty.

Some few years ago a suggestion was made that Charing Cross Station should be rebuilt on the south side, arid Hungerford Bridge replaced by a handsome arcaded bridge with a superimposed footway or promenade bordered with shops. I then called attention in these pages to an almost identical sug- gestion that had been discussed in the illus- trated papers c. 1845.

ALECK ABRAHAMS.

MACAULAY MISQUOTED. A notable in- stance of a misquotation and misapplication of a famous passage of Macaulay's appeared recently in The Manchester Guardian. It occurred in an otherwise informing article by Mr. Neil Munro headed ' Scotland and

the Campbells,' which was apparently an " In Memoriam " to the late Duke of Argyll, and ran thus :

" They [the Campbells] were Irish to start with a Hibernian colony of O'Duins, children of Diarmaid O'Duin, and even in the earliest periods of authentic Scottish history they were a tribe of no little potency, though we need not too literally accept the grandiose assurance of Macaulay, whose family owed much to the patronage of Argyll, that they were ' great and respected before the Saxon had set foot in Britain, before the Frank had crossed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch,and when idols were still worshipped in the temples of Mecca.' "

Every schoolboy should know that, the paragraph is from Macaulay's essay on Ranke's ' History of the Popes,' and is part of a florid outburst on the antiquity and durability of the Roman Church. It is not even used in a (so-called) sensus accommo- datitius which would be justifiable, and for which precedents could be adduced but is serenely transcribed as a " grandiose assur- ance " of Macaulay on the remote origins of a Scottish clan! "Verify quotations" still holds good as an indispensable maxim. J. B. McGovERN.

St. Stephen's Rectory, C.-on-M., Manchester.

ENGLISH-SPEAKING CARDINALS. The crea- tion of another English Cardinal, Abbot Gasquet, will increase the number of English- speaking Cardinals to eight. According to the date of their creation, they rank as follows :

James Gibbons, Abp. of Baltimore, 1886.

Michael Logue, Abp. of Armagh, 1893.

Raphael Merry Del Val, Secretary of State to His Holiness, 1903.

John Farley, Abp. of New York, 1911.

Francis Bourne, Abp. of Westminster, 1911.

William O'Connell, Abp. of Boston, 1911.

Louis Nazaire Begin, Abp. of Quebec, 1914.

Francis Aidan Gasquet, Abbot, President ot the English Benedictine Congregation, 1914.

Never before, in the history of the Sacred College, have there been so many English- speaking Ca-rdinals.

FREDERICK T. HIBGAME.

23, Unthank Road, Norwich.

LANCASHIRE PROVERB. " What comes over the devil's back goes under his belly." The meaning is : Dishonesty will never prosper the^ defrauder. Aged Lancashire people frequently say this. In ' The Pirate,' chap, xxxi., Cleveland saj r s to Bunce :

" You shall not prevail on me to go farther in the Devil's road with you ; for you know yourself that what is got over "his back is spent you wot how." The meaning may be the same. M.A.