Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 9.djvu/45

 ii s. ix. JAN. 10, 1914.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

APHRA BERN'S COMEDIES (11 S. viii. 469). If ' The Feign d Curtizans ' appeared in 1679, while Robert Knox's ' Historical Relation ' was riot published until the year 1681, it hardly seems a matter of course that this was the work alluded to in the drama. Not having " boiinie Mrs. Behn " by me, I cannot judge whether the context requires that, the folio should be a book of travel. By itself the combination " Knox or Cartwright " certainly suggests the Scottish reformer and the English Puritan divine. EDWARD BENSLY.

[MR. L. R. M. STRACHAX thanked for reply to the same effect.]

Samplers and Tapestry Embroideries. By Marcus

B. Huish. (Longmans & Co.)

THIS is a second edition of a work which, it cannot be denied, possesses considerable attractiveness. It is depressing in that it witnesses to a steady decay of true feeling for decorative art and design in the nation at large. The women who set patterns for youthful fingers to work in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries seem to have lost the fine instinct which guided their grand- mothers and great-grandmothers in the seventeenth century and a decade or two succeeding it. Un- fortunately it is such compositions as theirs only inferior still that we find in the few samplers of the late nineteenth century, and in analogous attempts at decoration on the part of people who have not been specially trained in design.

The present edition is issued at a more popular price than the former one, and includes descriptions and illustrations of several American samplers.

The samplers are much more interesting even more valid as ' art than the tapestry em- broideries. They do not lend themselves easily to the production of a brilliant text ; but, on the other hand, they are excellent subjects for illustration, and the plates in this volume could hardly be over- praised. They are perfectly delightful. It may be noted that they include the quaint sampler, done by E. Philips in 1761, at the age of 7, which was adapted to form the drop-scene for ' Peter Pan.'

READERS of 'N. & Q.' will turn in the current Nineteenth Century with some special interest to the ' Recollections of the War of 1870 and the Commune,' which Miss Gertrude Tuckwell gives us from the literary remains of Sir Charles Dilke. They offer a series of minute, vivid pictures, some- what aside from the main course of events, and include several entertaining episodes as well as instructive and suggestive observations. Two other articles composed of, or dealing with, " originals," are Mr. Alexander Carlyle's ' Eight New Love Letters of Jane Welsh,' and Sir Ernest Clarke's * David Garrick and Junius.' The former conveys to us an important find in the matter of the literature connected with Carlyle. Mr. Stephen Gwynn's interesting paper on * The Irish Gentry ' is illustrated from the career of George Henry Moore, who died in 1870. Mr. Darrell Figgis in

' Some Recent Poetry ' lays his finger rather adroitly on certain of the weaknesses of modern poets. Mr. Cyril Emmet in ' The Teaching of the Historic Christ ' reprints with some amplifications a paper given at the recent Church Congress at Southampton. The remaining papers are con- cerned with the more acute political and social difficulties of the moment.

THE January Cornhill has much to recommend it. It begins with two unpublished poems of Browning's early youth, in a pleasant setting by Mr. Bertram Dobell. These even if we take them as mere echoes and imitations are indeed remark- able work for a boy of 14, and like Mr. Dobell we do not remember anything parallel to them done at so early an age. Miss W. M. Letts's 'Grand- Aunts' is another of her delicate and lively stories of people of a past generation, containing more anecdote than the last, but less perhaps of vitality ; she is dealing with characters she did not person- ally know so well. Bishop Frodsham's 'The Men hemmed in by the Spears ' is one of the most successful of his papers that we have seen. By the way, is not " as cold as charity " a quaint idiom- to fall from the pen of a Bishop? Mr. C. A. Vince's 'Jack and Jill : a Theme with Variations,' tells us that well-known tale in the manner of twelve well-known writers. It is curious that the least successful should be the imitation of Scott's verse apparently so easy to parody. To our thinking the best are the Goldsmith, Tennyson, William Morris, and Max Muller. Sir Henry Lucy's ' Sixty Years in the Wilderness : Nearing Jordan,' furnish some twenty pages of particularly good reading. Bishop Welldon has a short article commemorative of Miss Gaskell, the last surviving daughter of Mrs. Gaskell. We liked much General Sir Neville Lyttelton's account of W T adsworth, one of the finest of the leaders in the struggle between the Northern and Southern States of America too little known until the recent publi- cation of his biography by Mr. H. G. Pearson.. Judge Parry is at his whimsical and humorous best in 'The Law of the Lost Golf Ball.' In this number begins a serial by Mr. Horace Vachell entitled 'Spragge's Canyon.'

THE two main literary papers in the January Fortnightly are ' Goethe in Rome,' by the Master of University College, Oxford, and 'William Haz- litt, Romantic and Amorist,' by Mr. Walter Sichel. Both are good : both may well afford pleasure and' instruction to the general reader, and matter to be stored up and dwelt upon to the students of Goethe and Hazlitt respectively. There is a lively paper entitled ' The Romance of the Scarlet Woman,' which takes us back to the vagaries of "No Popery" in the mid-nineteenth century vagaries which, as psychological phenomena, are certainly extremely curious as well as entertaining. Mr. Henry Baerlein has an illuminating article on ' The State of Alsace and Lorraine,' which, apart from political significances, illustrates, in a remark- able way, the obstinate persistence of even the narrower racial distinctions and their accompany- ing self-consciousness. Two characters whose r61e in Eastern Europe must needs fix the eyes of the world upon them, are described with insight and the command of information which we should ex- pect by Mr. Spencer Campbell in ' Ferdinand, Tsar of the! Bulgarians,' and by Miss Edith Sellers in 'The Future Emperor-King's Political Programme.'