Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 9.djvu/473

 n s. ix. JUNE is, 1914.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

467

-J'&eve mes regards, votre esprit me visite ; La terre alors chancelle et le soleil he"site. Vos anges sont jaloux et rn'admirent entre eux. Et cependant, Seigneur, je ne suis pas heureux.

O that M. Arouet had lived fifty years later, or de Vigny fifty years earlier ! He "would have turned de Vigny inside out, amid inextinguishable laughter. He would also have given a sly stroke or two to Moses, over the back of his eulogist. Not even the 41 verge d'airain " which de Vigny attributes to him would have saved him.

"What!" Voltaire might have said. 4< Here is another miracle. Moses possessed a rod made of a metal the very name of which was taken from Brundusium, a town not built until he had been dead for more than two thousand years." After this, the spectacle of " six cent mille Hebreux, courbes dans la poussiere," yet singing with one voice, is a trifle.

And now I hope no one will chastise me too severely for rny theory. An English writer now and then flounders into the bathos through mere stupidity. When Satan Mont- gomery says that

The soul, aspiring, seeks its source to mount,

As streams meander level with their fount,

one expects an occasional bathos, and scarcely notices it. The pilgrim simply blunders into the Slough of Despond. It is far other- wise with the Frenchman. He ascends like Icarus, and becomes super-exalted. Then down he comes, and his down-coming is tremendous. He neglects to consider that fatal step which intervenes between the sublime and the ridiculous. I do not mean to affirm that no English writer ever reaches a state of super-exaltation, or that no French writer ever treads the earth. Far from it.

I will only add that a collection of really good examples of the bathos is much to be desired ; and where better than in these columns ? RICHARD H. THORNTON.

COWES : ORIGIN OF THE NAME. (See

II S. i. 88, 155, 508 ; vi. 285.) At the last reference Y. T. writes :

" The history of the little town only began in his [Henry VIII.'s] reign. Before a single house anchorage now called Cowes Roads bore the name
 * was built oil those lonely wooded shores, the

of 'The Cowe.' The Calendars of State

Papers tell us that in 1512 the King's ships were at anchor ' at ye Cowe. betwixt ye Isle of Wight and England.' "

In The Isle of Wight County Press a writer (possibly the same) gives the year 1509 a? the date when the name of " Ye Cowe " first appears in the State Papers as a rendezvous for the King's ships. We read

of " Est Cowe " in the year 1539, and of the " West Cowe " in 1541. The abbreviated forms of " the Kowes " and " the Cowes " crept slowly into use, so that after 1553 we hear no more of either " Cowe."

Dr. Paul Studer, in the recently issued volume entitled ' The Port Book of South- ampton, 1427-1430 ' (Southampton Record Soc. Publ.) in his Historical Introduction, p. xi, writes :

" At great expense to the town, Thomas Abrygen has to be sent with a body of armed men to bring these foreign gentlemen [the patroni of the Genoese and Venetian carracks] to their senses, and to induce them to pay the anchorage money, which by ancient right the Mayor and Commonalty of Hampton are empowered to levy on all ships casting anchor within the precincts of the harbour, from Langstone in the east to Hurst in the west."

On pp. 118-19 the translation of this particular entry is given :

" On the 26th day of March [1430], I [the water bailiff], pay Thomas Abrygen to go io Coices to fetch the anchorage-money of Karole Italien."

The ensuing paragraph reads :

" On the 18th day of September I pay Thomas Abrygen for his expenses to go to Cowes to fetch the anchorage-money of Galyot Pinel."

From the foregoing it would seem the name " Cowes " was in use more than a century earlier than has been supposed hitherto. JOHN L. WHITEHEAD.

ROBERT BARON AND SHAKESPEARE. I was surprised to see that, though the new edition of ' The Shakspere Allusion-Book ' (Munro, 1909) referred to Robert Baron's ' Pocula Castalia,' 1650, it ignored his ' Cyprian Academy,' 1647 ; on p. 69 of Book III. occurs the following obvious imitation of a famous passage in ' Richard III.' :

For Monuments we've hung up brused armes, To pleasuers we've converted stern alarms And dreadfull marches to delightfull greetings, And harnest squadrons into merry meetings. Grim Visag'd war hath smooth d his brow, in

stead

Of mounting of a fiery barbed steed. To fright pale foes, now all in a qualme He capes [sic] in a Ladyes Amphithalme. Bends all his nerves, and every meanes he '1 prove To the lascivious pleasing of his love.

I have given only a rapid glance at this production of Baron, and have not now time to examine it more fully, but it is quite likely that it contains other thefts, and the book should be carefully read from this point of view by some one. Baron steals from Milton, as is well known. Sidney's influence seems to dominate the prose (cf. the opening paragraphs of Book I.). I have