Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/405

12 S. I. MAY 13, 1916.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

399 Life, I was so often, I trust unjustly, charged with Delay, my Consolation was 'Sat Cito si sat bene.' This took place in 1766." G. E. P. A.

According to other quotations in the 'N.E.D.,' a fly meant a wagon or country cart in 1708, and a public passenger vehicle later on. Thus, e.g., Burke mentions the Grantham fly in 1774, Sir Walter Scott the Hawes fly in 1816; and I have the copy of a public document, dated 1764, before me in which "a pocket-book left behind by a passenger in the Birmingham fly" plays an important part.

(v. sub 'Memory at the Moment of Death,' 12 S. i. 49, 178, 234).—There would seem to be no doubt that freezing to death must be a comparatively painless death. I froze my toes some years ago, while tobogganing, and was unaware of it until I took off my shoe and walked across the room, when the unusual noise on the boards attracted my attention.

Sheepherders in this country are frequently frozen to death in the winter storms. Recently I heard of one who had become unconscious, and whose faithful dog wandered off until he met with another sheep outfit, and, by his strange behaviour, led some of the men back to his master. The poor fellow recovered consciousness, and lived long enough to tell them that it had seemed to him as if he were in some town where there were numbers of restaurants, with all kinds of good food, but that in some unaccountable way he could never actually get anything to eat. In his story there was every indication of all absence of pain. The thawing out hurts fearfully.

ADJECTIVES FROM FRENCH PLACE-NAMES (11 S. ix. 21, 94, 171, 358; xi. 116). In addition to those given may be noted Stavicois from Estavayer.

D. L. GALBREATH.

JOHN LEWIS, DEAN OF OSSORY, 1717-83 (11 S. x. 428). His first wife, Catherine, daughter of Rev. Geo. Villiers, died April 4, 1756. His second wife was Charlotte, daughter of Admiral Cotterell, who survived him. By his first wife he had two sons and one daughter, and by his second wife one son and two daughters. The eldest sur- viving son, Villiers-William, assumed the surname of Villier s on the death of his uncle, Rev. Geo. Villiers (who claimed to be Viscount Purbeck), June 24, 1774 ; he married in 1780 Matilda, daughter of Lord St. John. G. R. B.

Jio&s 0n

Virgil's *' Gathering of the Clans," being Observa- tions on ' j&neid? vii. 601-817. By W. Warde Fowler. (Oxford, Black well, 3s. 6d. net.) IN that book on Mysticism by which, five or six years ago, Miss Evelyn Underbill first captured her circle of readers, there is a passage designed, we believe, to elucidate meditation about the effect of gazing, and gazing immovably, upon some object say a flower till, isolated from the rest of crea- tion, it expands as it were to the horizon, opens up to the sight undreamed-of depths, and becomes invested with all sorts of significance, strangeness, and charm. No doubt the enhancement is partly subjective, an effect, quasi-hypnotic, of his own concentration upon the observer ; but there seems no reason to doubt that it also arises from a really better because more detailed and more prolonged. perception, and a really fuller comprehension of the object itself. Something like this is not per- haps exactly novel as a method of appreciation, especially where it is a question of characterizing the limited output of a minor author ; but we do not remember often detecting it employed upon a selection from the text of a classic, and seldom any- where in a more delightful example than that afforded by this book.

Isolating from the context of the ' JEneid ' Virgil's description of the Italian princes and their array, who f gathered together to oppose the Trojans, Mr. Warde Fowler has gazed so steadily upon every detai I of these strong and delicate pictures, and searched' so deep into their meaning, that the figures of Mezentius and Lausus, of Virbius and Turnus and Camilla, and all the rest of the pageant have at length revealed themselves, and the intention of their author, to him in a stateliness and richness, and, above all, in a living vigour, such as, we think, not many readers of the ' ^Eneid ' have hitherto found in them. As he justly says, scholars will' find that he has not wasted space by setting down what can be found in well-known commentaries.

There is little textual criticism, but Mr. Warde Fowler has, in our opinion, made good one rather important point, and thereby demolished the rather absurd deductions as to Virgil's social and political opinions which have been made from the line

Pila manu saevosque gerunt in bella dolones in its present position. He proposes to transfer this, with the five lines immediately following it, from the description of Aventinus to that of Ufens, where " gerunt," which without a subject is~ supposed to illustrate Virgil's contempt of the common folk, would then have a nominative easily understood from "armati" two lines above. We think the three or four reasons brought forward by Mr. Fowler sufficient to settle the matter.

The introductory pages furnish a delightful inter- pretation of Virgil's difficulties, and his design in thus setting forth the glory of the tribes and the leaders of Italy, together with an illuminating comparison between this " catalogue" and the- catalogues of Homer and of Milton. It is curious that a theme which, in the oldest of the three poets, makes the dullest reading of the whole general level of interest of the whole, should, in the latest of these three great epics, have inspired some of the most glorious and pealing verses that their author ever penned.
 * Iliad,' and in the second is lifted fully to the