Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/466

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

[12 S. I. JUNE 3, 1916.

disturbing sense of unreality, even when, as recently at His Majesty's, they were uttered by A fine, deep voice. In ' Hamlet ' the Ghost starts the whole action ; but the play would have been i;he same if Horatio had been a spectator of the murder and told Hamlet of it. Yet we should have lost an apparition most subtly conceived and introduced, as Mr. Whitmore shows. The ^extreme cold is an effective touch which was used by Mrs. Oliphant in ' A Beleaguered City ' to make iier ghosts more impressive. In ' Macbeth ' without the witches the chief character would be a mere common murderer for gain, and no doubt Shakespeare was influenced by the views of King James. Sources and topical points Mr. Whitmore occasionally neglects. The vision of Caesar in ' Julius Caesar ' is very largely from Plutarch, and so not " a wholly novel handling of the revenge- ghost"; while in 'The Libertine' of Shadwell ^Coleridge detected a copy of the old Spanish play ' Atheista Fulminate,' which was the first really dramatic treatment of the ' Don Juan ' legend. The summary of English influences and traditions is well done, the importance of ' Locrine ' and * The
 * Spanish Tragedy ' being duly recognized ; and

we find under ' The Modern Revival ' just ap- preciations of the skill of Maeterlinck and Mr. W. B. Yeats. In ' Shanwalla,' seen last year in London, Lady Gregory introduces a ghost which
 * is seen by one person only, but has an import-

ant part in the action. These Irish plays show, indeed, a notable renaissance in the supernatural .after the vapid follies of ' The Castle Spectre.'

At present we have little that can be called serious drama on our stage, and, as Mr. Whitmore truly remarks, "we prefer the surfaces of things -to their depths." On the other hand, the super- natural has of late years attracted an immense amount of attention from serious thinkers, and -we note that it has a vogue on the most popular stage of to-day the dramas of the kinematograph. Here mechanical means can produce the most satisfying ghosts so far as presentation is con- cerned. But in recent plays we have seen conscience is pictured not so often by an isolated supernatural figure recalling the sense of crime to the guilty man as by a momentary repetition of "the actual scene in which, some time before, he performed the crime, or began to take the wrong road towards it. In either case the effect is business-like as well as decorative, and represents, in fact, what we started with as a basic idea the embodiment of Nemesis or conscience, as the reader prefers to put it.

Bibliographical List of Books, Pamphlets, and Articles connected with Barnsley and the Imme- diate District. Compiled by Frank J. Taylor. (Barnsley, Public Library Committee.) 'COMPILED as a handbook to the exhibition of local literature which was held to celebrate the com- pletion of twenty-five years' work on the part of -the Public Library, this brochure certainly deserves a longer than ephemeral existence. It ^comprises two lists, the one consisti ng of classified alphabets of authors and publications, the other being an alphabet of Barnsley printers, whose several works are arranged in chronological order, the earliest date thus recorded being 1809, the year in which C. Greaves printed ' Sermons on Different Subjects,' by S. Horsfall.

The catalogue is a pretty f ull one as it stands, showing a good body of mat ter under each class,

and we are told that it does not claim to be com- plete, owing to the short time in which it had to be put together. Some of the entries do not carry on their face the nature of their connexion with Barnsley, and it might be a good plan, when an extended edition is published, to annotate them as a few have already been annotated. Collectors of local histories will, no doubt, make a note of this bibliography.

Records of Flixton. By A. A. Toms, Vicar of the Parish. (London and Bungay, Richard Clay, 2*. Qd )

THIS is a careful compilation chronologically arranged of the most interesting facts connected with Flixton, near Bungay. in Suffolk. Flixton has legendary associations with Boadicea. and, as the name indicates, with St. Felix, and, moreover, furnished the site for a rude wooden church erected about 700. The principal centres of its later history were the Augustiniari nunnery, known as Flixton Priory (disestablished and appropriated by Wolsey), and Flixton Hall, built in the early seventeenth century by John Tasburgh, to whose family them- selves Roman Catholics the priory lands had been granted in 1547. Mr. Toms has collected a number of amusing personal details, as well as setting out the main facts connected with the place. A few good illustrations are provided : one is a photograph of the Capt. Boycott of etymological fame, who, between 1887-97, was the agent of the Flixton estate, belonging now to the Adair family.

Scandinavian Names in Norfolk : Hundred Courts and Mote Hills in Norfolk. By Walter Rye. (Norwich, Roberts.)

THIS brochure is to be taken in connexion with the writer's 'Popular History of Norfolk,' in which is set out the theory that there was a Scandi- navian settlement in Norfolk before the arrival of the Romans. The first part consists of a list of some twenty names of Norfolk villages, extended by cognate place-names derived from books and records, and having added a list of Norfolk place- names compared with names still in use in Den- mark. The second part consists of a list of the Norfolk Hundred Courts, annotated with remarks largely conjectural as to the sites where these were held.

The Athenceum now appearing monthly, arrange- ments have been made whereby advertisements of posts vacant and wanted, which it is desired to publish weeklv, may appear in the intervening weeks in ' N. & Q.'

In

WE cannot undertake to answer queries privately, nor can we advise correspondents as to the value of old books and other objects or as to the means of disposing of them.

CORRESPONDENTS who send letters to be forwarded to other contributors should put on the top left- hand corner of their envelopes the number of the page of * N. & Q.' to which their letters refer, so that the contributor may be readily identified.

MR. E. C. MOORE. Anticipated ante, p. 420. H. K. ST. J. S. Forwarded.