Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/221

 12 S. X. MAR. 4,1922.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 179 hint that the Cambridge registers might in their turn be published. It would be difficult to exaggerate our many- sided indebtedness to Foster and to Colonel Chester before him, but it must be conceded that the compilers of the Cambridge Register have both encountered greater difficulties and achieved more. The ' Alumni Oxonienses ' go back but to 1500 ; the first ' Alumni Canta- brigienses ' date from 1261. Yet again, Foster had the Oxford matriculation records in a com- plete transcript to form his basis : the Cambridge matriculation records from their inception in 1544 had not been so prepared. Moreover, for the earlier years they are but scanty and the business of supplementing them brought a new complication to light. Students were found duly entered at a College who had never matricu- lated. It became clear that the matriculation records were far from representing the whole of the men who had passed through the university ; and further, that the men unrecorded in them tended to be specially youths of some social or political importance. Hence it was seen to be necessary to search the Admission Registers of all the Colleges, and no fewer than 3,000 addi- tional names were thereby obtained. It must be conceded that this suggests the desirability of making similar investigations at Oxford. The name of Oliver CromweU, as the Preface points out, is the monumental instance to this purpose. He appears on the Register of Sidney and resided for a year, but neither matriculated nor graduated. A most interesting section of the Preface is that describing the University Records. The dislike of writing things up seems ineradicable not to be overcome save by compulsion. The Registrary for 1590-1601 was, in that respect, a person of such negligence that he recorded no matriculations at all. This would not be possible at the present day, but was easy enough according to the old system, by which the boys' names, with other requisite particulars, were sent in to the Registrary by prelectores College officers in charge of the youth for him to copy into his book. These prelectors' lists have been kept, and recourse has been had to them to supplement and correct the errors and omissions of the official scribe ; and it is interesting to observe that these exemplify the not uncommon inverse proportion between the importance of a document and its legibility. The Grace Books form a continuous series from 1454 to the present day ; and in the Ordo Senioritatis Cambridge possesses a nearly unique " Honours list." A third list, that of the Supplicats, completes the records of Degrees. The Grace Books go furthest back ; for about two centuries of university history anterior to these search has to be made elsewhere. Four of the Colleges have published their records. The best of them is that of Gonville and Caius, but Trinity possesses, in the names of students of King's Hall, the earliest continuous list of scholars in existence. These " King's Scholars " were assisted by payments from the Exchequer, and the list has been extracted from the records of the Exchequer. Published or unpublished, all the College records have been worked through, but even so finality is not to be reached. Up to about the middle of the sixteenth century there abounded at Cambridge hostels or boarding-houses which were as populous as the Colleges, and frequented, it would appear, by the youths of higher social position. So far as is now known none of their books has been preserved, and it seems improbable that any of the lists of names belonging to them will now be recovered. For the most interesting names those of the earnest times, search had to be made in many quarters. Episcopal Registers naturally yielded a good deal : and the compilers point to one class of information contained in these which is of peculiar interest the occasional leave of absence from his parish granted by a bishop to a clerk to enable him to study for a certain length of time at a university. College Account- books ; Patent and Close Rolls, Papal Letters and other public records, as well as lists of ordinations and institutions to livings will present themselves to most readers' minds as sources to be investigated, and a consideration of the labour thereby involved will occur as a matter of course. It is greatly to be regretted that the compilers found their work obstructed in some quarters. It seems extraordinary that so heavy a fee as six shillings and eightpence an hour should be charged for examination of an Episcopal registry when the research was for a purely historical purpose. To turn from the Preface to the list itself this is arranged substantially on the plan of the spelling of well-known names being ignored in the alphabet. The biographical notices fre- quently contain points of curious interest. Those who make a study of names will discover instances worth noting while the systematic genealogist needs no recommendation to send him to a work for which he has been waiting. Those who possess the * D.N.B.' might usefully annotate one or two biographies from this list that of Walter Balcanqual, for example, which is astonishingly incorrect, or that of Henry BiUingsley. Among the names included in Part I. are those of more than a hundred Cambridge students who emigrated to New England before 1650, biographies of whom have been supplied by Mr. J. Gardner Bartlett of Boston, Mass. The names contained in this first volume number some twenty thousand. Measure for Measure. (Cambridge University Press. 7s. net.) WE have here before us the fourth volume of that " New Shakespeare " which has already established itself as an authoritative interpretaton of the Plays. There is none among these like ' Measure for Measure ' for tantalizing an editor and pricking his ingenuity ; and none which more acutely vexes a lover of the poet by its incongruities and its steep descents from the height of beauty to depths of squalid futility. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Introduction first gives us Whetstone's sketch of the Italian story upon which the plot is founded, and then proceeds to search for the flaw whereby the play as. a whole must be acknowledged to miss fire. He discusses first its licentiousness, and since it has come to be regarded as the locus classicus for this quality in Shakespearian drama he takes occasion by it to deliver his main opinion on the subject as a whole. These sections,
 * Alumni Oxonienses,' minor alterations in the