Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/432

 354 NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 S. X. MAY 6, 1922. In Cornwall, the giant Tregeagle is said to be employed at Padstow in making trusses of sand and ropes of sand to bind them with, which each tide sweeps away. Clouston, in his ' Popular Tales and Fictions,' quotes the following story from the Talmud : " An Athenian was walking about the streets of Jerusalem, and see- ing a tailor on his shop-board busily at work, he picked up a broken mortar and facetiously asked him to put a patch upon it. " Willingly," replied the tailor, taking up a handful of sand and offering it to the witling, " most willingly, if you will first have the kindness to make me a few threads of this material." The story about the wizard Michael Scott, quoted by your correspondent from Sir Walter Scott, is, according to ' The Denham Tracts ' (Folk Lore Society) current in the Hexham district of Northumberland, where he is known as " Mitchell " Scott, and where the version is that he " beat the Devil and his myrmidons by the well-known device of employing them to spin ropes of sand, denying them even the aid of chaff to supply some degree of tenacity to the incohesive material." WM. SELF- WEEKS. Westwood, Clitheroe. Columella's words in the passage referred to show that he was making use of a Greek saying : " Eadem tarn exigua sunt, ut, quod aiunt Graeci, ex incomprehensibili parvitate harenae funis effici non possit." In an Oration of Aristides (Sam. Jebb's edition, vol. ii., p. 309) we have rb CK rijs ^d/z/xov o-xoiviov 7re<ovrs, and the proverb is given, with references, in Leutsch and Schneidewin's ' Paroemiographi Graeci,' vol. ii., p. 114. A. Otto, 'Die Sprichworter der Homer,' p. 160, quotes, besides Greek and Latin examples, the German " Seil aus Sand, wie halt das Band ? " and compares No. 112 of Grimm's ' Kinder und Hausmarchen,' where a peasant twists a rope of chaff. EDWARD BENSLY. HENRY HOWARTH (12 S. x. 228, 258). I find that there are many references to this famous counsel in my extracts from eighteenth- century newspapers. He is said to have belonged to Lincoln's Inn. He was one of the defenders of the unfortunate Dr. Dodd, and at the trial of Samuel Foote on an outrageous charge in December, 1776, he is said to have " opened the prose- cution with great delicacy." According to frhe Morning Post, May 13, 1783, he was drowned on Sunday, May 11, while he and Mr. Chippendale, " a near relation," were sailing together. This newspaper con- tradicts The Gentleman's Magazine, and says that he could not swim. HORACE BLEACKLEY. MARY SEYMOUR : LADY BUSHELL (12 S. x. 244, 313). Should the Seymour- Bushell-Johnson matches ever be proved, the evidence will probably be found in Kent, not in Leicestershire. The Johnsons (alias Anthony) were of Kent, and so, according to the Rev. Ed. Turner, in his article on Mares- field in the Sussex Archaeological Collections (vol. xiv., p. 166, &c.), was Sir William Bushell. John Johnson, or Anthony, of Thanet was " surveyor " of monasteries under Cromwell, Earl of Essex, and may therefore have been connected with the Seymour Protestant party and interests, which again might lead to a match between his grandson and Seymour's granddaughter. Of a Bushell family in Thanet some traces remained up to the end of the eighteenth century. No Sir William is, indeed, known to me, or. to be found in the Visitations, but that is negligible negative evidence. Mr. Turner, speaking of the Rev. Peter Johnson of Maresfield, who died at St. Lawrence, Thanet, in 1704, quotes one of his descendants then (1862) living and Fellow of the Royal Society as an additional authority for the Rev. Peter's descent from Silas Johnson and the daughter of Sir William Bushell of the Isle of Thanet by Mary Sey- mour. The Rev. Peter was born in 1629, and I make him son of Henry, grandson of John, and great-grandson of the John the brother of Silas, which would bring him into only the collateral line. Hasted, however, only gives Silas one wife, Sara Austin, and says nothing about a Bushell. Silas had, among his many brothers, an earlier Rev. Peter, vicar of Bobbing, in Kent, whose daughter, born 1578, married James Huberd of the same, and the name of the wife of this first Rev. Peter has not been ascertained. This Peter seems to have had some influence and to have found promotion in a small way. Was he the husband of Mary Seymour's daughter Bushell ? The conventional anony- mity of clergymen's wives under Elizabeth would aid the apparent design of sinking this offshoot of the quasi -royal house " without trace." There is a Cleve Court in Thanet which belonged to the Crispes, of which family John Johnson, brother to Silas and the Rev. Peter