Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/515

 12 S. X.JuNES, 1022.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 421 LONDON, JUNE 3, 1922. (then Mrs. Broadbent) sent it to Puttick and Simpson's in 1861, when it was purchased by OONTENTS.-NO. 216., Miss Burdett-Coutts for about *360. The possessional pedigree of this famous NOTES :-Eowland Stephenson. M.P. Banker and Bankrupt. chair ig F worth a ^ N> & Q/ for its 421 Marat in England. 422 Robert Hemck s Grave,. v xi_ 11 e - 426^Tottings on some Early Editions of the Bible in Latin. Own mterest ; but the allusion to One of its 427 "The Pickwick Papers" : Martin Equilinear Squares, Owners Rowland Stephenson, the notorious 428 Eighteenth-century Taverns: Printing House Square ' absconding banker and bankrupt arouses Cat Comfort Apprentices to and from Overseas. 429. I a special interest for myself, and suggests QUERIES :- " Chinese " -An Asiatic Orpheus Eduardo G. Gordon. 429 Gordon in Sculpture Byron and the Royal Society Hazlitt as a Portrait-painter Bull of West Jersey Rhyming History of Rome Palindrome on a Sundial Yates Subscriptions for Polish Dissidents. 430 The Pawnbroker's Sign American Civil War Languages of Eastern Europe Stone Sign, Corner of Warwick Lane and Newgate Street " Regent " = Leg-rest J. G. Butcher- Blair Brade London Clockmakers Superstitions con- cerning Salt Tailless Cats Heredity National Foods. 431 Tokeley Gully Author of Phrase wanted Authors of Quotations wanted. 432. REPLIES : Nicholas Hilliard Old and New Style Re- versing the Union Jack, 432 Prime Minister, 433 Wroth Family Burial of Lord Zouche. 434' The King, the Bishop, and the Shepherd ' Armstrong Sir John Bourne. 435 Salad The Countess Guiccioli's 'Recollections of Lord Byron ' Hubert de Rie and Fulbert of Dover The Montfort Families Oldest Halfpenny Evening Newspaper, 436 Nineteenth-century Writers on Sport Barrel Organs in Churches 'William Cullen Dickins's Literary Allusions The One-legged Lord Mayor, 437 Identification of Arms Hudson Pedigree Martin Authors wanted, 438. NOTES ON BOOKS : ' English Tracts, Pamphlets and Printed Sheets ' ' The Owl and the Nightingale ' ' A Contribution to an Essex Dialect Dictionary ' ' Bicentenary Gloucester Journal ' ' English Prose.' Notices to Correspondents. ROWLAND STEPHENSON, M.P., BANKER AND BANKRUPT. AT the recent seven days' sale at Christie's of the late Baroness Burdett-Coutts's collec- tion of pictures and works of art, as is recorded in The Times Literary Supplement of May 18, the Garrick-Hogarth-Sliakcspciire chair, designed by Hogarth, of mahogany, the centre with a profile portrait of Shakespeare carved out of a piece of Shakespeare's mulberry-tree, realized 2,000 guineas. It was presented to Garrick as President of the Shakespeare Society of the day, and after Mrs. Garrick's death it was sold (for 145 guineas) with other Shakespeare relics at Garrick's villa at Hampton. It was bought by Rowland Stephenson, the banker M.P. for Leo- minster, treasurer of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, &c., who absconded with a large sum of money in 1828, producing one of the great commercial sensations of the time. In 1829 the chair a question I have long Wished to submit. A Rowland Stephenson was returned to the House of Commons in November, 1786, for Carlisle on petition, after*a contest in which he had been defeated by Edward Knubley by 553 votes to 405. If that be the Rowland Stephenson under notice, he apparently did not again seek Parliamentary honours after the dissolution of 1790 for thirty-six years, being, on June 14, 1826, returned at the General Election but again on petition for Leominster as " Rowland Stephenson, Esq., of Marshalls, County Essex." But and it is not the least singular episode in a very curious career this was only one of two contests in which Stephenson was a candidate at that dissolution, the other being at Newport, Cornwall. It adds to the singularity that not only, as far as I am aware, has this second candidature not been mentioned in any biographical account, but that, while in the Herefordshire constituency he stood as a Tory, in the Cornish one he masqueraded as a Whig. In my * Launceston, Past and Present,' published in 1885, I told in some detail the story of the Newport contest (pp. 310-12), on the authority of my late father, Richard Robbins an old contributor to ' N. & Q.' who, as a boy of nine, had taken part in a procession to welcome the Whig candidate into the borough. The whole affair seems to have been a suspicious transaction from its inception. It began at the end of 1824 in a forged letter attributed to a resident of electoral importance, local who, though he denied ils authenticity, assisted to bring Stephenson to the place. The latter's arrival was greeted with bands, banners, and beer, in accordance with the fashion of the time, which dictated also the scattering of red-hot coins from a frying- pan among the crowd waiting outside a hotel at which the candidate and his friends were dining freely. But, when the poll came, overwhelming defeat awaited the banker, and he disappeared from Cornish ken. . OV I IOUI i- ' I 10 VJL ill' I ill I'. AJL* _.' VXJ.^7 i IlMI mi 1 i 1 1 I? i 1 again came into the market, and was purchased There happens to be no mention of the by a Mr. Frith, a London merchant, whose widow ! Newport contest throughout The Times'