Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/587

 :2S. X. JUNE 24, 1922.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 481 LONDON. JUNE 24. 1922. CONTENTS. No. 219. NOTES : The First Grand Chaplain. 481 Marat in England. 482 Bedford Inscriptions. 484 Nicolas Sander and the University of Louvain. 486 Robert Herrick's Grave " Comparisons are odious " ' A Literary Find.' 487 Feudal Payments in the Hundred 51. Threadneedle Street. 488 John Stow and the New Elver. 489. QUERIES :" Qui strepit in campo " " Gill Ale" before Lord Langdale Joe Manton Antiseptic Island. 489 Commodore Gale. Legendary ' Gale's Recreations ' Louis de Male " George Standfast " French Coinage of the Birmingham Mint The Attractions of Paris Scottish Genealogy Groombridge Place. Kent. 490 " O et Olla " " Rising Glasses " The Star Club Guinness Earl of Cambridge. 491. REPLIES : Rowland Stephenson. M.P.. 491 Reid the Mountebank. 492 The Adventures of a Coin The Capon Tree in Jedwater The British and Foreign Review Spencer Smith Sir William Henry Clinton. G.C.B., 493 Salad Clarence Gordon " Hay Silver " " Bomenteek " Adrian Stokes, 494 Wedding-ring : Change of Hand "St. FrauncesFire " Major William Murray Stone Sign Grazia Deledda London Clockmakers Jottings on some Early Editions of the Bible in Latin Reversing the Union Jack, 495 Yorkshire Use of " Thou " 496 " Cannot away with " " Hampshire Hogs " " Stone-coat." 497" Dy- archy " ' Twinings in the Strand ' Byron and the Royal Society Waddon Authors wanted, 498. NOTES ON BOOKS : ' The English Village ' ' APepysian Garland ' ' Nature and Other Miscellanies ' ' The Laws of the Earliest English Kings.' Notices to Co respondents. Jgote*. THE FIRST GRAND CHAPLAIN. THE oration of the Rev. William Dodd, M.A., the first Grand Chaplain of the Order, at the dedication of Freemasons' Hall, represents, doubtless, the teaching of the highest initiates of the " craft and mistery " of the time. He says Masonry is an institution not, as the ignorant and uninstructed vainly suppose, founded on unnecessary mystery and supported by mere good fellowship, but an institution founded on eternal reason and truth, whose deep basis is the civilization of mankind and whose everlasting glory it is to have the immovable support of those two mighty pillars- science and morality. He touches upon the antiquity, the extent, the comprehensiveness, the excellence and the utility of " the Royal art," of whose daily advancing progress, highly flourishing state, and unquestionable merit, who can doubt a moment that beholds this splendid edifice, that considers this lovely, honourable and illustrious assemblage ? . . . If antiquity merits our attention and demands our reverence, where will the society be found that hath an equal claim ? Masons are well informed, from their own private and interior records, that the building of Solomon's Temple is an important era whence they derive many mysteries of this art. ^- Now, be it remembered that this great event took place above a thousand years before the Christian era and, consequently, more than a century before Homer, the first of the Grecian poets, wrote [sic] ; and above five centuries before Pythagoras brought from the East his sublime system of Masonic instruction to illumine our Western world. But remote as is this period, we date not from thence the com- mencement of our art. For, though it might owe to the wise and glorious King of Israel some of its many mystic forms and hieroglyphic ceremonies, yet certainly the art itself is coeval with creation when the Sovereign Architect raised on Masonic principles this beauteous globe, and commanded that master science, Geometry, to lay the rule to the planetary world and to regulate by its laws the whole stupendous system in just, unerring proportion rolling round the central sun. And as Masonry is of this remote antiquity, so is it, as might reasonably be imagined, of boundless extent. We trace its footsteps in the most distant, the most remote, ages and nations of the world. We find it among the first and most celebrated civilizers of the East ; we deduce it regularly from the first astronomers on the Plains of Ghaldea to the wise and mystic kings and priests of Egypt ; even to the rude and Gothic builders of a dark and degenerate age whose vast temples still remain amongst us as monuments of their attachment to the Masonic arts and as high proofs of a taste which however irregular must always be esteemed awful and venerable. DR. WILLIAM DODD'S RECORD. " The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together." The very remarkable, but not unique, clergyman, Dr. William Dodd the famous preacher at the Magdalen Penitents' Home in the heart of London Port ; the sometime drudging curate, private tutor, and school- master by what is now called West Ham Portway ; the first Grand Chaplain of the Freemasons' Grand Lodge in 1777 ; and, probably, the most fashionable pulpit exhorter and after-dinner orator of his day was the principal figure when the Magdalen (popularly called the " Maudlin ") was opened on Aug. 10, 1758, the existence of that institution having been made possible by his florid and fervent rhetoric. It was in Great Prescott Street where Sir Cloudesley Shovel, the old rough Admiral