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NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. 11. SEPT. 2, me

is preserved in the British Museum Library. Its title, very much abbreviated, is as Tinder :

"The Book of Fortune .... First written in Italian, after translated into English, and now newly compared in all the parts thereof and much amended. [A large woodcut.] London, printed by 31. Flesher, and are to be sold by H.
 * Sawbridge at the Bible on Ludgate Hill, 1686."

The Italian author's name is not mentioned on the title-page, but there is a statement in the Preface to -the following effect :

"This book was first drawn and made in Italian by a noble and joyous knight, Laurence Spirit, and translated into English."

This writer was no other than Lorenzo Spirito, or L. Gualtieri of Perugia, a well- known author, whose ' Libro del Sorte ' (The Book of Fate) was published in Vicenza without date, but probably in 1473. Several other editions appeared in various parts of Italy, and at least one French translation, before the end of the century ; subsequently it was translated, besides French, into Spanish, Dutch, and, as we see, into English. The oldest Italian edition in the British Museum bears the title ' Libro della Ventura di Lorenzo Spirto ' (sic), and was printed in Borne in 1535. The French edition I have consulted is " Le Passetemps de la Fortune des Dez. .. .compile par Maistre Laurens L'Esprit " (Paris, 1637).

The English version issued in 1686 is not strictly a translation, but rather an adapta- tion of the original. The large woodcut on the title-page represents the revolving Wheel of Fortune. On the reader's left a man wearing a cap is being carried upwards clinging to the wheel, with the legend " Regnabo " ; on the top of the wheel a crowned monarch is sitting holding his sceptre, and the legend in this case is " Regno " ; on the right-hand side, a man is moving downwards with the wheel, with the legend " Regnavi " ; and, finally, at the bottom of the wheel a man is hanging head downwards, with the legend " Sum sine regno." A similar illustration is shown on the title-page of the Rome edition of 1535, and on the second title-page of the Hun- garian ' Fortuna ' of 1594 referred to above ; in this case, however, the poor man at the bottom is lying face downwards on the ground under the wheel. The idea of the illustration is very old. Mr. Bela Majlath, a Hungarian bibliographer, who has made a special study of the subject, saw similar designs in several MS. books of fortune (Sortilegia), the oldest dated j 1450, at Munich. In this case several human figures are being carried up on one

side, and pitched down on the other side of the wheel. The " roue de fort vine " figures also on an old tarot card, the one numbered X in some packs. L. L. K.

(To be concluded. )

" UNTHINKABLE." There is a fashion in the use of words which is as inexplicable as fashion in dress. From time to time a word or a phrase is selected from the immense available stock in our language, and used with a frequency out of all proportion to its value, and often out of all relation to its sense, until it becomes little better than slang or meaningless interjection. At the present moment two of the most emphatic words in the language " absolutely " and " unthinkable " are undergoing this process of degradation. " Absolutely," in fact, is now beyond redemption ; but " unthink- able " is in a different position. It has a pseudo-scientific air about it, since it is at the moment rather favoured by sociologists and politicians, and does not yet flow trippingly from the tongue of ordinary con- versationalists. But the degradation has certainly begun, since the word has now a great vogue in the newspapers, and is used without regard to its- strict original meaning.

It is over twenty years since the writer first made the acquaintance of this word in the pages of Spencer's ' Synthetic Philos- ophy.' In the second and third chapters of ' First Principles ' it occurs rather frequently with a strictly literal meaning, and it was a somewhat favoured word with Spencer at all times. He may have borrowed it from some earlier writer, but he, at any rate, gave it a status which marked it out for the sociologist- politician as a word to conjure with. Yet not one man in a score or a hundred of those who now use it pauses to think that in the days of its dignity " unthinkable " did not mean " unlikely," or " improbable," or " incredible," but literally " beyond the grasp of the human intellect."

There are, as a matter of fact, some things which the human brain literally cannot " think " or comprehend. It cannot con- ceive of a limitation of space of a sort of wall or precipice inside of which there is space and beyond which there is no space. Nor can it grasp unlimited space.

It is the same with our conceptions of time and eternity ; we cannot in our thoughts pursue time through all eternity except by the symbolism of a conception carried so far, and left to be resumed on some future occasion a mere mental makeshift. Yet,