Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 2.djvu/71

 12 s. ii. JULY 22, i9i6.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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For further particulars of his sister, Jane I.- ingham, see The Westminster Magazine, i. 88.

According to Henry Bromley's 'Catalogue Kngraved British Portraits' (1793), p. 438, the small oval mezzotint, engraved by John Raphael Smith in 1781, of Mary Hemet was a portrait of the dentist's second dauu'iiter, which agrees with the information contained in his will.

Jacob Hemet had one formidable com- petitor during almost the whole of his career. On June 13, 1766, The Public Advertiser contained the following advertisement :

" Ruspini, surgeon-dentist, informs the Nobility . . . .that he has just arrived from Dublin at his lodgings at Williamson's, taylor, in Prince's St., Leicester Fields. ..."

It goes on to advertise a " Dentifrice," and announces that Ruspini " will call on anyone who wants him."

This dentist, who with Jacob Hemet was the most eminent in his profession during the latter part of the eighteenth century, is mentioned by two contemporary writers, and seems to have been famed for his generosity :

" It is with additional gratification I can add [say.s Henry Angelo] that the second portrait painted by Sir William Beechey was of my father ; the first which this distinguished veteran of the British School painted being that of my father's esteemed friend, the Chevalier Ruspini, Avh<>.-. ( . elegant hospitalities I have often enjoyed at his house, then situate at the corner of St . Alban's St." ' Reminiscences of Henry Angelo ' (Kegan Paul, 1904), i. 94-5.

In a foot-note, vol. ii. 252 of ' Records of my Life,' John Taylor asserts that

"Dr. Dodd, on the day when he was taken into custody, had engaged to dine with the late Chevalier Ruspini, in Pall Mall."

Ruspini died on Dec. 14, 1813, when the following obituary notice appeared in The inan's Magazine, Ixxxiii. pt. ii. 701 :

" In Pall Mall, aged 86, Chevalier Ruspini, who has been upwards of half a century established in this country (and 26 jointly with his eldest son), surgeon-dentist to R.H. the Prince Regent. His memory will long be revered by his friends ; and his loss deeply deplored by the unfortunate, whom he was in the constant habit of consoling, and by the indigent, whose wants he was ever ready to relieve. He was the founder of a most excellent Institution for the Support and Educa- tion of the Female Orphan Children of Free

\V. Ruspini, the son of the " Chevalier," died on Jan. 2, 1812. On Feb. 7, 1801, he had married, at St. James's Church, Lucy Jennings, daughter of Ross Jennings of Gharetty in Bengal.

HORACE BLEA.CKLEY.

AX ANCIENT IRISH MANUSCRJ J ' i :

THE BOOK OF THE MACGAURANS OR MoGOVERNS.

AT a meeting of the British Academy held on, March 22, 1911, Dr. Edward Crosby "Quiggin, Lecturer in Celtic at Cambridge, read a paper entitled ' Prolegomena to the Study of the Later Irish Bards, 1200-1500,' which was inserted later in vol. v. of the Proceedings of the British Academy, p. 102. In the course of this he writes :

" Certain it is that in a number of cases we find a cycle of poems addressed by different authors to the ruler or rulers of one clan collected together. The earliest of such family books now in existence is probably the Book of the MacGoverns or MacGaurans (MacSamhradhain), a fourteenth- century vellum, in the possession of the O'Conor Don, a fragment of a larger book."

And in the ' Addenda ' (p. 142) he says :

" The Magauran Book was transcribed by Adam O'Cianan for Thomas Magauran, who, according to the Four Masters, was slain in the year 1343. A. stanza on p. 50 affords the only literary evidence with which I am acquainted that the better-known families maintained books in which eulogies of their race were entered. I give the verse according to a transcript made by Joseph O'Longan in 1869, which the Conor Don kindly deposited for use in the Cambridge University Library in February, 1913 : Ni hinarm duchas dhiunde | 's du daimh ri flesg

find bailie

Seach dhari gach daime oile | Ian dar udaine a duanoire.

An earlier (and apparently first) descrip- tion of this MS. was contributed by the late Sir Ji T. Gilbert, F.S.A., to the Second Report of the Royal Commission on His- torical Manuscripts, 1871, p. 223, and runs thus :

"MS. in the Irish language on vellum, fifty-four pages folio, in double columns, imperfect at begin- ning and end. The penmanship is excellent, out the vellum is dark and defaced in some places. From a note on the first page, we learn that tma book was transcribed by Adam O'Cianan for Thomas, son of Brian MacSamhradhain, apparently the chief of the territory of Teallach Eachdhach, in the north-west of the present county of Cavan, whose death is chronicled by the Four Masters under the year 1343. The contents consist mainly of poems on the genealogies, achievement*, and liberality of the chiefs of Teallach Eachdhach and. their relatives."

After enumerating by name five chiefs, three wive?, and fourteen authors of the poems, Sir J. T. Gilbert adds :

"The volume also contains various pieces in prose on the territories, rents, and. genealogies ot the Sept MacSamhradhain and the families will whom its members were allied. In it we likewi find miscellaneous writings, among which are tractt on the kindred of Christ, the parentage of Mary