Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 3.djvu/171

 12 8. III. MARCH 3, 1917.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

165

Greene, and, it may be, even known to Shake- .speare.

Some coincidences noted by M. Kozmian in support of his thesis are at least worthy of attention. In the first place the characters of Paulina and Emilia, through whose agency the child of the injured wife is spared and brought up in safety which characters are found in Shakespeare, but do not exist in Greene have their prototypes in the poor woman, by whom the infant was nourished, and in the Princess Margaret, by whom he was educated, and introduced to his repentant father. We may not unnaturally suppose that if Shakespeare knew the original ballad from which the story was drawn, he may there have found a hint for the creation of " the grave and good Paulina," and of his own imagination have found for her a some- what similar part in her care of the good Queen Hermione whose prototype Bellaria, in Greene's story, perishes on thefeews of the death of her young son.

A few other coincidences between Greene's novel and the historical circumstances trifling, it may be, but still, perhaps, in sufficient number to indicate that they are not the work of pure chance may be worth mentioning. That the scene is placed in a Slavonic country', i.e., Bohemia, and that Hermione is the daughter of the Emperor of Russia the historical Ludmila having been Bohemian by nationality is one of these. Dorastus, when desiring to pass through the dominions of Pandosto with his beloved Fawnia, gives himself out as " a gentleman of Trapo Ionia," i.e., " Transpolonia," or the country beyond Poland, a name often applied to Lithuania in the sixteenth century.

It is strange, however, that M. Kozmian should have omitted what seems to us the most convincing circumstance Vof all. The very name of Pandosto the original Leontes is good Polish to this day, and exactly descriptive of his status. Pan=" a lord," and dostojny = " rich " or " mighty." Pan dostojny, as written, requires nothing but the omission of the last three letters, indicating an adjective, to make "Pandosto." It is not difficult to imagine how a phrase, perhaps caught up by a minstrel in a foreign country, may have been converted into a proper name, and been thus transmitted through two centuries orally.

It is also suggested that the story may have reached England through some of the attendants cf Anne of Bohemia, married in 1382 to Richard II. She was the daughter of Charles IV., King of Bohemia and Em- peror of Germany, at whose court Ziemowit

first met the unhappy Ludmila, while that lady's accuser, Przemyslaw, her nephew,, was the ambassador who came to London to arrange the marriage with the English king in 1381, the very year in which the- original " Pandosto 's " death took place.

M. A. BIGGS.

FOREIGN BOOKS OF FORTUNE. (See ante, p. 144.)

II.

MRS. STOPES quotes ' La Biographic Uni- verselle,' according to which fountain of knowledge Fanti's book (published in 1527) is written in the style of Marcolini. Of course, there is a certain family likeness among all books of fortune, but Marcolini's ' Giardino dei Pensieri ' was not published till 1540 (republished in 1784 after the edition of 1550), and has neither wheels (rote) nor dials (sphere), but is used with a pack of trapola cards (pip cards 1, 2, 7 to 10, knave,, knight, and king). There are thirteen questions for men, thirteen for women, and twenty-four (some of them very delicate ones) for persons of either sex. The book is a folio, and the part containing the working of the oracle is arranged in fifty sets of" four pages each. The first page of each set has four square compartments, one in each corner, in each of which there are the nine- cards of a suit arranged singly, not in pairs. The nine cards of a suit are also arranged,, again singly, in the cruciform space (la via croce) left between the four squares, each of" which has a different name, the names varying in the different sets. There are,, therefore, forty-five single cards on that particular page, and under each card there - is a direction as to where to look for further guidance. The second page of each set has a special name of its own, and a woodcut,, representing the symbol after which it has been named in the upper half of th page. On both sides of the woodcut and below it there are forty-five pairs of cards repre- senting all the possible combinations of the eighteen cards of two suits (disregarding the difference in the suits), and with each pair there is a direction as to the next step to be taken. Finally, the third and fourth pages of each set are named after a philo- sopher, and contain the replies in terzetti (three-lined verses), each reply being de- pendent on a pair of cards. The working of the oracle can now be shown on an example. . Let us choose the query : " Whether one's life will be happy or sad ? " We are advised.