Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 5.djvu/193

 12 S. V. JULY, 1919.]]

NOTES AND QQERIES.

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presentation of the Supreme Order callin ie vices for punishment. I leave it t mebody more acquainted with the MSS the time to decide on the question. It may be added that many devils or onsters during the fifteenth century anc ter, for instance, in paintings by J. Boscl id Teniers, had sometimes their musica struments blending with their nose or the iver part of their body. The latter joke if ite mediaeval ; even Dante himself has t despised it, and the readers of ' Inferno 11 remember at the end of Canto XXI. :

Ed egli avea del cul fatto trumbetta. It remains to say that a general icono aphy of the devil is badly wanted by the idents of mediaeval iconography. It has en attempted by Miss Margaret Stokes in r well-known English edition of Didron's Ostoire de Dieu,' but her work is rather sketch and the siibject remains practically touched. Such a study should con- .erably help in identifications of works of s severely controlled by the Church, some edom was generally allowed in the re- sentation of the devils. Local influences I temporary fashions could be more easily ich I hope will tempt later some student ;
 * . When the liturgical part or even the
 * endary element of the religious subjects
 * ected in the treatment of the subject,

3 the matter is enormous and will require erious effort. PIERRE TURPIN.

4 Heath Terrace, Leamington.

DICKENS' s TOPOGRAPHICAL SLIPS (12 S. 37. 136, 164). I am by no means con- ced that MR. ALECK ABRAHAMS' s charges tinst Dickens with regard to Child's Bank

borne out. Hilton Price should be a d authority on the subject ; but reference that first-rate authority Harben ('A jtionary of London'), to Wheatley's mdon Past and Present,' and to Walford's id and New London,' makes me doubtful
 * o the date of the building of that Child's

ik which was known to Dickens and to ny others still alive. At any rate, ording to Pennant the original goldsmith's p of Blanohard & Child seems to have n standing in 1793, eighteen years after opening of The Tale of Two' Cities.' I not know exactly what MR. ABRAHAMS ins by saying that Dickens' reference to

use of cheques is " haphazard " I aid like the charge to be stated in a more bicular, and less apparently " haphazard " iner. At any rate Francis, in his story of the Bank of England,' tells us

of a gentleman who in 1780 was induced to give his cheque for 500?. for a parcel of forged notes, which cheque was cashed early the following morning, before a discovery of the fraud was made.

As to the use of cheques in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the following throw a light on the practice :

5 Anne, cap. 17. The word cheque is used in the sense of counterfoil.

In a Court Minute of the Bank of England, 1717, occurs the following:

" All persons who keep accounts by drawn notes to use cheques." Annual Review, 1803 :

" Might pay to the several stockholders their interest money in cbecques [stc], as they are called^ or drafts to bearer, on some Banker." Todd, 1818 :

" Check, the corresponding cypher of a Bank bill : often corruptly used for the draft itself."

A very high official of the Bank of England writes me that :

It looks as if the beginning of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of the cheque system ;

though it was not for a dictionaries used the word

hundred years that for the draft rather

than the counterfoil."

I should like to know if in view of these facts MR. ABRAHAMS upholds his charge against Dickens that the author's " reference to the use of cheques is haphazard."

Why Dickens should be blamed for not laving referred quite unnecessarily, in my opinion to the story of Sarah Anne Child' s ; elopement with the 10th Earl of Westmorland n 1782, I cannot conceive ; but there seems }o be an epidemic of hole-picking in the Tiantle of the great novelist at the moment.. As to Dickens being ignorant of this omance, which was often mentioned when. 1 was a small boy sixty years ago, that ppears almost a ludicrous assumption in riew of his appetite for all romances, legends,, and traditions connected with London.

W. COTJRTHOPE FORMAN.. Compton Down, near Winchester.

SOTJTHEY'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO * THE CRITICAL REVIEW' (12 S. iv. 35, 66, 94,. 22). MR. JACOB ZEITLIN'S four papers .nder this heading display a painstaking nd successful research which will lay future bibliographers of Southey's writings under a considerable obligation to their author. But his criticisms of the poet- critic as reviewer will not, I suspect, pass muster equally well. Such phrases as " colourless summaries," " deprived his articles of all character," " resulting in- sipidity," " giving pleasure to worthless-