Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 5.djvu/89

 12 s. V.MARCH, low.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

83

All the herbs mentioned in MR. LUCAS'S extract, with the addition of coltsfoot, musk, and verbena, were in use to some extent seventy years ago ; and I have gathered coltsfoot both flowers and leaves for my father's pipes in Derbyshire.

THOS. RATCLIFFE.

P ANTON STREET PUPPET SHOW : FLOCKTON (12 S. iv. 303). This exhibition is mentioned in Forster's ' Life of Goldsmith.' Burke and Goldsmith witnessed a performance, and Burke was much struck by the fashion of one of the puppets " tossing a pike " with military precision. Goldsmith pooh- poohed the feat : he vowed he could do it better himself. He returned to supper with Burke, and severely hurt his shin in exhibiting his dexterity to the companv present. ^GEORGE MARSHALL.

MATTHEW ARNOLD : PROVING A NEGA- TIVE (12 S. v. 38). See the (later) Preface to * Literature and Dogma ' (Smith & Elder, 1891), especially the last paragraph ; also this work and ' God and the Bible ' passim. S.

[MR. GEORGE MARSHALL thanked for reply.]

EDMUND CLERKE, CLERK OF THE PRIVY SEAL (12 S. v. 12). According to the ' Victoria History of Hampshire,' vol. iii. p. 307, quoting " Chan. Inq. p. m. 29 Eliz. no. 167,'' this man died in 1586. Cf. also S. P. Dom. Eliz., cciii. 46, and pedigrees in Harl. Soc. PubL, vol. Ixiv. pp. 188-9, and Berry's ' Hants Genealogies,' p. 315.

JOHN B. WAINE WRIGHT.

AUTHORS OP QUOTATIONS WANTED (12 S. v. 42). MB. O'BRIEN'S first quotation should run as follows :

Exemplo Datrum commotus amore legend!

Ivit ad Kibernos sophia mirabile claros. The lines are 91, 92 of a poem on the life and family of Sulgenus (Sulien or Sulgen), Bishop of St. Davids, 1073-8 and 1080-86, by his son leuan. The piece is given from a MS. at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in Appendix D to vol. i. of Haddan and Stubbs's ' Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland.' 'The Corpus MS. is one of St. Augustine's ' De Trinitate,' Sulgen's Life being written on fly- leaves at the end. See p. 667 in Haddan and Stubbs, where we learn that " a few lines of this poem have been printed by Archbishop Ussher (' Belig. of Anc. Irish,' c. 3, end ; and ' Vett. Epistt. Hibern. Syll.,' Pref.) from a 16th-century copy then in the Cotton MSS. And from the fragments of the same copy, half burned, which are now in the British Museum, Bishop Burgess printed a considerably larger portion in 1812." The Corpus MS., which contains on the top of one page a Latin invocation to St. Paternus, is said to have been probably written at Llanba-darn Fawr, close to Aberystwyth. f '

2. This ought apparently to read thus :

" Confluxerunt omni parte Europse in Hiber- niam discendi causa tanquam ad mercaturam [possibly mercatum] bonarum artium."

The author, whoever he was, clearly had in his recollection a passage in Cicero :

" Suscepisti onus prseterea grave et Athenarum et Cratippi ; ad quos cum tamquam ad merca- turam bonarum artium sis profectus," &c. (' De Officiis,' iii. 2, 6).

Cainden, in the historical account of Ireland in his ' Britannia,' has something very like the " Confluxerunt " quotation, and immediately

afterwards introduces the lines "Exemplo

claros."

3. The first word, " Flocuerunt," should evi- dently be " Floruerunt."

EDWARD BENSLY. University College, Aberystwyth.

Jltrites 0tt Utrohs,

Characters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Centuri/. With an Essay on the Character, and Historical Notes, by David Nichol Smith. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 6s. net.)

Characters collected in this volume are not, like the Characters of Hall, Overbury, and Earle, epigrammatic studies of contemporary social types ; they are what we should now term character-sketches of historical personages. Mr. Nichol Smith in his introductory essay draws, or implies, a distinction between the character proper, the portrait, and the short biography : a character should deal with " central facts " rather than with external features, and should contain only a small admixture of biography. Clarendon, whose ' History ' and ' Life ' provide more than half the contents of the volume, is held up as the model character-writer. The section of the introduction devoted to him is on the whole an admirable estimate of his qualities as an historian, though a comparison of his fine portrait of Charles I. with his unsympathetic studies of Pym and Cromwell suggests the reflec- tion that he gets rather more praise for impar- tiality than he deserves. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions, his characters are undoubtedly of a higher quality than those of his competitors in the same field, showing a wider range of compre- hension and a keener eye for essentials. Sir Philip Warwick and Bishop Burnet, good as their work often is, have neither his insieht nor his grace of style.

Among the best of the pieces extracted from the works of other authors are Lucy Hutchinson's memoir of her husband Col. John Hutchinson, and (in a very different style) Shaftesbury's graphic portrait of his Dorsetshire neighbour Henry Hastings, who " bestowed all his time in sports, but what he borrowed to caress his neighbours' wives and daughters, there being not a woman in all his walks of the degree of a yeoman's wife or under, and under the age of forty, but it was extremely her fault if he were not intimately acquainted with her." The description of the