Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 6.djvu/202

 162

NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. vi. MAY i, 1920;

Finally the poet gets through his mind- wanderings, and hears him. And after that whenever the poet becomes despondent (through dropping on his toe a very heavy weight, for example), he weeps, for it reminds him of the aged aged man a-sitting on a gate.

The foregoing outlines show, as it were, the skeleton of the parody. For the full humour of the song in ' Alice ' one must really enter into the spirit of Wordsworth's poem -for that, it seems to me, is precisely what Lewis Carroll had done when he wrote Ms parody.

The various names which the Knight gives his son, too, are very probably further parodying of the two names of Wordsworth's poem. The resemblance between ' The Aged Aged Man ' and ' The Leech- gatherer,' between ' Ways and Means ' and ' Resolu- tion and Independence ' is certainly not accidental.

Some traits in the not altogether admirable character of the Aged Aged Man make me suspect very strongly that Lewis Carroll was pretty thoroughly acquainted, not only with the Wordsworth poem itself, but also with the history of the poem's composition, par- ticularly the account of it in Dorothy

Wordsworth's 'Journal.' The Aged AgedJ Man is, I am afraid, a good deal of a beggar,, in spite of his extraordinary fertility of imagination. Now Wordsworth's old Leech-gatherer, in the poem, is not a beggar in any sense far from it. But listen to Dorothy Wordsworth's more exact account of him : "His trade was to gather leeches ; but now leeches were scarce, and he had not strength for it. He lived by begging," &c. Perhaps it is as well not to investigate too closely into every nook and cranny of Lewis Carroll's imagination to say nothing of" the impossibility of investigating fully such a vast and complex realm. But the more one reads the ' Aged Aged Man ' as a parody of Wordsworth, the more delightful it becomes. And when it is remembered that in one and the same song Lewis Carroll is parodying Wordsworth, is imitating Thomas Moore's poem, is making the " hero " of the song exactly fit the character of his White Knight, and, best of all, is producing a poem utterly delightful to a child as welt as to a more sophisticated reader well, the poem is fully worthy of a place equal with, the more renowned ' Jabberwocky."

GEOBGE R. PORTEB, B.A. Cambridge. Mass.

PRINCIPAL LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES, TAVERNS,

IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. (Seefonfe. pp. 29,' 59, 84,105, 125, 143.)

AND INNS

Three Cranes Three Hats Inn Three Kings Three Nuns Three Tuns

Three Tuns

Three Tuns Three Tuns Tom's. .

Tom's ..

Tom's M

Tom's ... Truby's

Thames Street

Upper Street, Islington

Piccadilly

Aldgate High Street

Between Cornhill and Ex 1748

change Alley St. Margaret's Hill, South-

wark Chandos Street .. .. 1723

Strand 1793

Cornhill (south side). 1709 1718

1752 1770 1793

St. Martin's Lane, next to 1710

Young Man's Coffee-house 1 725

Eussell Street, Covent Gar- 1707 den, opposite Button's

(no. 17) 1713

Devereux Court, Strand

St. Paul's Churchyard

Thornhury, ii. 19 and 20.

Warwick Wroth, p. 148.

' A Twentieth-Century Palace,' 1908, p. 30.-

Shelley's ' Inns,' p. 42' ; Hare, i. 348.

Plan of Great Fire, R. E. A. C., ' N. & Q '

Dec. i), 1916, p. 462. Wheatley's ' London,' iii. 379.

MacMichael's ' Charing Cross,' p. 128.

Roach's L.P.P., p. 52.

Matthew Prior's ' The Chameleon.'

Plan of Great Fire, R. E. A. C., ' N. & Q. ' Dec. 9, 1916, p. 461.

Fielding's C.G.J., no. 2.

Chatterton to his sister, May. 30.

Roach's L.P.P., p. 55 ; Wheatley's ' Lon- don,' iii. 383.

Dobson's ' Hogarth,' p. 49.

MacMichael's ' Charing Cross,' pp. 57, 165..

Farquhar's ' Beaux Stratagem,' Act IV.,. sc. i.

Addison's Guardian, June 2 ; Wheatley'a ' London,' iii. 383 ; Hare, i. 27.

Stirling's A.Y.H., i. 40.

Dickins and Stanton, p. 13.

Stirling's A.Y.H., i. 333; Wheatley's ' London,' iii. 383.

Sydney's ' XVIIIth Century,' p. 186 ;; Wheatley's ' London,' iii. 56.