Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 6.djvu/214

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

1759, giving a " List of Ships with Sir Edw. Hawke," at the head of which is the " Royal George, 100 guns, 880 men, Admiral Hawke." It further gives an " Extract of a Letter from -& . Chaplain of one of his Majesty's Ships, dated from Quiberon Bay, Nov. 25, 1759," which contains this statement :

" On the 14th of November Sir Edward Hawke hoisted his flag on board the Royal George in Torbay, where the fleet had put in a few days . before through stress of weather."

W. R. WILLIAMS. Talybout, Brecon.

SLATES AND SLATE PENCILS (12 S. vi. 67, 136). I am now able to give the references which, owing to absence from home, had to /be omitted in my last letter.

Chaucer, in that roundel which Skeat calls j>. 121):
 * Merciles Beaute,' says (Student's edition,

Love hath my name y-strike out of his sclat. and in the Astrolabe (ib., p. 416) : Entere hit in-to thy slate.

The use of chalk for recording tavern scores (not, however, on a slate) is mentioned in the ' Return from Parnassus,' pt. i. (ed. Macray, p. 39) :

All my debts stand chalked upon the post for liquor.

Fryer in his ' Account of East India ' (1698, p. 112) mentions :

"aboard plastered over which with cotton they wipe out when it is full as we do from slates or table books."

Johnson in his ' Dictionary,' 1765, defines " slate " as :

"a grey fossile stone easily broken into thin plates which are used to cover houses or to write upon." Horace Walpole, in a letter dated Nov. 15, 1781, explains the illegibility of his writing toy the gout in his hand, and adds :

" Soon, mayhap, I- must write upon a slate ! it will only be scraping mv fingers to a point and they will serve for a chalk pencil."

As late as 1821 Charles Lamb (in 'Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist ') mentions "chalk and a slate."

Slates had been used by Pestalozzi at Burgdorf towards the close of the eighteenth century, but Lancaster certainly knew nothing of him in 1803 ; even a zealous reformer like Wilderspin almost boasted that he had not heard of him in 1820.

It is interesting to learn from MB. BLOOM'S

letter that sand has been used within living

memory. Dr. Andrew Bell saw it used by

the natives on the Malabar Coast and intro-

duced it about 1791 into the Military Male

Asylum at Egmore, near Madras, of which he was superintendent. Lancaster saw a description of it in Bell's 'Experiment in Education' (1798) and adopted it in his Borough Road School about 1803. It spread thence into all schools on his system and after the establishment of the National Society in 1811, with Dr. Bell as super- intendent, it was employed in all National Schools. DAVID SALMON.

Swansea.

At the last reference MB. J. HARVEY BLOOM says that slate pencils can hardly have come into use until the period of modern lead pencils, viz., early in the nineteenth century. But "modern lead pencils," that is, pencils cased in wood, are much older than that. The 'O.E.D.' quotes, under

date 1683 : " Black Lead of late is

curiously formed into cases of Deal or Cedar, and so sold as dry Pencils." The date of the first use of slate pencils is probably as old and I do not see why it should not be older. In Dyche's 'New General English Diction- ary ' (1744), " pencil " is various defined, but one definition is : "A small, long, thin piece of slate to write with on a broad flat slate." It does not seem likely that this use was not known in schools before Lancaster's time. We were not allowed to use slates in a school I attended in the sixties, I suppose because they led to slovenly ways of working.

C. C. B.

BUBIAL AT SEA : MILDMAY (12 S. vi. 95). I am anxious to trace, for entry in a memoir of the Mildmay family, the " Mr. Milclmay " referred to. No information can be got at the Admiralty Library and the Ships Muster Books at the Public Record Office do not go further back than 1745. Could MB. ANSTEY say where the log of the Tavistock could be seen, or whether that or Marine Records give further information ? H. A. ST J. M.

" COCKAGEE " : "CYPBESS " (12 S. vi. 40, 97). The solution suggested by some of your correspondents that " Cockagee " being the name of a cider apple, the label bearing that name was used to distinguish cider of a particular make is, I feel sure, the correct one. But the suggestion of others that " Cypress " was merely a mis-spelling of " Cyprus " does not commend itself to me.

There is no trace about these labels of illiteracy, as there might well be if they were carelessly hand-painted in rough lettering. On the contrary, they all appear to be enamelled in well executed print above the