Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 7.djvu/604

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. vii. DEC. is, 1020.

worth such treatment, he should print it with ful annotation. A scissors- and-paste-book often bears witness to its compiler's scholarship but it will defeat the best attempts at form and style and, when the matter in hand is dry and drab as is the history of William Bolts, it is to form and style one must look to make a book " bite ' the reader's mind.

We could have wished, then, that Mr. Hall ward had more often trusted himself to para- phrase the documents he has chosen to make use of (most of these would have borne il easily), and also that he had enlarged a little more upon the general situation, so as to get some air and space in between these solid masses. But f we acknowledge gratefully our indebtedness to him for placing the essentials of the material he has worked over within reach of students, to whom they have hitherto not been readily accessible.

Occultist* and Myttics fal( Agts. By Ralph Shirley.

(William Rider & Sons, 4*. 6rf.) A STUDY of occultists covering a period of 1,900 years in less than 200 pages is necessarily superficial. And in dealing with the seers of Greece and Rome, Mr. Shirley assumes knowledge not possessed by the ordinary reader without offering any fresh suggestion to the student. The subjects chosen for the latter portion of the book lend themselves to lighter treatment. Michael Scot, the Wizard of the Middle Ages, is given to us in vivid outline ; Paracelsus to those who may have known him only through Browning ceases to be the elusive figure pursued through the five books of the poem that bears his name, and becomes a historical per- sonage. And in both sketches we are shown the early evidence of powers that are baffling modern scientists. It seems clear that Scot the Wizard was in fact an adept in hypnotism, and that Paracelsus practised faith -healing, while in Emannuel Swedenborg we find a potential leader of psychical research. The value of the book is its suggestiveness.

A CORPUS OP RUNIC INSCRIPTIONS. W T B are glad to bring the following letter to the notice of our readers :

SIR, Will you kindly grant us permission through the hospitality of your columns to make the following appeal for help in an archaeological undertaking ? We are preparing for publication by the Cambridge University Press, an Annotated Corpus of Runic Inscriptions in Great Britain, on or in stone, bone, wood, metal, or other such material, and we shall be most grateful if any of your readers interested in the subject will kindly bring under our notice any newly discovered specimen and any example w^iich we are not likely to know. Runically inscribed objects contained in the larger and better-known public collections, or published in. archaeological works of national scope, we shall naturally have on our lists, but as regards tnose in private hands or in local collections of the smaller type, we shall be very glad of information, if correspondents will kindly send it to one of us at the address given below We are, &c., G. BALDWIN BROWN.

BRUCE DICKINS.

The University, Edinburgh.

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CORRIGENDUM. Ante, p. 476, col. 2, the address " Compton Down, near Winchester," should have appeared under the name of MR. COURTHOPE FORMAN in col. 1.

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