Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 7.djvu/626

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [ 12 s. VD. DEC. 25, 1020.

over the chancel arch of Arkesden church in Essex with the initials C. P. and the date 1 624. This is the only instance that I know of its occurrence in Essex.

See article by J. A. Sparvel Bayley in vol. vi., New Series, of the Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society ; Bur- net's 'History of the Reformation' and Cox and Harvey's 'English Church Furni- ture.' STEPHEN J. BARNS.

Woodford Wells.

JOCELYN FLOOD (12 S. vii. 409, 450). I should like to know more about Warden Jocelyn. Flood, the younger son of Warden Flood, before identifying him with the Jocelyn Flood, who matriculated at Dublin in 1764. When and where was he born ? Is anything known of him beyond that he was M.P. for Callan, and that he died unmarried in 1767 ?

G. F. R. B

"H" ASPIR^ (12 S. vii. 455). When I was a boy, an old Frenchman told us that in French the letter h was never pronounced except in the exclamations Helas / and Aha ! In each of these words he sounded the h. exactly as in the English words "have," "hay," &c. Perhaps a Paris reader of ' TV". <fc Q.' can state the present usage. G. H. WHITE.

23 Weighton Road. Anerley.

THOMAS FULLER: REFERENCE WANTED (12 S. vii. 450). The words are taken from the fourth section in chap. xliv. of 'The Holy State.' The chapter is headed 'Of Travelling,' and the sentence immediately following the part quoted by JVJR. PRESCOTT Row is

i' But late writers lack nothing but age, and home' wonders but distance, to make them admired."

Our blindness to what is of interest at our own doors was neatly described by Mr. E. V. Lucas when he wrote in his ' Wanderer iii Holland,'

" So many of us are so constituted that we never use our eyes until we are on foreign soil. It is as though a Cook's ticket perlormed an operation t'oi cataract." EDWARD BEN SLY.

AUTHOR OF QUOTATION WANTED. (12S. vii. 251.)

3. In King's Classical Foreign Quotations,' (1904 edn. n. 1384), quotations are given from Voltaire and Marivaut, winch shew that they had antici- pated 0. W. Holmes' historian in his thesis, if not in the precise words. They, in turn, seem to have taken the idea from Aristotle, who, in his 'Politics,' Book ii. ch. vii., points out that (to quote Bishop Weldon's translation at p. 65), "as a n:atter of fact it is the superfluities rather than the bare neces- saries of life which are the motives of the most heinous crimes." JOHN B. WAINEWRIGHT.

Opera Tiactemis inedita Eogeri Baconi, Fasc. V. Secretum Secretorum ; with Introduction and" Notes by Eoger Bacon, an English Version from the Arabic, and an Anglo-Norman Version. Edited with Introduction and notes by Robert Steele. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 28s.)

WE have Englished for the most part the long- and stately Latin title of this volume. Mr., Steele, a past-master of mediaeval lore has, we are glad to see, resumed the printing, interrupted? by the war, of unpublished works of Roger Bacon.- This section includes the famous ' Secretum Secretorum,' which Bacon edited with an Intro- duction and glosses, and two translations of it r one in English from the Arabic, the other in Norman French. Questions of text, parallel works, and citations are very complicated, and are discussed by Mr. Steele \vith abundant erudi- tion in a long Introduction. The ' Secretum ' nominally addressed by Aristotle to Alexander the Great, is supposed to represent that philo- sopher's esoteric teaching to his intimate pupils. It has not, however, a Greek: origin, being; ascribed here to " the interaction between Persian and Syriao ideas which took place in the seventh, to ninth centuries of our era." Bacon's notes Mr. Steele puts at some date before 1257, and his Introduction at about 1270. W T e are thus transported to the thirteenth century, a time full of astrology and strange remedies, but full also of sound sense on the management of life. The ' Secretum ' had, we learn, an immense influence on Bacon, and was widely imitated. There are two differing Arabic texts, and these vary from the Latin texts, which again offer considerable differences in material and arrangement. Speak- ing of traditions as to the Syriac texts, Mr. Steele rebukes those \vho regard " a manuscript attribu- tion as a decisive argument against the supposed author or translator having any connexion with the work." This is a fair hit at the theories which bring more temporary repute to scholars than permanent aid to scholarship.

Bacon's is the fullest text of the ' Secretum ' extant, and we have read it with considerable interest. The Latin is easy to a classical scholar, apart from occasional words like " dextrarius," which it takes some knowledge to make into the obsolete French destrier, a charger being led by a squire with his right hand. A quotation from the Vulgate is included, but there is nothing of the rhythm of that noble rendering. In the passage concerning the mating time of spring we rather expect, but do not find, any echo of ' The Song of Songs.' The beginning of wisdom for kings is not, as in the Proverbs and elsewhere in the Bible, the fear of the Lord, but " desi- derium bone fame," and that sentiment may have inspired Milton in ' Lycidas ' through the medium of the popular ' Zodiacus Vitae 'of Palm- genius. Bacon was a good Greek scholar for his time, and talks of grammarians who do not know the language, and corrupt words, putting " exennia " for xennia. The " matbematici " are, he points out, derived from ^dOrjaos, and- the5 reader of Tacitus will have no difficulty in recognizing them as astrologers. _ Bacon has a