Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/305

 12 S. VIII. MABCH 26, 1921.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 247 A NORFOLK CHURCHWARDEN'S CHARITIES IN 1716. In the Accounts of Thomas Patrick, churchwarden of St. Mary Magdalen Parish, Wiggenhall, charitable gifts are not very numerous. The following items are selected from some three or four long columns of entries relating to other pay- ments. They appear to show that although the tales of woe became sadder the value of the gifts became progressively less and less. A Bill of money I have disbursed in y e year 1716 being Church Warden : Nov. 2. pd. 2 lame souldyers. . . . 01 00 14. gave 4 seamen that vas taken by ye Tursk going home to Newcastell 01 06 Dec. 19. gave to a man had his hous burnt at Welny. . . . 01 00 JFeb. 20. gave a woman yt had her house burnt att Dunington in Lynckhornesheyre & lost 300 00 06 1717. T?eb. 19. gave to a man of Totnell yt had his hous burnt. . . . 00 02 1725. Aug. 25. gave a man yt had his father and mother burnt and lost 300 by fire 00 06 R. T. GUNTHER. A BRONTE POEM. A reviewer in The Manchester Guardian of a recent volume entitled : " The Complete Poems of Anne Bronte. Edited by Clement Shorter, with a Bibliographical Introduction by C. W. Hatfield. Hodder & Stoughton. Pp. xxiii. 154, 12s. Qd. net." observes : " It repeats an obvious error, for which Mr. A. C. Benson was originally responsible, in attributing the strange and forcible lyric. There let thy bleeding branch atone to the mild and meditative Anne, though telling us, as Mr. Benson forgot to do, that the lyric was found among Emily's papers, unsigned, in Emily's handwriting. We should greatly like to know what Mr. Benson's or Mr. Shorter's reasons are for believing it to be Anne's work." So should I with many others interested in Bronte literature. Perhaps, should this note meet their eyes, Mr. Benson or Mr. Shorter may be induced to supply ' N. & Q.' with the reasons asked for by the reviewer. To my edition (1867) of 'The Professor ' are annexed ' Poems by Currer (18), Ellis (21) and Acton (21) Bell,' together with 'Selec- tions from the Literary Remains of Ellis (17) and Acton (9) Bell. By Currer Bell,' but, .curiously enough, the above lyric is con- spicuous by its absence. Had Charlotte but included it in her Selections from Emily's poems controversy would have been needless, but the fact that Emily herself evidently included it in her own transcrip- tions of her poems should, apart from any internal evidence, go far " to prove it hers." In 1916 vol. xii. of the Transactions of the Rochdale Literary and Scientific Society was issued containing a paper by Mr. H. A. Mince on the MS. of Emily Bronte's poems in the collection of Mr. A. J. Law, Houres- ford, Littleborough. " The MS. [said a local account] is described as one of the several transcripts which Emily Bronte made of her poems before any of them, were published in ' that slight and disregarded volume, " Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell," with which, in 1846, the literary career of the three sisters began.' This transcript is in Emily Bronte's microscopically small hand- writing, of which a facsimile, printed in the Transactions, shows the curious character, and is dated 1844. The MS. consists of thirty pages of large smooth-surfaced letter paper, and has been bound in tooled leather, apparently by the late Mr. J. T. Wise, a former possessor of it. It contains thirty-two poems, of which three are ' unidentified ' not known to have been pub- lished and these are printed in full in Mr. Mince's paper, which also gives the title or first line and the date of each of the other pieces. Several stanzas omitted from poems included by Mr. A. C. Benson in his recent volume, ' Bronte Poems,' are also printed here." Mr. R. J. Gordon, Chief Librarian of Rochdale, informs me that there is no refer- ence in Mr. Mince's paper to the lyric under discussion. J. B. McGovERN. St. Stephen's Rectory, C.-on-M., Manchester. THE QUALITIES OF FEMALE BEAUTY. The Evening News for Mar. 3, 1921 (p. 3), has the follow paragraph : "In a beauty specialist's shop window in Oxford Street appears the following notice : A woman, to be beautiful, must possess the twenty-seven qualities running in series of three. White : Skin, hands, teeth. Black : Eyes, eyelashes, eyebrows. Pink : Lips, gums, nails. Long : Life, hands, hair. Short : Teeth, ears, tongue. Large : Forehead, shoulders, intelligence. Narrow : Waist, mouth, ankle. Delicate : Fingers, life, spirit. Round : Arms, legs, income." This is derived from a once well-known poem, beginning : Triginta haec habeat, quae vult formosa vocari Femina ; sic Helenam fama fuisse refert. It is rather too long to print in full, and a little too shall we say, anatomical, for modern taste. Where are these lines first found, and is their author known ? They occur in the ' Elegantiae Latini Sermonis,' but are hardly