Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/413

 las. vin. APRTL23, i92i.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 339 The picture required in this query is j reproduced in Arkwright's ' The Pointer j and his Predecessors ' (London, A. L. ' Humphreys, 1902). It is from an etch'ng of a large oil painting, giving a por- trait of the second Duke of Kingston am"ng his poin ers, with a view of his home, Thoresby, in tl.e background. Redgrave says it is dated 1725. The colouring of the or ginal is very beautiful, all the pointers are liver and white, and it is supposed to be the earliest picture of this breed of dog. It is in the possession of Earl Manvers, Thoresby Park, Ollerton, Nottinghamshire. ARCHIBALD SPARKE. GRAY'S 'ELEGY' (12 S. viii. 294). " Noiseless tenor " was not apparently Gray's first intention in line 76. In the 'Eraser' MS., usually regarded as a first j draft of the ' Elegy ' we have " silent " with | " noiseless " written over it. See the note : in D. C. Tovey's edition of Gray's ' English j Poems,' p. 155. Wordsworth used the com- ; bination " even tenor " a few lines from the j enH of his ' Ode, 1814,' and Tennyson | in section Ixxxv. of ' In Memoriam,' and j stanza 5 has My blood an even tenor kept. EDWARD BENSLY. JJotes on Jloofetf. The Church Bells of Lancashire. Part IV. The Hundred of Amounderness. By F. H. Cheet- ham. THIS brochure has been reprinted from the Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire i Antiquarian Society and a few copies are for j sale, to be obtained from the author. Our readers know the character of Mr. Cheet- ham's work so well that commendatory words are out of place. This instalment of his task of cataloguing the bells in the older Lancashire | churches displays all his wonted care, thorough- ness and appreciation of picturesque antiquarian detail. The Amounderness hundred embraces six ! ancient parishes, subdivided, in 1915, into no' fewer than 63. A dozen of the churches re- present pre-Reformation chapels. Twenty- five churches fulfil the condition laid down by Mr. Cheetham for inclusion in his work i.e., they were founded before the end of the eighteenth ' century. The examination of their bells was not in every instance an easy task. In four cases the bells i are in bell-cotes accessible only by going up i outside ladders. In two churches where they , hang in towers they are reached through a man- , hole in the ceiling of the porch. At Warton the ' bell is in a wooden turret over the chancel arch, and is chimed from the porch at the east end of the north aisle by a pulley carrying a rope which goes over the roofs and through a hole in the porch roof. Ladders over the roof are the only means of reaching it. Seeing this church was built as late as 1 885-6 we may echo Mr. Cheetham's astonishment at so strange a method of bell- ringing. The most interesting church in the hundred in the matter of bells is St. Michael- on- Wyre. It possesses not only the much-discussed fifteenth- century French treble, but also the oldest of the three seventeenth-century bells still in the hundred, and an eighteenth-century bell from the Rudhall bell-foundry at Gloucester. The French bell bears an inscription showing that it was the gift to some church of Catherine de Berneuilles, Lady of Neufchatel and Wicquinghen, places in the department of the Pas-de-Calais. Mr. Cheetham, as our readers know, was brought by the fortune of war as near to this neighbour- hood as St. Omer. Inquiries then made of local antiquaries as to this bell unfortunately brought no further light upon it. It must still be considered as most likely " butin de guerre." The vestry book shows that the tenor cast by Abraham Rudhall was paid for by levying a rate of twelve pence in the pound in the parish of St. Michael. The second oldest bell in the hundred is the larger Wood Plumpton bell dated 1596. We should like to know more of an old bell belonging, apparently, to Grimsargh, which was mentioned in 1871 as in the vicarage garden, having the inscription " Mater Dei, Ora Pro Nobis, 1687. R.A." a combination that suggests a history as yet by no means satisfactorily brought out. A few customs connected with bell-ringing are noted the continuance at Poulton-le-Fylde both of the pancake bell and of the curfew between September and March ; and the curfew and (presumably) angelus at Preston St. John continued till near the twentieth century. At Poulton, too, it appears they ring the bells on Sundays before matins and evensong for a solid half -hour. Mr. Cheetham gives us three facsimiles of bell inscriptions, among them reproductions of the rubbings from the three old bells of Broughton, which were melted down in 1884, the metal being used again. The oldest, by its invocation to St. Peter, was clearly a pre-Reformation bell. It bore an interesting shield, the initials whereon T.B. have been taken to be those of Thomas Bett of Leicester, c. 1530. The two others were seventeenth-century bells by Seller of York and Hutton of Congleton, and the disappearance of the three is certainly to be regretted. Besides the careful description of each bell Mr. Cheetham gives us all particulars connected with bells and bell-ringers to be found in the different records of the respective parishes, and sundry pleasant anecdotes and descriptions culled from out-of-the-way sources. The Quarterly Review for April has several articles which should attract the attention of our readers. Dean Inge's paper on ' The White Man and his Rivals ' raises many interesting questions in ethnology as well as in practical