Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/627

 12 s. viii. JUNE 25 3 i92i.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 517 DANTEIANA (12 S. viii. 463). I have. verse. The Ptolemaic system was good read with much interest MR, McGoVERN's | enough for many men of learning, and, recent remarks under this heading, but 1 1 at any rate, it had in its favour the evidence cannot agree with him in attributing ' ' un- ! of the senses ; we profess to believe in the disguised effrontery " and " extraordinary teaching of Copernicus, though the majority vanity " to Dante, because he ranks himself j of men would probably find it hard to give as poet above Ovid and Lucan. Most a reason for the truth, now axiomatic, competent critics, I imagine, would agree ! that the earth goes round the sun. But is that Dante is right in his estimate, and there it not possible that the Coperniean system is no lapse from humility on the part of a ! may some day be dethroned, or superseded man who knows his own place in the world i by some wider synthesis, and that an after and realizes that it is a high one. The generation will mock at us for our ad- production of good poetry is the surest i herence to a conception of the universe path to immortality of fame ; every poet, I that seems to them erroneous or inadequate ? then, has the right to ask if he is likely to -j PERCY ARMSTRONG be immortal and if he decides in the | The Authors' Club, Whitehall Court, S.W. affirmative and proves to be correct in his j conjecture, it merely shows that he is gifted THE CAVEAC TAVERN (12 S. vi 170, 216 with prophetic insight and critical acumen. 2 79 ; viii. 453). Anent J. P. DE C/s friendly The number of poets who have correctly information, quite a nest of taverns would predicted their own immortality is very aar to haye existed in Spread Eagle great. Or to take an example from the Court and the contiguous portion of Thread- life of another superman when Gourgaud needle street. I venture the surmise that wished to leave St. Helena and Napoleon, Caveac's (or Caviack's), although always to cheer him up and keep him there, pointed desc ribed as being situate in Spread Eagle o*t to him that he, by coming to Longwood, ; Court? not have been altogether of it, had made his name immortal, was Napoleon but stood tl n or about the site guilty of pride? Rather it would have of Lemann > s biscuit-shop, or Banister's, been strange on his part if he had neglected the butc her's, in Threadneedle Street. The to use so obvious an argument. i illustration to which MR. ANDREW OLIVER So, too, MR. McGovERN seems to imply referred (12 S. vi. 279) might settle the that some apology may possibly be due from difficult point as to location, admirers of Dante because of his astrology CECIL CLARKE.. and his anti-Scriptural conception of the i Junior Athenaeum Club, material torments of Hell. At any rate MR. MCGOVERN says that he can overlook "MAGDALEN" OR " MAWDLEN " (12 S. them. But, as he admits, it is unreason- j viii. 366, 417, 453, 494). It is customary to able to affirm that a masterpiece suffers i regard this change as phonetic and to because it reflects the intellectual notions attribute it to the dropping of the g. But and cosmogony of the age in which it was Magdalene became Madeleyne in Middle composed. Who would think of blaming English, and that does not t ally with Homer because he says that Poseidon, Mawdlen. Has the possibility that the returning from the Ethiopians, saw Odysseus change originated in scribal error ever somewhere in the Mediterranean from the received due consideration ? mountains of the Solymi; or, again, that, In early medieval times there were Helios kept an eye on Aphrodite, when her forms of g and u which were occasionally lord went off to a far-distant country ? j mistaken one for the other. In the eighth - The very pettiness of Homer's cosmogony | century Corpus Glossary we find " exugiae " adds an additional charm to his poems, and ' k frigula '' for exuviae and friuula I suggest, moreover, that it would be captious (frivola). In Henry of Huntingdon (twelfth to blame a poet because he accords as much ' century) the name of Archbishop Plegmund respect to tradition as to the words of (appears as " Pleuxmmd." In the repro- Scripture : the intellectual world would ! duction of the ancient map that Bertram indeed be poor if men had confined them- i published along with Pseudo-Richard, the selves rigidly to the letter of the Bible. ! lithographer misrepresented Jk*[tiitf] by Lastly, strange as it may seem to say so, i " fig " more than twenty times. In the we should be wise to hold with due modesty thirteenth-century Cotton MS., Vespasian to our astronomical conceptions of the uni- A. XIV., in the Welch tract %' De Situ