Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/485

 12 s. ix. NOV. 12, 1921.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 399 relics of " Monsenyor Saint John the Evange- ' list " which had been brought thither by the , Turks after the taking of Ephesus and pledged j there for wheat. These were a piece of the true | Cross ; a seamless shirt made for Saint John by Our Lady in which he had been wont to say Mass ; and a book called ' Apocalypse ' written by the Saint's own hand. These relics being divided by lot the true Cross came to Muntaner (this is now in the Cathedral of Genoa). He amassed a huge treasure which, however, he lost irrecoverably when his galley was taken and plundered by the Venetians and himself made prisoner. Sent back to the Company, after many further exploits and vicissitudes, he returned to Sicily to make preparations for his marrage. King Fadrique, however, compelled him to forgo that for the time and occupy himself with the conquest of Jerba, where, after at last getting duly married to a long-affianced bride, he spent three years. The delay and its cause are typical. During the last years which he chronicles we find him back from the East and busied in the more personal service of the Royal house to which he was so whole-heartedly devoted, at Messina, Perpignan, and at last at the coronation at Saragossa. (By the way, it must surely be a clerical errdr which, in the account of this ceremony, explains " nones " in a footnote as " 9 p.m." !) Besides its main historical importance this latter half of the Chronicle is no less rich than the former in curious and picturesque incident and in portraiture, which is interesting partly from the formula in which it is comprised and partly from the touches which, while adhering to the formula, have a look of verity in them. Muntaner, though he is not quite in the front rank of the authors of his kind, well deserves to be much read. The Site of the Globe Playhouse, Southwark. (The London County Council. Is. Gd.) THE much-vexed question of the site of the Globe Playhouse may now be considered as settled. In this very interesting and workmanlike pamph- let, published by the London County Council, we have fully set out both the evidence and arguments which brought Dr. Wallace to believe the Playhouse stood north of Maid Lane, and those which, after fresh research, have confirmed the traditional view that its site was to the south. Dr. Wallace had a very good case for his opinion : in fact, the terms of the lease- transcript on which he mainly relied have to be explained as a clerical error, the scribe who drew up the lease having worked from a plan which had the north at the bottom, and having reversed all the boundaries by reading it in the more usual way. But the difficulty of supposing the existence of a " Park " to the north of Maid Lane, which his theory made necessary, is, through the nature of the ground and its known history, virtually insurmountable. This pamphlet, moreover, shows that the frontage of Maid Lane to the north was so occupied in the sixteenth century that no room is left in which to place the Globe. The crucial document in positive proof that the site was on the south of the lane is Judith Brend 's jointure. Dr. Wallace has made use of this but in error on his own side. A closer examina- tion, together with a comparison between the Brend document and other records, makes it clear that the property alluded to as being " where the late playhouse called the Globe " included a house on the south side of the Lane nay, that a house actually adjoining the Globe was on the south of the Lane. But the researches of the London County Council have gained more than this : they have identified the actual site of the Globe Estate by a careful examination of the records and plans of Messrs. Barclay, Perkins and Co.'s brewery which now occupies it. To ample quotations from documents are added several plans, so that the whole matter is presented with a convincing lucidity. Of no less interest than the main treatise is Mr. Forrest's Appendix on the Architecture of the first Globe Theatre, with its excellent draw- ings of conjectural reconstructions of the building both exterior and interior. No student of Shake- speare should miss this pamphlet, whose forty odd pages are worth more than many of the stout volumes on Shakespeare which have from time to time appeared. English Prose. Vol. iii. Walpole to Lamb. Chosen and arranged by W. Peacock. (Hum- phrey Milford, 2s. &d.) THIS third volume of selections from English prose is composed of extracts from twenty-eight writers, some of whom are among the most difficult for Mr. Peacock's purpose. What shall one choose, as their finest deliverance, from Gibbon or Scott, even from Burke or Jane Austen ? Recognizing the difficulty, we still think that the task of selection in this volume has been somewhat less happily accomplished than in the former ones. Out of seven passages of Goldsmith's prose an immensely long one comes from ' She Stoops to Conquer,' and four from ' The Vicar of Wakefield.' The remaining two are ' The Strolling Player,' which Goldsmith j included in his own selection of his Essays, and Now everybody knows or may know ' The Vicar ' by heart : there are countless editions of it : but the rest of Goldsmith which should furnish equally fine prose is not nearly well enough known, and here is an opportunity lost of making readers acquainted with him. The question of the propriety of introducing scenes from plays into such a volume as this has no doubt been considered. It seems to us certainly debatable ; and we should be inclined to give the contrary decision. The grounds for doing so would be that the dialogue of a play is so expressly written to be spoken and spoken to the accompaniment of acting that its true quality, as prose, hardly comes out when merely read from a book. In a minor degree this objection might lie against a good deal of the dialogue of novels : but the difference between dialogue intended to be read and dialogue intended to be spoken on the stage is sufficient to justify the one rather than the other. The extracts from Gibbon, Gilbert White and Smollett are very good. Burke, with two rather weakly rhetorical tirades from the ' Revolution in France/ comes off, to that extent, less well. Jane Austen is given rather lavishly,
 * The Man in Black ' from the ' Chinese Letters.'