Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/653

 12 s. ix. DEC. si, 1921.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 539 originated in Mexico when a command of cavalry in camp adjacent to an infantry command who were quartered in the native adobe huts nicknamed the latter " Adobes," which was quickly corrupted into " Dough- boys." DUMP (p. 347). Where soil or rock from ex- cavations, garbage, &c., is unloaded. GUY (p. 344, A). A contemptuous appellation given to one who is at the moment obnoxious to the speaker. KID (p. 344, A). Children of either sex. In vogue for the past twenty or more years. RED-CAPS (p. 344, A). Name given to porters at U.S. railway stations, who wear red caps. So LONG (p. 347, C). Old-time form of American good-bye. SONNY (p. 384, A). A term used in addressing youth by their seniors. Equivalent to " my lad " in England. SPUD (p. 347, C). Name for potato in America for sixty years or more. STIFF (p. 347, C). American slang for " corpse." STUNG (p. 385, C). Not Army slang, but American for " swindled." GEO. MERRYWEATHER. Highland Park, Illinois, U.S.A. on The Laureateship. A Study of the Office of Poet Laureate in England, with Some Account of the Poets. By Edmund Kemper Broadus, Pro- fessor of English at the University of Alberta. (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 15s. net.) THE minds that were trained under Victorian influences cannot easily dissociate the thought of Tennyson from their conception of a Poet Laureate. So completely did he fulfil and represent his office that he seemed to create tradition, and his contemporaries were not in- spired to look beyond him in connexion with it. Tennyson is not a personality to the present generation, however, and his office has survived him, therefore the time has come when a history of the Laureateship in England should be wel- comed. As the book before us goes back to the thirteenth century and covers the intervening period within the compass of 218 pages, the survey of succes- sive ages is necessarily rapid. Each reign, how- ever, would seem to contain for the writer only the matter with which he is concerned ; he is rarely betrayed into digression, and his own vivid interest in his subject becomes infectious. He introduces us first to those Poets Laureate who made the public ear familiar with their title as a university distinction. Bernard Andreas, to whom Henry VII. granted an annuity in 1486, was the first Poet Laureate whose position in any way corresponded to our modern con- ception of it, and the office lapsed at his death, the tradition that assigns it to Spenser and later to Ben Jonson is not supported by the facts. Under the rule of the Tudors and the Stuarts a man of letters, in England as elsewhere, was mainly dependent on the generosity of individuals for his livelihood. Spenser and Jonson may have been supported by the royal bounty and in return may have expressed the sentiments that were seemly in a courtier, but in so doing they only followed the ordinary usage. A man of letters was expected to employ his art to extol his patron. It may be claimed for Dryden, however, that he was officially the Poet Laureate, and his relation to his office has been made the theme of very careful study. The various historians of the period have found scope for criticism in the con- duct of Dryden, and the portraits of him that have become classical are not pleasing. The pages devoted to him in the present volume are free from all political bias, and they suggest that the common verdict on him may be unduly harsh. Certainly he was qualified, by his dis- position as well as by his genius, for the place assigned to him, for few Englishmen have ever paid such deference to existing authority. The office, to which his great gifts had lent dignity, was degraded by his successors. The names of Thomas Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Nicholas Rowe, Laurence Eusden and James Pye are not indis- solubly linked with the glory of English Letters. With the exception of Tate, who is responsible for translations of the Psalms and for a popular I hymn, the bearers of them are forgotten and we are indebted to Mr. Broadus for the delight- fully humorous selection from their works which he presents to us. We have no difficulty in accepting his statement that by the middle of the eighteenth century the Laureateship had become a joke, and it is* not astonishing that the poet Gray rejected it with scorn. When in 1813 it was offered to Walter Scott he was advised by the Duke of Buccleuch that " the situation by the general concurrence of the world is stamped as ridiculous." Refused by Scott, it passed to at his death, it could be fittingly assigned to In his consideration of Southey, Mr. Broadus displays the same discrimination as he brought to bear on Dryden. He is less happy in the concluding pages, which bring us to the present time, but his book as a whole is a useful con- tribution to the history of English letters, well planned, well balanced, and well written. The Calendar : Its History, Structure and Im- provement By Alexander Philip. (Cambridge University Press. 7s. 6d.) MB. PHILIP'S name is already associated with Calendar reform. His new book, though he gives the tyro in matters chronological a short, work- manlike survey of the history of the Calendar and a careful elementary account of its structure, has clearly for its chief purpose to recommend changes. He wishes for a fixed Easter, for the equalization of the quarters of the year, and for a scheme whereby the days of the month should severally year by year fall on the same day of the week. Some inconveniences in our present Calendar may be admitted, but we think Mr. Philip writes of them with exaggeration. The International Chamber of Commerce has decided to ask the prin- cipal Governments to convene a conference on Calendar reform, and a Bill to provide a fixed
 * Southey, and he, though not infrequently absurd
 * himself, so far redeemed it from absurdity that,
 * Wordsworth.