Page:Notes and Queries - Series 7 - Volume 5.djvu/134

126 terms, which are equally interesting from a phonological point of view. A long list of English words employed in Indian kitchens, which are indispensable for an Anglo-Indian housewife to be acquainted with, is given in Punjab Notes and Queries, ii. 62. Communications on the subject of the introduction of Portuguese words into Hindústání will be found in the same periodical, ii. 79, 117, 135, 152, 173. The formation of language is a phenomenon which comes under our daily observation, and it is well to note its changing aspects.

—A letter appeared in the Times of January 25 relating to West’s picture, now exhibited at Burlington House, No. 156, questioning the figures standing round the dying general. I have a coloured engraving, published by Sayers, January 1, 1772, from the picture by Edward Penny, Professor of Painting to the Royal Academy, of the same subject. In this there are only three figures besides the general, two Grenadiers and an officer in a violet-coloured uniform with blue facings (the latter may be of the Artillery or a surgeon), but there are no instruments visible. In Penny’s and West’s pictures the musket, belts, and bayonet carried by the general lie in the foreground. West’s work was painted in 1796. The grouping in his picture is most improbable. Col. the Hon. Simon Fraser, commanding the 78th Regiment, at that moment closely engaged, would certainly not be in the position in which he is placed. The red Indian and the Canadian trapper, who obscure Col. Fraser’s figure, were added, no doubt, for the sake of pictorial effect.

On the day preceding the battle of Quebec, while descending the St. Lawrence, Wolfe read to his staff Gray’s ‘Elegy,’ an early copy of which had been sent to him by the Duchess of Bolton, to whom he was engaged to be married. On finishing the last stanza, Wolfe said, “I would sooner have written that poem than beat the French tomorrow.” —If the following specimen of Pepys’s criticism has not already appeared in ‘N. & Q.’ perhaps it may be worth insertion:—

Charles II.’s copy of this tragi-comedy, by Sir Samuel Tuke, is in the Dyce Library, South Kensington Museum. —By the removal of this edifice another of the landmarks of old London has disappeared. The Chapter Coffee-House had long lost its original character, for, after being closed for some little while, it became a tavern in 1854. It had retained many of its old features about 1849–50, when I occasionally visited it in company with a friend having relations of business in the neighbourhood. I remember that it still had a reputation for punch, and the frequent joke of the old grey-haired waiter when an additional half glass was ordered by some youthful customer, under the name of an “overtaker,” was that persistence in such habits would sooner or later result in an “undertaker.”

In the golden days of coffee-houses, during the last century, the Chapter was one of the “houses of call” for the unemployed clergy, of whom George Colman writes in the Connoisseur, No. 1, January, 1754:—

The Chapter, however, was more frequented by authors and booksellers. It would needlessly encumber the columns of ‘N. & Q.’ to quote all the references to this once famous literary centre in English literature. Let it suffice to refer to the following:—Mrs. Gaskell’s ‘Life of Charlotte Brontë,’ 1858, p. 298; Masson’s ‘Chatterton,’ 1874, pp. 149–152; and Timbs’s ‘Clubs and Club Life,’ 1872, pp. 153–158, See also Goldsmith’s ‘Citizen of the World,’ Letter 57. (See 6 S. ix. 507; x. 34, 97, 195.)—It is an interesting occupation to dispel vulgar errors; but care must be taken in hunting for such that we do not light upon a mare’s nest instead. This reflection was suggested by reading a leading article in the Daily News of November 4, in which it is stated that the word morse, in the tenth chapter of ‘The Monastery’—Father Eustace to Christie of the Clinthill: “Dost thou so soon morse thoughts of slaughter?”—is only a misprint for nurse. Not to mention that remorse is a common English word, the fact that “morsing-horn” is found in the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ should have suggested a doubt on this point, which is fully discussed in the tenth volume (see p. 97) of the Sixth Series of ‘N. & Q.’ The fact seems to be that morse is an old Scotch word, derived (through the French amorcer, Old French amorcher) from the Latin mordeo, morsi, to bite. Father Eustace is made to reproach Christie with morsing—i.e., biting (a common metaphor for eagerly entertaining or constantly meditating)—thoughts of slaughter. A morsing-horn was a powder-flask for priming, and called “morsing” from its containing a morsel, or small quantity.