Page:Notes and Queries - Series 7 - Volume 5.djvu/23

7 S. V. 7, ’88.]  was the trivial one of not dividing it into lines. I did not deem it necessary to take up the valuable space of ‘N. & Q.’ by specially drawing attention to each individual error, as I inferred the plan I adopted to be the better.

copy of the inscription in ‘Greater London’ appears between inverted commas, and should, therefore, I maintain, be an accurate quotation, whether set out in lines or in paragraph form. There can be only one correct copy; and had intended merely giving his “version” of the inscription, he should hardly have preceded it with the words, “The inscription runs as follows,” and then quoted it.

In conclusion, I may say, I have yet to learn that inscriptions should be given incorrectly in books intended for “popular reading” any more than in “county histories.”

If the whole work is like the portion devoted to this neighbourhood, it is very far from trustworthy. I select three instances in proof.

1. On p. 17 of part i. it is stated: “Some almshouses were built at Strand-on-the-Green in 1725, but they have been demolished.” They were repaired in 1816, and are still standing.

2. On p. 21, part i. we read, “Here too [i.e., Ealing Parish Church] lies buried Sir John Maynard.” I was told by the late vicar that this is not the case; Maynard’s wife is buried in the churchyard. Hence the confusion.

3. On p. 43, same part, is a description of Heston Church. No notice is taken of the singular (and with one exception unique) lych gate, three hundred years old, and its contrivance of a suspended mass of stone, whereby it automatically closes, though the gate figures on a very small scale in the woodcut. As a well-known antiquarian contributor to the columns of ‘N. & Q.’ once said to me, much of the book gives one the idea of being done at second hand.

(7 S. iv. 287).—This pseudonym, according to Cushing, was used by John Harris, an English member of the Society of Friends, who was born in 1784, resided successively at Ratcliff, Wapping, and Kingston-upon-Thames, and died in 1815. He was also the author of ‘Tit for Tat: Original Poems for Juvenile Minds,’ London, 1830, and ‘Parliamentary Letters.’ The fourth edition of the ‘Rough Sketches of Bath’ was published at London in 1819, by Baldwin & Cradock.

(6 S. vii. 48).—If I may be allowed to answer my own query as to the source of error in nearly all the biographical notices of Dr. John Blair, the author of ‘Chronology,’ I find that the Gentleman’s Magazine (1782, vol. lii, p. 312) is responsible. Dr. Blair had a brother William, but he was in the H.E.I.C. army, and was at Benares at the time of the doctor’s death, which may account for the error passing unnoticed. Dr. John and Col. William Blair were sons of John Blair of Edinburgh. On the other hand, Capt. William Blair, R.N., who was killed in Rodney’s action, and whose brothers Thomas and Sir Robert distinguished themselves in the Company’s military service, was a son of Daniel Blair of Burntisland, by Barbara, daughter of Sir John Whitefoord of Milntoun, and Robena Lockhart, daughter of James Lockhart of Cleghorn. John Blair of Edinburgh and Daniel Blair of Burntisland were brothers; but hitherto I have not found the place or date of their birth.

&c. (7 S. iv. 260, 296).—These lines occur in the old and famous ballad called ‘Waly! Waly!’:—

And again in ‘Lady Barbara Erskine’s Lament, ibid., p. 271:—

(7 S. iv. 488).— asks “why a hat is called a goss. And is it slang?” It is not the name for a hat, but it was the name of a special sort of hat. Between 1830 and 1836 a London maker invented a hat to which, on account of its lightness, he gave the name of “gossamer,” and it was largely advertised under that name. The price was four and ninepence, and a man who wore one was sure to be quizzed—“chaffed,” we should say now—about his “four and ninepenny goss.” Goss, thus used, was certainly slang, but only as cab and bus are slang for cabriolet and omnibus. Cab has long since become a legitimate word, and although bus is still vulgar, it is so commonly used that not long ago the Times described an entertainment given to “busmen.” Goss is a common mispronunciation of gorse. Furze is not a very uncommon name, and, by an odd combination, there was a few years ago in London the firm of Heath, Furze & Co.

The term goss as applied to a hat is of a slangy nature. It denoted in my schoolboy days the ordinary tall silk hat, as distinguished from a cap, or low-crowned hat. I always understood that the name was an abbreviation of a “Patent Gossamer Hat,” said to have been largely advertised in the earlier “forties” (at the time when beaver