Page:Notes and Queries - Series 7 - Volume 5.djvu/25

7 S. V. 7, ’88.]  vicar then said, ‘The penance laid upon you is that you go to the assize court at Wells, when it shall next be held, and take your place where I shall set you beside the prisoner at the bar. Will you accept that penance?’ The man answered, ‘Yes.’ Turning to the congregation, the vicar said, ‘I am going to ask you all a question. Seeing that this man has humbled himself in the house of God, and provided he fulfils his promise, will you forgive him? If so, answer “I will. The congregation replied, ‘I will.’ The vicar continued: ‘One thing more. Will you all, so far as opportunity may permit, so help this man towards living a better life, and shield him from reproach in this matter? If so, answer “I will. The congregation replied, ‘I will.’ The vicar then, turning to the young man, pronounced these words: ‘God be with thee, my son, and give thee the peace of true repentance to live a better life from this time henceforth. Amen.’ The vicar afterwards ascended the pulpit and preached a sermon from the twenty-first verse of the eighteenth chapter of St. Matthew.”

I have heard of a later case of public penance than 1850, but I do not recollect the details. The sinner’s name began with a T, and it occurred in Chester. Doubtless correspondents from that city could give full particulars to.

(7 S. iv. 486).—There is a view of Ockwells House, Berkshire, with coloured illustrations of four of the window lights, in the additional plates to Lysons’s ‘Berkshire.’ The arms there given are, in one plate, those of Henry VI. and his queen, with the mottoes, “Dieu et mon droit” and “Humble et loiall”; and, in the other plate, of Norreys (not Marreys), the owners of the house, and Beaufort, Duke of Somerset. But the arms of Norreys are not those usually borne by that family, but Argent, a chevron between three ravens’ heads erased sable. Crest, a raven, wings elevated, sable. Supporters, two beavers. Motto, “Feythfully serve.” This coat appears to have boenbeen [sic] borne by John Norreys, Esq., the builder of Ockwells House, in 1465, as heir of the family of Ravenscroft. The name “Norrys” occurs at the foot of the light. He impales, Quarterly, 1 and 4, Bendy of ten, or and azure (Mountfort); 2 and 3, Or, two bars gules and a bend azure (Wake of Kent). There is no mitre to be seen here or in the other glass that Lysons has engraved. He mentions, p. *705, that among the other arms in these beautiful windows are the Abbey of Westminster, and these were anciently, Azure, on a chief indented or, a crozier on the dexter and a mitre on the sinister, both gules. This is, therefore, probably the coat intended in the report of the law case to which your correspondent refers. The mitre is a very rare charge in the arms of a private family (see Papworth’s ‘Ordinary,’ p. 979), but it occurs in those of several bishoprics and religious houses, as Carlyle, Chester, Llandaff, and Norwich; and many bishops differenced their paternal arms with a mitre. Some thirty examples will be found in Bedford’s ‘Blazon of Episcopacy.’ The representatives of some of these continued to bear the mitre in their arms, as in the case of the family of Peploe, of Salop.

have read the ‘Anacalypsus’ of Godfrey Higgins, and the ‘De Miraculis Mortuorum’ of L. F. Garmann. Having performed these feats, it has been our wont to boast that no book could be so wild, stupid, or ill-arranged as to be unconquerable by us. How vain our pretensions were Mr. Waite has demonstrated. We have found it as impossible to pierce the dense fog in which he has enveloped himself as it would be to read a book in a language the very characters of which were unknown to us. His ‘Real History of the Rosicrucians’ is not a history of anything in the heavens above or the earth beneath. It is a mere string of facts, fancies, and guesses, which have some relation to the mysticism which the brethren of the Rosy Cross have professed. The ‘Percy Anecdotes’ might as well be called a “history of men, manners, and morals,” or the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ treated as a serious contribution to mental science. The foregoing books are amusing and instructive. The man is indeed to be envied who can derive entertainment from Mr. Waite’s pages.

Two things in this book strike us as particularly senseless. We have page after page concerning the mystical meanings of the rose and the sign of the cross. Now, as to the first, it is the most attractive of flowers, and is very widely distributed. It need not surprise us, therefore, that the “flos florum” should have become the flower of Venus, a type of the blessed virgin, a mute symbol at burials, a Plantagenet and a Stuart badge, that the Popes should have sent the “rosa aurea” to kings as a symbol of joy and hope, or that garlands of roses should have been used as a type of joy at the Feast of Corpus Christi. What does astonish is that any one should imagine that the heavenly rose of Dante’s divine vision has anything to do with the senseless dreams of those misguided persons, mediæval and modern, who have manufactured a stupid, and in some instances revolting, mysticism from the purest and holiest symbols which nature affords us. It is only fair to say that Mr. Waite is not the originator of the idea. It comes, he tells us, from Eliphas Levi, who made the profound discovery that the ‘Roman de la Rose’ and the ‘Divina Commedia’ are two opposite forms of the same work.

The pages that are given to the cross are even more silly. Mr. Waite has had many forerunners. It is obvious that the cross is one of the simplest of signs, and it is but natural that many peoples should have hit on it as a type or symbol of something. To suppose that the Christian use of this sign has come from heathenism or the secret societies shows a want of imaginative appreciation of the central fact of the Gospel history as well as of ecclesiastical history and art.

books are always pleasant reading, and are invariably full of wide and varied information. ‘Life and Labour’ has been written on the same lines as ‘Self-Help’ and ‘Character.’ It treats in eleven chapters of