Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/12

 NOTES AND QUEKIES. [9 th s. i. JAN. i,

Ah ! this is a far other tone from that

In which the Duke spoke eight, nine years ago.

Freeman, too, in his 'Norman Conquest' (i 642, ed. 1867), indulges in the same catachresis " The Anlaf here spoken of was another person from Olaf "; and only a few days ago I read in the manuscript of a Greek examination paper for a great school: "Why are the choruses [in the 'Eumenides' of ^Eschylus in another dialect from the rest of the play? I have treated above of a confusion of differen with other; in these three examples the con fusion is conversely of other with different, th( result, logically, being little better than non sense. In imitation of such constructions we might write "Another from him would do ' so and so, or improve the reading of Isaiah Iviii. 8 thus: "Thou hast discovered thyself to another from me."

Different is not the only word with which than is misused. " Superior than " is not new to me, and I have just seen in the catalogue for the new year of a well-known provincia] firm of seedsmen the following gardener's puff: "We gathered double the quantity off it than from any other." This is the language of illiteracy, but it does not outdo in impro- priety the polished Newman's phrase: "It has possessed me in a different way than ever before " (' Loss and Gain,' p. 306). We are all

familiar, too, with "hardly than" and

"scarcely than" outrages of speech as

detestable as they are common, though I have not collected examples, chiefly because such as present themselves to me are not printed in which than usurps the place of when. Here it is interesting to note that Addison (' Cato,' IV. iv.) could write " Scarce had I left my father, but I met him " a con- struction met with at the present day from the fact that but is now often used for than, not only with other as mentioned above, but with real comparatives, e. g., " No sooner had he said so, but he vanished."

The above was written before I had read the note (8 th S. xii. 477) in which MR. BAYNE adverts to the conflict of practice with pre- cept in regard to different. This is not the place for comment on his observations, but I may say that the expression " to differ with " is as finical as it is unnecessary. Why should differ have the syntax of disagree rather than that of dissent or its own ? F. ADAMS.

106A, Albany Road, Camberwell.

THE MORE FAMILY. THE Proceedings of the Society of Anti- quaries of London, on 18 March, 1897, again call attention to the date of birth of the Lord

Chancellor Sir Thomas More, and I think clearly establish it to have been in 1476-7, and not in 1480, as laid down by his great- grandson, Cresacre More, who wrote about eighty-five years after that event. * N. & Q.,' 4 th S. passim, takes the same view of the date, so that I think we may assume Cresacre More was incorrect ; and he almost seems to have doubts by his writing " about 1480." He has been hitherto believed to be corroborated by the date on Holbein's picture of the More family; but upon investigation it is found that the original at Basle bears no date at all, and it is also proved that the dates must have been subsequently added on the copies, which are dated a year after Holbein had left England. Even supposing the date (1530) had been correct, it might have been that of the finish of the picture, for as he lived in Sir Thomas More s house for some years he may have been two or more in completing it after its commencement in 1527. The earlier date of birth is also more consistent with the Chancellor's reporting in his ' Life of Richard III.' a conversation which he had heard in 1483, which he could scarcely have been precocious enough to have remarked had he been only three years old.

Now if we are satisfied to believe that Cresacre More and subsequent writers may have been incorrect in one instance, may we [not unfairly) assume they may have been in others, more especially as they wrote eighty or ninety years, or more, afterwards ?

The Chancellor's great-grandson narrates that Sir John married thrice, and that his irst wife was a Handcombe and the third a Barton, but makes no mention of the second wife, stating Sir Thomas to have been the son of the first. From the evidence which MR. WILLIAM ALDIS WRIGHT announced in N. & Q.,' 4 th S. ii. 365, which he found in a MS. in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, written, without doubt, by John More (after- wards Sir John), I think we must have grave misgivings as to the hitherto accepted par- ticulars about the names of these ladies, and especially as to the first-named having been
 * he mother of the Chancellor. If we believe
 * he MS. written in Latin by John More, he

narried on 25 April, 1474, Agnes, daughter )f Thomas Graunger, in the parish of St. Tiles Without, Cripplegate, London, and hat after a daughter Johanna, born 11 March, 475, he had a son Thomas, who was born

February, 1476/7 ; a daughter Agatha, >orn 31 January, 1479 ; son John, born

June, 1480; son Edward, born 3 Septem- >er, 1481 ; and daughter Elizabeth, born 2 September, 1482. I give these latter