Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/135

 ft* S.L FEB.

NOTES AND QUERIES.

to any deep feeling. The following lines, from the speech of Calypso to Ulysses, in Pope's translation, are quite an invention of Pope :

Farewell ! and ever joyful may'st thou be,

Nor break the transport with one thought of me.

There is nothing like the second line in the original. It is a good line, but it does not represent the character of Calypso as Homer meant to draw it. Virgil has taken more from the ' Odyssey ' than from the ' Iliad.' None but the author of ' Macbeth' could have written ' King Lear'; and I believe that none but the author of the ' Iliad ' could have written the ' Odyssey.' But it has been said that there were many authors of the ' Iliad.' How can any one who esteems poetry have such a thought ? Can we suppose that duction of many authors ? And can we not see the one great mind pervading the whole of the ' Iliad ' 1 E. YARDLEY.
 * Macbeth ' or ' Paradise Lost ' was the pro-

We must request correspondents desiring infor- mation on family matters of only private interest to affix their names and addresses to their queries, in order that the answers may be addressed to them direct.

THE CHARITABLE CORPORATION. In the early part of the seventeenth century a semi- philanthropic association was formed, incor- porated by royal charter, entitled the Charit- able Corporation, which was intended to benefit the poor by lending money at a low rate of interest on the security of pledges. The society, which was launcheu with a great flourish of trumpets, had offices in Laurence Pountney Hill (I think at the corner of Duck's Foot Lane) and a warehouse in Spring Gar- dens. After it had traded a short time, exten- sive defalcations were discovered, some of the principal officers absconded, and the society was wound up, the total loss on 5 Feb., 1731. amounting to nearly 488,000^., which occasioned widespread distress and recrimination, as did a similar society in our own days. Mrs. Anne Oldfield, the actress, and Bennet Langton, Dr. Johnson's friend, were shareholders. In the British Museum Library (357 C/5 2) is a printed broadside containing a letter in French (with an English translation) from John Angelo Belloni, dated Home, 4 May, 1732, addressed to the Committee of the Parliament of England appointed to in- spect the affairs of the Charitable Corporation, stating that Mr. Thomson had been arrested at Rome and was then a prisoner in the

castle of St. Angelo, and offering to give up Thomson's papers on the Committee agree- ing to certain conditions not specified in the letter, which a MS. note states was, by order of Parliament, burnt by the common hangman. Who was John Angelo Belloni, and what was the nature of the proposal he made to the Parliamentary Committee ? There are references to the Charitable Corporation in How's * History of Pawnbroking,' but they are of a meagre description. JOHN HEBB. Canonbury Mansions, IN.

INSCRIPTION ON A SUNDIAL. M. Jusserand, in his article * Ron sard and his Venddmois,' contributed to the Nineteenth Century last April, notices (p. 598) a Renaissance house at Montoire which has a sundial with a sceptical inscription, as follows :

Hie nee jura juvat meritis acquirere, Nam malis oritur sol, pariterque bonis.

"It must be said," he remarks, "for the honour of sundials, that they very rarely give such wicked hints," to which, if his tran- scription be exact, he might have added " in such queer Latin." The hexameter might be completed by adding velle, and the penta- meter made metrical by changing nam to namque. Conjectures, however, will not serve me. What I want is a correct copy of the couplet, and I shall be much obliged to any of your readers who will furnish me therewith.

F. ADAMS. 106A, Albany Road, Camberwell.

OCNERIA DISPAR. Would some one kindly tell me by what name this moth is called in England? AD. MiiLLER.

Berlin.

WILLIAM BOWER, OP BRISTOL. Can any one give me the lineage of this William Bower, whose name occurs in the pedigree of Hussey (Hutchins's 'Dorset,' iii. 80, second edition) of Edmondsham House, near Cranborne, Dorset ? Was he one of the Bowers of Berke- ley, co. Gloucester ? He married Ann Gold- wyer and had two sons: (1) Rev. William Bower (1731-82), of Oriel College, B.A., rector of Edmondsham and Sutton Walrond, who married his first cousin Philadelphia Fry, of Edmondsham House ; (2) Capt. Edmund Bower, R.N., of Prospect Hill, near Reading, who married his kinswoman Elizabeth Hill (born Goldwyer) and had issue.

A. R. BAYLEY.

St. Margaret's, Great Malvern.

SHORT A v. ITALIAN A. I am engaged upon a reading primer in which the pronun- ciation of each word is given by a new system of phonetic notation, and I find myself con-