Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/31

 9 th S. I. JAN. 8, '98. J

NOTES AND QUERIES.

Clerk later in the same year. He succeeded Hope as Lord President and Lord Justice- General in 1841. He retired in 1852 (forty- one years).

Sir George Deas, Lord Deas (1804-1887), was appointed a Lord of Session and Judge of Exchequer in 1853, and a Lord of Justiciary in 1854. He resigned in 1885 (thirty-two years).

John Inglis, Lord Glencorse (1810-1891), was appointed Lord Justice Clerk in 1858, and Lord President and Lord Justice-General in 1867. He held office until his death (thirty- three years). J. A.

Edinburgh.

To the names of those already given that of the late Hugh Barclay, LL.D., Sheriff Substitute of Perthshire, may be added, as having for a much longer period occupied the bench. He received his appointment in 1829, and retired from office in October, 1883, at the age of eighty-four, the father of the judicial bench in Great Britain, having dis- charged the onerous and important duties of Judge Ordinary of the large county of Perth for fifty-four years. He did not long enjoy his well - merited rest, having died in the following year. Dulce et venerabile nomen. Few in Scotland were better known or more revered than Sheriff Barclay for his ability as a lawyer, soundness as a judge, and use- fulness as a citizen in every good work. He was a multifarious writer, and his legal works are held in much esteem by the profession. Apart from his eminence as a judge and an author, he was one of the most kind-hearted and amiable of men, and justly endeared himself to all who had the privilege of his acquaintance. A. G. KEID.

Auchterarder.

POPE AND THOMSON.

(See 8 th S. xii. 327,389, 437.) I AM obliged by, and readers of ' N. & Q.' will value, MR. TOVEY'S careful supplementary account of the disputed MS. readings of ' The Seasons.' My object in stating my query in ' N. & Q.,' however, was more to emphasize the expediency of an additional scrutiny of the calligraphy of the second writer in the revised MS. I was not unaware of MR. TOVEY'S minute and painstaking investiga- tion on the subject, as evinced in his notes to the new Aldine edition of Thomson ; but it seemed to me that, in face of all the evidence there adduced, Mr. Churton Collins had com- pletely reduced the crux of the matter to one of handwriting. I am still inclined to believe, in the absence of decided proof that the hand-

writing corresponds to Pope's, that the writer of the corrected lines was simply an amanu- ensis working at Thomson's dictation. Mr. Collins's argument, which is summarized as follows, is very convincing. He says :

" What has long, therefore, been represented and circulated as an undisputed fact, namely, that Pope assisted Thomson in the revision of ' The Seasons,' rests not, as all Thomson's modern editors have supposed, on the traditions of the eighteenth cen- tury and on the testimony of authenticated hand- writing, but on a mere assumption of Mitford. That the volume in question really belonged to Thomson, and that the corrections are original, hardly admits of doubt, though Mitford gives neither the pedigree nor the history of this most interesting literary relic. It is, of course, possible that the corrections are Thomson's own, and that the differences in the handwriting are attributable to the fact that in some cases he was his own scribe, in others he employed an amanuensis ; but the intrinsic unlike- ness of the corrections made in the strange hand to his characteristic style renders this improbable. In any case, there is nothing to warrant the assump- tion that the corrector was Pope."

With the exception of the fact that Mr. Collins expresses doubt as to the internal resemblance between the revised readings of 'The Seasons' and that of Thomson's recognized work, the argument effectually re- solves itself into one in favour of Thomson's authorship of the disputed emendations. And I think most students of Thomson will admit that the advance he made from first to last in point of style, as shown especially in 'The Castle of Indolence ' and in his later dramas, goes far to explain this divergency of manner between the early and later text of 'The Seasons.'

In support of Mr. Collins's contention (to my mind, however, already sufficiently strong), I would urge one or two further points of evidence.

1. Thomson, who, despite MR. TOVEY'S ill- advised gibe, gave no token in the course of his career that he was stamped with dis- honesty, declared himself to be his own re- viser. In a letter to Lyttelton, 14 July, 1743, he says :

" Some reasons prevent my waiting upon you immediately ; but, if you will be so good as let me know how long you design to stay in the country, nothing shall hinder me from passing three weeks or a month with you before you leave it. In the meantime, I will go on correcting 'The Seasons,' and hope to carry down more than one of them with me."

If Mitford's theory is to be accepted, Pope ought to have been somehow smuggled into that visit to Hagley ; but no record appears of such an extraordinary step.

2. The vast amount of correction involved in the revised edition of ' The Seasons ' im- plies a contrast too tremendous with the