Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/313

 j* s. I. APRIL 16, 'gal NOTES AND QUERIES.

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p !t-ly and literally, " upon himself," though " ir ei ben ei hun" (literally "upon his own h 5ad") would be correctly translated "on his o vn account." JOHN HOBSON MATTHEWS. Town Hall, Cardiff.

THE VOWEL COMBINATION EO. An inter- esting list of place-names containing this diphthong with instructions for their pro- nunciation is given in 4 fch S. xi. 202, but this does not include surnames. Can any reader tell me if the pronunciation commonly given in London to the name McLeod (rhyming with loud or doud} is really the form used in

1,~ TJ' -Ul ! 1 ' 'A n

(canto iv.) :

A numerous race ere stern McLeod O'er their bleak shores in vengeance strode, which show that in Scott's time the diph- thong in McLeod was pronounced as it is in the Irish surnames Keogh and Keown, viz., Avith the stress upon the o, a pronunciation which the etymology of the name shows to have been the original one. In fact, the current pronunciation of McLeod seems quite unaccountable unless we consider that this particular diphthong is beyond all rule, as indeed it seems to be not only in English, but also in some of the continental languages. Witness its curious usage in Hungarian, where, for example, in the name of the famous novelist Eotvos, it represents a single vowel sound. The pronouncing dictionaries have been sorely troubled by this name, which is two syllables and not three, and might be roughly rendered in English ortho- graphy by " Utvush." JAMES PLATT, Jun.

EATING OF SEALS. Some time ago I pub- ished in ' N. & Q.' (8 th S. iii. 124) several notes on stories relating to persons being compelled to eat the seals attached to official documents. I have since come upon three )ther examples. Whether they be genuine history or amusing fiction I have no means of knowing :

" In 1340 Edouard II. Lord of Beaujeu, having Carried off the daughter of a merchant of Ville- tranche, was summoned to give an account of his actions before the Parliament of Paris, but made the messenger swallow the seals of the commission, and flung him out of a window in his castle of Pouilly." A. J. C. Hare, ' South-Eastern France,' p. 99.

" Her irreverent behaviour in church was made subject of complaint to the Bishop of Lichfield, and he sent a citation, which, however, Lewis

Lhomas Lewis, her husband] is said to have forced the official to eat." Life of Joyce or Jocasta

wis ' 1557> in ' Dict ' Nat> Bi g ra P h y>' xxxiii -

The following cutting is taken from an article on 'The Perreaus and Mrs. Rudd,' communicated to the Catholic News by Mr. Dalrymple I. Belgrave. I may premise that Serjeant Davy was the leading counsel for Mrs. Rudd :

"The prisoner had a string of counsel, the leading counsel oeing Serjeant Davy, a barrister of the type that has survived at the Old Bailey and about the law courts to this day. A big man, with a loud voice and a rare power against witnesses, was ' Bull' Davy. In early life he had been a tradesman at Exeter. A bailiff had come to serve a writ on him, and he had slipped the poker into the fire, and then, bringing it out, had made the wretched officer of the law eat the writ, saying it was sheepskin, and would eat like mutton." 19 March, 1898, p. 14, col. 4.

EDWARD PEACOCK.

Dunstan House, Kirton-in-Lindsey.

THE DEATH OF CHATHAM. In the great work edited by the late Justin Winsor, under the title ' Narrative and Critical History of America,' the first chapter of the seventh volume is by Mr. E. J. Lowell, of the Massa- chusetts Historical Society, and is on the " Relations with Europe during the Revolu- tion." At p. 52 the death of the Earl of Chatham is mentioned, and stated to have occurred four days after the fit in the House of Lords which supervened on his last speech. As a matter of fact, this took place on 7 April, and Chatham's death on 11 May. Oddly enough, there is also a mistake of date in the account of Chatham in the fifth volume of the ninth edition of the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' where the speech in the House of Lords is said to have been made on 2, instead of 7, April, 1778. W. T. LYNN.

Blackheath.

" CHORIASMUS." MR. BAYNE'S memory was surely skittish when he slipped this word into the heading of his note (ante, p. 225) as the name of a figure of rhetoric. Chiasmus seems to be meant. But the employment of "this" for the nearer, and of "that" for the remoter, of two objects is not an ex- ample of chiasmus, or, indeed, of any figure that I can remember ; still less does chiasmus fit MR. BAYNE'S case of the use of "'those' for the friends," the nearer object, "and 'this' for Porteous," the remoter, which he says " would have afforded an example of a skilled rhetorician illustrating a recognized figure." Chiasmus is defined by the late Dr. Kennedy as the placing of a double antithesis in intro- verted order. An apt example would be "Cogito aliud, aliud dico." If the second half of this phrase is placed parallel to the first, a line drawn from verb to verb will