Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 1.djvu/374

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

[9* s. i. MAY 7,

As it is not always easy, even in China, to catch a wild goose and gander, tame ones are sometimes substituted, or sometimes even wooden or tin models, which are perhaps preferable at a wedding feast, as the bridegroom's envoy has to enter the bride's house with a goose in each hand, and these are placed upon a table, where they are expected to sit still during the prolonged ceremonies ! " ' Wanderings in China,' by C. F. Gordon-Gumming (London, Chatto & Windus, 1886).

H. ANDREWS.

BROWNINGIANA. In his well-known poem 'Muleykeh' Browning has initiated a prac- tice which one would like to see followed by all writers of verse who deal with Oriental subjects, and which the optimist may hope will some day even reach to our historians and geographers he has marked the tonic accent upon every foreign word. Much as I admire this, I must unfortunately deplore the fact that the poet was evidently much less careful in obtaining his information than he was in the means by which he passed it on to his public. At least half the Arabic names are wrongly accented. Hoseyn is the correct form of the name of the hero, but each of the twelve or more times that it occurs Browning marks it H6seyn. Brown- ing's Miizennem, obviously a passive parti- ciple^ of the second conjugation, should be Muzennem, and Ed-Darraj, of course, should be Ed-Darraj ; but the most curious of these errors is the case of the compound name Benu-Asad, in which, if I interpret it rightly as " Sons of the Lion," both elements are in- correctly accented. It should be Benu-A'sad. JAS. PLATT, Jun.

A RHYMING WARNING TO BOOK-BORROWERS. So far as I know, no formula has been devised and adopted as a protest against dog's - earing, soiling, and other maltreat- ment of books, although the awful warning against stealing them has been transcribed by hundreds of plebeian book-owners upon blank leaves, and still furnishes an occasional scribbling diversion to the schoolboy. The minatory doggerel has more than one variant, but it generally runs as follows :

Steal not this book for fear of shame, For in it is the owner's name, And when you die the Lord will say, Where is that book you stole away ?

The Scots have a somewhat similar rhyme, beginning :

ye thief ! how daur ye steal ! The subjoined lines were communicated by " Bookworm" to Leigh Hunt's London Journal, No. 34, 19 Nov., 1834. He found them, he says, written upon the blank leaf of a second- hand well-read copy of Burns's 'Songs,'

picked up by chance. Not only were they better worth printing than the greater part of "fugitive" magazine verses, but if (as I think is the case) they show a spark of rustic genius akin to that of Burns himself, they deserve, perhaps, to be transferred to the pages of f N. & Q.'

To THE READER. Afore ye tak in hand this beuk To these few lines jist gie a leuk.

Be sure that baith ye'r hands are clean,

Sic as are fitten to be seen,

Free fra a' dirt, an' black coal coom ;

Fra ash-hole dust, an' chimley bloom ;

0' creesh fra candle or fra lamp,

Upon it leave nae filthy stamp.

I 'd rather gie a siller croon,

Than see a butter' d finger'd loon,

Wi' parritch, reemin fra his chaps,

Fast fa'in down in slav'rin draps

Upon the beuk. Hech ! for each sowp,

1 'd wish a nettle in his doup ;

For every creeshie drap transparent,

I 'd wish his neck wi' a sair hair in 't :

Sic plague spots on ilk bonnie page,

Wad mak a sant e'en stamp wi' rage.

Reader, ye '11 no tak amiss,

Sic an impertinence as this :

Ye 'r no the ane that e'er wad do 't

An use a beuk like an old cloot ;

Ye wadna wi' y'er fingers soil it

Nor creesh, nor blot, nor rend, nor spoil it.

HENRY ATTWELL. Barnes.

SUGGESTION TO BINDERS OF PERIODICALS. Those who have to search for items in the back volumes of a magazine know how much time and trouble are saved when the back of each bound volume bears not only its own number, but the year of its publication.

M. K.

CURIOUS ANECDOTE OF CHANCELLOR HAR- COURT. The following, contained in an ori- ginal MS. note-book (in my possession) of the Rev. John Lambe, M.A., of Clare Hall, Cambridge, rector of Ridley, co. Kent, and written certainly not earlier than 1724 nor later than 1727, is probably unpublished, and, I think, worthy to be enshrined 'N.&Q.':-

"Lord Harcourt once Ld. Chancellor, now alive not many years since married a Widow Lady to his second wife that was advanced far in years as well as himself, soon after the death of his first, A little time before he was married he in private told his Chaplain he was speedily to be married, & would have him prepare a Wedding Sermon, it being as he said the Custom of his Family The Chaplain did not approve of his intended Lady, & was resolved, if he could possibly get of [i.e., off], not to preach however on that occasion, but the more the Chaplain desir'd to be excused, the more the Lord insisted on it, so that he was forced to seem to comply. Soon after his Lord asked him, if he remember d