Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 11.djvu/420

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NOTES AND QUERIES. pi* B. XL MAT 23,

(originally a Lancashire woman), and has been familiar to me since childhood. 1 con- fess, however, that 1 cannot remember hear- ing the expression on the lips of any other person. " **

Halliwell, in his ' Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words,' says it is used in Sussex, where " to walk by owl-light implies to skulk for fear of arrest." Archdeacon Nares, in his ' Glossary of English Authors, gives the following instances of its use :

" Ned Wimarke appears not in Paul's, but ever since before Christmas hath taken a toy to keep in, saying that now and then he steals out by owl-light to the Star and to the Windmill." Letter dated 1610.

When straight we all leap'd overboord in haste, Some to the knees, and some up to the waste, Where sodainely 'twixt owle-light and the darke, We pluck'd the boat beyond high water marke. Taylor's ' Workes,' 1630. EVERARD HOME COLEMAN. 71, Brecknock Road.

Perhaps the following stanzas from a poem by William Allingham, entitled ' The Green- wood Tree,' may prove illustrative : Our host hath spread beneath our tread A broider'd velvet woof ; Curtains of blue peep richly through Our fretted palace roof. Well spent, say I. in forestry Each summer day like this, Till glowworms light owl- watch men's flight Through our green metropolis.

JOHN PICKFORD, M.A. Newbourne Rectory, Woodbridge. GOOD FRIDAY IN 1602 (9 th S. xi. 368). It fell on 2 April, Old Style, and 5 April, New Style. See Sir H. Nicolas's 'Chronology of History,' 1838, pp. 58-78, for tables showing when Easter fell, &c., from A.D. 1000 to A.D 1999, or A. De Morgan's ' Book of the Thirty seven Possible Almanacks, with Indices for finding the Almanack of any Year from A.D. 1 to A.D. 2000.' The Book of Common Prayer has a list of movable feasts, with their dates for several years from the date of publication as well as the tables to find Easter.

J. T. F. [Many replies received.]

"DELIVERED FROM THE GALLING YOKE o: TIME " (9 th S. xi. 369). MR. BRIERLEY will fine the lines in the original text of Wordsworth' ' Laodamia.' In the editions of 1815 and 182( of the ' Poems ' the penultimate stanza run as follows :

Ah, judge her gently who so deeply loved ! Her, who, in reason's spite, yet without crime, Was in a trance of passion thus removed ; Delivered from the galling yoke of time And these frail elements to gather flowers Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers.

Here, as the 1 poet observed in 1831 to his

ephew John Wordsworth, "the heroine is

ismissed to happiness in Elysium." In the

e vised text of the edition of 1827 she is

unished for her disobedience to the exhorta-

.ons of Protesilaus, being " doomed to wan-

er in a grosser clime, Apart from happy

jhosts." In the edition of 1832 the doom is

mitigated ; her banishment from Elysium is

>ut for " an appointed time." In 1845 the

tanza received a final revision, but the fate

f Laodamia remains as it was fixed in 1832.

"or a full account of the successive changes

n the text of this stanza, see the * Oxford

Wordsworth,' p. 901, note. K. A. POTTS.

OPTICIANS' SIGNS (9 th S. x. 503; xi. 53). In a neighbourhood like that of the Minories, given up to ship and insurance >rokers, marine engineers, shipping sur- eyors and valuers, ship chandlers, cork ealers, brass furnishers, rope makers, nd ship furnishers generally, one may .xpect to find the nautical instrument iealer, whose favourite sign, however, was not the " Sea Telescope," or the later marine binocular, or even the mariner's ompass, but the "Quadrant" and the if the "Sea Quadrant" has already been Alluded to. The "Blue Coat Boy and Quad- rant" distinguished the shop of a mathe- matical instrument maker in the Minories in 1799 (Banks Coll. of Shop Bills, iv.), the selection of a bluecoat boy being, no doubt, suggested by his connexion with the mathe- matical foundation in Christ's Hospital by Oharles II. In the same ancient thorough- rare, inhabited of old chiefly by gunsmiths, may still be seen a similar combination of the " Admiral and Sextant," a sign rendered, may we not say, immortal, from having once stood outside the shop described in ' Dombey and Son' as Solomon Gill's, in Leadenhall Street. It is not, however, " a little timber midshipman," but an admiral, whose uniform is said to be exact and complete as worn in the early part of the nineteenth century. The figure was removed from Leadenhall Street when the present owners, Messrs. Norie & Wilson, removed thence to 156, Minories.
 * Sextant." Messrs. Dollond's old sign

In a collection formed by Sir Charles Price, and afterwards in the possession of Mr. C. T. Davis, is an engraving of the houses which were built on the north side of Leadenhall Street, on the site of those destroyed by the fire of 1765, where the sign of the "Admiral and Sextant" may be seen over the central first-floor window of what was then Norie's