Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 11.djvu/441

 9*8. XL MAY 30, 1903.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

433

seems to lack literary recognition. It would be important either to find standard examples of this form, or to show that it is utterly without credentials.

THOMAS BAYNE.

The song ' Nix-my-dolly ' in the melodrama of 'Jack Sheppard,' founded on Ainsworth's novel, is a transplantation from Ainsworth's 'Rookwpod,' book iii. chap, iv., being Jerry Juniper's Chant, ending as here printed :

And here I am, pals, merry and free,

A regular rollocking romany.

Nix my doll, pals, fake away.

Rookwood ' was published in May, 1834, according to Laman Blanchard's memoir of Ains worth. ADRIAN WHEELER.

ROAD WAGGONS FROM LIVERPOOL (9 th S. xi. 88, 376). It may be added that in 1697 the carriers from London to Halifax were Holmes, who started from the " White Horse " in Cripplegate, and Kershaw, from the "Bell'' in Wood Street. O. Hey wood's 'Diaries,' iv. (1885) 174. W. C. B.

CITY OF THE VIOLET CROWN (9 th S. xi. 108, 177, 295). According to Liddell and Scott, Mr. Ruskin appears to have been the first to suggest that ''Homer's violet was the purple iris," and they say " this would best agree with Pindar, O. 6, 91 " ; but the Greeks applied the name to several flowers. The authorities already cited give Viola odorata as the lov /xeAai/ of Theophrastus, who also mentions TO XcvKotbp (probably, says Canon Eilacombe, . either the snowdrop or the spring snow- flake) as the earliest flowering plant. Unless Gerard misinterprets Pliny, the violet used in garlands by both Greeks and Romans was almost certainly the same flower that we still call by that name. He says, after speaking of the cooling virtue of the flower, whether used internally or externally, "Besides, Pliny saith that violets are as well used in garlands as for smell, and are good against surfeting, heavinesse of the head," <fec.

C. C. B.

m In relation to the violet colour which at times tints the seas around Greece, it is well to call to mind that Byron has commemorated what he no doubt had himself witnessed, for he had wandered

Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit, And the voice of the nightingale never is mute ; Where the tints of the earth, and the hues of the _ sky,

In colour though varied in beauty may vie, And the purple of ocean is deepest in dye.

' The Bride of Abydos,' canto i. ASTARTE.

SAMUEL PEPYS, 1716 (9 th S. xi. 369). If MR. WALTER RYE refers to the 'Genealogy of the Pepys Family, 1 by the Hon. Walter C. Pepys, 1887, George Bell & Sons, in pedigree iv., he will find Samuel, son of John and Elizabeth Pepys of Great Yarmouth, bapt 26 Jan., 1695. Administration to father's estate, 6 Aug., 1723. It does not state whom he married.

F. G. HILTON PRICE.

"MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB" (9 th S. xi. 309). In 4 N. & Q.,' 9 th S. v. 35, I asserted that this poem was first published at Boston in 1830, where the author, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale, resided. In corroboration of my state- ment, a correspondent at New York (p. 297) stated that Mrs. Hale was the sole author, and claimed to have been so in 1878, the year before her death. Her son, on 10 April, 1889, again urged her right to the authorship, through the pages of the floston Transcript. The poem, he stated, was first issued in a little duodecimo volume of only twenty-four pages, entitled 'Poems for our Children,' Boston, 1830.

EVERARD HOME COLEMAN. 71, Brecknock Road.

THE OLD WIFE (9 th S. xi. 188, 310, 351). Your correspondent at p. 310 touches on an extremely interesting point of history, namely, that of the various degrees of strictness with which, at different times, the mediaeval Church enforced the precept of abstention from servile work on Sundays. As most people know, the Catholic rule as to Sunday observance is briefly summed up in the command " to hear Mass and refrain from servile work" in other words, to attend devoutly the Eucharistic rite and to abstain from unnecessary manual labour or from one's ordinary avocations followed for payment. There can be no doubt that this precept has been interpreted with varying degrees of strictness at different times and in different countries of Christendom. It would seem that, as J. T. F. says, there was in the twelfth century a movement towards a stricter observance of the Sunday rest.

iraldus Cambrensis (already cited by J. T. F.) relates a strange story of a tonsured man who accosted King Henry II. in a street at Cardiff, in 1172, and said to him, in

Teutonic" :

"God hold thee, Cuning ! Christ and His dear Mother greet you, as also do John the Baptist and all the lands subject to your rule, you should cause
 * he Apostle Peter, commanding you that, through
 * he holding of markets on Sundays to be strictly

^orbidden ; and no work to be done on those days save the Divine Office, which shall be devoutly performed and heard) excepting only the preparing