Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 11.djvu/505

 9*" s. XL JUNE 20, iocs.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

497

sketch of just over one page called 'The Journal of a Wiltshire Curate.' Zschokke seems to have derived the hint for his story from this, very much enlarging upon the theme, so that his story can in no sense be called a translation. As Goldsmith at one time contributed to this magazine, the sketch may possibly be his.

It may be noted that on 13 May an order was made against the owners of 6, Wine Office Court, to remove the front (which, though shored up, was bulging and dangerous) within fourteen days. Goldsmith lived here (query at No. 6) in 1760 and later ; and, according to Boswell, Dr. Johnson in the spring of 1763 (not 1764) found Goldsmith under arrest for debt to his landlady, and, taking the MS. of the 'Vicar,' sold it to Newbery for 601.

"Unluckily, considerable confusion has been imported into this picturesque and time-honoured incident by the discovery, in recent years, that Goldsmith had disposed of a third share in this very book, as early as October, 1762, to Benjamin Collins, a Salisbury printer, who subsequently printed it. How this inconvenient fact is to be reconciled with the canonical tradition is not clear ; at all events, an explanation is not at present forth- coming." Mr. Austin Dobson in 'Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature,' new edition, vol. ii. 1902, p. 479.

ADRIAN WHEELER.

EIKON BASILIKE ' MOTTO (9 th S. xi. 389). I have always understood TO Xi ovStv 8tK^o" rrjv TToX.iv ouSe TO KcurTra as "The Ch. did not wrong the State nor yet the K.," i.e., neither Church nor king.

G. C. MOORE SMITH. University College, Sheffield.

In the original saying quoted by^ W. T' the X and K stood for XpioTos and Kwi/orai/Tios. As applied to Charles I. they appear to stand for Xpio-Tos and KapoAos.

Is it not likely that Xi means the Church, KaTTTra the King ? C. DEEDES.

Chichester.

WILLIAM BARNES (9 th S. x. 486 ; xi. 245). Is not GENERAL MAXWELL a little too harsh in his criticisms upon the Anglo-Saxon pro- clivities of the Dorset poet 1 It is well known that this simple-hearted scholar (whom I only came to know late in his life) preferred, when- ever he could, to use words derived from Teutonic sources rather than from the Latin ; but I have yet to learn that he had what your correspondent calls "a bee in his bonnet," or that he merited the American epithet of a "downright crank" in respect of this. One would think that had he had such

an extraordinary, prejudiced feeling on this subject he would scarcely have stayed so long in his profession of "dominie," in which he must daily have encountered that which your correspondent says was a " red rag " to lira, namely, Latin and Greek. Of course, it is, as GENERAL MAXWELL says, impossible, were it even desirable, that all such elements as William Barnes objected to could be eradi- cated from our language ; but there was wisdom and aptness, I think, in many of his substitutions.*

I do not think that the only new words to be introduced into our language should be Americanisms. Some of the instances given by GENERAL MAXWELL are, to say the least, very quaint. Would he mind telling me from which of the deceased writer's works he culled them 1 ? I know little but his poems, and for his appreciation of these I thank GENERAL MAXWELL. They are very sweet to Dorset ears and hearts. I doubt whether Burns would have been read as much had he followed dialect as closely even as did William Barnes the English Burns. But does GENERAL MAXWELL approve of the Latinized expression which I have italicized (there is a word for you !) in the following sentence, taken from a recent number of the Saturday Review (4 April) : "A curious open letter positing the general wickedness of rebellion has been sent," &c. ? The late Wil- liam Barnes was so I have been told and read no mean philologist ; but of folk-lore, though he would seem to be brimful of it himself, little appears in his works. I hope that some day an introduction of his which he wrote for me on what proved to be his deathbed will form the most valuable portion of a work which I contemplate on Dorset folk-lore. J. S. UDAL, F.S.A.

Antigua, W.I.

THE LIVING DEAD (9 th S. xi. 427). The gardens referred to are no doubt those of the terrible "Old Man of the Mountain" respon- sible for the word assassin destroyed by Hulagu Khan and his Tartars. Arbaces the Egyptian (' Last Days of Pompeii '), who has always struck me as a belated survival of ancient traditions, had a somewhat similar sensuous hall of bliss in his palace. Some drugs, I imagine, are known to produce a condition of supermundane enjoyment at the cost of wrecked nervous systems ; indeed,

during his last long illness, when writing to me, he excused the shortness of his letter by saying that his " pen-hand" (meaning his daughter, his ordinary amanuensis) was absent. That is a substitution 1 would willingly incorporate.
 * I remember on one occasion, shortly before or