Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 11.djvu/527

 0* 8. XL JUNE 27, 1903.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

519

"PACKET -BO AT" (9 th S. xi. 427). On 24 October, 1599, John Frauncis, "Post" of Chester, wrote to Sir Robert Cecil :

" I cannot hear of any passage of late out of Ireland, saving the post bark which brought over two packets, which I hope you have before this received. The post bark arrived yesterday at Hplie Head." 'Cecil Papers,' Hist. MSS. Com- mission, ix. 377.

On 1 November he wrote :

"I have certain word from Beaumaris that the treasure as yet and the shipping lie there ; and the treasure have twice put to sea and come in again. Now the same is put aboard the Popingey ready for the first wind. The last packet you writ I doubt not but are safely delivered in Ireland, and answer thereof I hope now with these." Ibid., 385.

From these extracts one may perhaps infer that post-bark preceded packet-boat, and that the latter word was not yet in general use in 1599. O. O. H.

May not the packet-boat, to which the present perfected mail -packet service owes its origin, be said to date from the reign of Richard II. ? To enable the town of Gravesend to recover the loss inflicted upon it through the burning and plundering of the French and Spaniards, the Abbot of St. Mary-le- Grace of Tower Hill, having the manor of Gravesend in his possession, obtained from King Richard II. a grant to the men of Gravesend and Milton of the exclusive privilege of conveying passengers thence to London, on the conditions that they should provide boats on purpose, and carry all persons, either at twopence per head with their bundles (i.e., their paquets, for a paquet is described in Bailey's ' Dictionary,' 1740, as a bundle or parcel), or the whole boat's fare should be four shillings. These boats were the Gravesend barges, clumsy, comfortless vessels, which were not superseded by the lighter and faster tilt-boats until the close of the sixteenth century. I should not say "superseded," however, as the old barges continued for many years to share in the traffic. Queen Elizabeth alludes to the Gravesend barge in her usual ungentle manner as " never without a knave, a priest, or a thief" (see 'Reliquiae Wottonianse,' p. 343). It must have been between the time of the introduction of the tilt-boat and of that of the steam-packet, 1815-16, the first steam vessel to appear on the Thames, that the paquet-boat was most in vogue. It was a small vessel that sailed from the different seaports in England, and carried passengers, mails, &c., to and from our foreign possessions. It also kept up a regular intercourse with foreign powers that were at peace with Great Britain. The last tilt-boat was withdrawn

from between London and Gravesend in 1834 (see Cruden's 'History of Gravesend,' p. 521), having suffered far more than the steam-packet from the opening of the rail- way. J. HOLDEN MACMICHAEL.

NOTES ON BOOKS, &c.

Portraitures of Julius Go&sar : a, Monograph. By

Frank Jesup Scott. (Longmans & Co.) ' IN its way the handsome volume of Mr. Scott is unique. Collections of portraits are not unfamiliar. They are most common in the case of literary men, such as Shakespeare or Rabelais. In the case of the heroes of antiquity they are, so far as our knowledge extends, unknown. Very few indeed can have suspected that sufficient likenesses of Julius Caesar were in existence to fill a volume such as the present. From the various museums of Europe and from other sources Mr. Scott has obtained material for thirty-seven handsome plates. These are not all busts or plates of Julius himself, and not all of them are authoritative. Some of them, like the head by Ingres, which serves as a cut de lampe, and that by the author, with which the volume closes, are ideal. Recent investigations have resulted in weeding out from the best-managed museums niany works once boldly put forth as authoritative and unquestioned, and other museums stand in dire need of similar processes of sifting. Many busts, indeed, are classified by our author as nondescript. Not a few of the likenesses are enlarged from coins or gems. Mr. Scott is the possessor of no fewer than eighteen plaster casts of notable busts of Csesar. A view of these arranged on a shelf in his library constitutes one of the most interesting of the illustrations. Italy naturally supplies the majority of the illustrations, and of these, naturally also, the best come from Rome. Prof. Bernouilli, of Basle, has reckoned up, in his ' Romische Ikonographie ' (3 vols., Stuttgart, 1882), sixty statues, busts, and real or supposed antiques, presenting, it is believed, the great Roman em- peror. Among these, however, it is difficult to find one of guaranteed authenticity, or one for which Julius can safely be assumed to have sat. Mean- time, so great are the differences that it is next to impossible to believe all of them intended for the same man. So various are, indeed, the present- ments upon coins, that our author, unlike most authorities, is unwilling to accept them as supply- ing the "fundamental data" for a knowledge of the features. Some of these effigies are symbolical of the offices Ctesar bore, and others, hard as this is to believe, are caricatures. Many of them are, how- ever, clumsy attempts at portraits, and from these Italian antiquaries have drawn conclusions as to which busts are to be accepted as genuine. All is, accordingly, to some extent presumption or con- jecture. Coins, too, as Mr. Scott points out, have not been kept for a couple of thousand years in the cabinets of the curious, but have been buried in the ground and turned up by the plough. The first century before Christ was not a period of great artistic excellence. " The whole revolutionary period preceding, during, and after his time was not an era of good art work." Sensible of the difficulties that attended his quest, Mr. Scott has