Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/164

 156

NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th s. xn. AUG. 22, 1903.

with (pardonable) ignorance of racing and its phraseology, has made two slips. Eclipse, carrying 12 st., was not " a welter-weight." It is the 12 st. that is the welter-weight. Again, the capacity of a horse to carry a welter-weight has nothing to do with "a stout or heavy-bodied animal"; on the con- trary, with the requisite blood, stamina, and shape, a "rat of a horse," to the eye, has often given weight and inches to others over his favourite distance. Theoretically, a welter-weight is that which should make a horse roll from distress at the finish of a race, a sight frequently seen. H. P. L.

" HOOK IT" (9 th S. xi. 348; xii. 33). One has always been under the impression that this phrase had its origin either in the habit of workmen slinging their bag of tools behind them on ceasing work, preparatory to going home, or in the cessation of the day's work of the harvester, who would sling his reaping-hook over his shoulder on leaving the scene of his labour. It is commonly noticeable even to - day in London how plumbers and workmen in kindred trades will throw their bag of tools at their back, suspended by a hammer which serves the purpose of a hook. Sailors have a similar expression, " to sling one's hammock " i.e., to make oneself scarce; to " bunk," a sailor's hammock or bunk being his bed. Again, " to sling one's Daniels " is to move on, to run away :

"He flung up his window with a furious bang ...... swore in horrible terms that if we did not that

instant sling our Daniels which the Trombone in- formed me was an equivalent for moving off he would shy at us every heavenly article of crockery his apartment contained. "Greenwood, ' In Strange Company.'

Or the word "hook" may apply to the fingers i.e., to pick up one's bundle and depart. In Northamptonshire and elsewhere "hook-fingered" is dishonest. There is, according to Jamieson, a harvest custom in Scotland called " throwing the hooks." The bandster collects all the reaping-hooks, and, taking them by the points, throws them upwards. The direction, whatever it be in which the point of the hook falls, is supposed to indicate the quarter in which the individual to whom it belongs will be employed as a reaper in the following harvest. If any one of them break in falling, the owner is to die before another harvest. J. HOLDEN MAC-MICHAEL.

.,." To . HH his hook " is a very common

idiom in Lincolnshire. A man talking to me

a few days ago about an affiliation case said,

i heard him say that if the magistrates

laid him on to pay owt, he should tak' his hook an' nivyer be seen in these parts no more." At Lincoln Assizes many years ago I was present at a trial relating to a savage assault which had taken place somewhere in the Isle of Axholme. A witness deposed that one of the persons implicated said in his presence, "I shall tak' my hook an' go ower Ouse into Yerksheer, an' then they can't find me." On hearing this the judge intervened by an inquiry as to what hook was meant, as no instrument of the kind had been mentioned in the previous part of the case. It might be of service if His Majesty's judges when on circuit took with them a copy of Prof. Wright's * English Dialect Dictionary.'

A JUSTICE OF THE PEACE.

BACON ON HERCULES (9 th S. xi. 65, 154, 199, 352 ; xii. 54). I am sorry that under another heading than the above' Shakespeare's Geo- graphy 'I supplied most of the illustrations which I gave you. But a good thing is none the worse for being repeated even in * N. & Q.' My purpose was to show that in his works Bacon was not infallible that he made as many mistakes as did Shakespeare or Sir Walter Scott, depending upon his memory for his quotations.

May I add a few further references to Bacon's fallibility in this respect? The items were first issued in 1596, the sole literary efforts of his pen in the course of nearly twenty years, while Shakespeare was pouring out pages of print by the yard. During his life Bacon rewrote these ' Essays ' five times, remodelled and augmented, and in the last edition he perpetuated the follow- ing errors made in the first : In the fifth and tenth essays he misquoted Seneca, as he did in his ' Wisdom of the Ancients ' and
 * Essays ' consisting originally of ten short

Advancement of Learning '; in essay 13 he misquotes Machiavelli ; in essay 15 he mis- quotes Tacitus twice ; in essay 22 he misquotes Solomon ; in the same essay Plutarch ; in essay 30 Celsus ; in essay 35 Herodotus ; and in essay 54 Cicero. Reynolds, the editor of the Clarendon Press edition of the ' Essays,' gives no fewer than a dozen inaccurate quota- tions in the first ten, and says, " For accuracy in detail Bacon had no care whatever," and that he "frequently quoted from memory seems certain. We find accordingly that the

Assays ' abound in misquotations of a more or less important kind " (p. xxvii). In Bacon's

1 romus ' we find similar mistakes made by tfacon, quite equal to the attribution of a sea-coast to Bohemia, the sea (or a canal) at Milan, and the game of billiards in the days