Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/354

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th s. XIL OCT. 31, im.

' conspicuity, left untouched by either author that of course or editor. It had therefore a very narrow escape from publication.

Omnibi has been humorously suggested as a possible aspirant for plurality, and mayhap some writer with that dangerous mediocrity of learning rebuked by Pope will, in a con- verse direction, evolve alibus from alibi.

F. ADAMS.

WATERLOO : LAST SURVIVOR OF THE BATTLE. Mrs. Moon, the last known sur- vivor of the battle of Waterloo, recently died at the age of ninety-two years at Rolveden, Kent. The daughter of a colour-sergeant in the 3rd Battalion Rifle Brigade, Mrs. Moon, who was born at Gibraltar in 1811, was present, when four years of age, in a baggage waggon on the historic field of Waterloo, a distinct recollection of which she retained to the last. Her father was wounded in the battle.

As far as can be ascertained from very careful inquiry, there is now no one alive who was actually present on the field on that eventful day, though there recently died in Paris a French soldier who was a drummer- boy at Waterloo, and who could remember some of the incidents of the battle perfectly, he being fourteen at the time.

FREDERICK T. HIBGAME. [See, however, ante, p. 85.]

ST. ANDREWS AND BALCARRES. At p. 305 of her 'Poems' (1888) the author of 'John Halifax, Gentleman,' has a lyric entitled 'At St. Andrews,' of which these are the opening lines :

The air is light, the sea is bright, the sky without

a cloud, The elder folk look on content, the children laugh

aloud, And all along St. Andrew's bay and by Balcarras

hill The stooks lie yellow in the sun, the leaves drop

brown and still.

"St. Andrew's " in the third line should be St. Andrews, as the name of the city dis- penses with the sign of the possessive case.

Balcarras " suggests Balcarres, the seat of the Lindsays, which is nine miles distant from St. Andrews, and on the side of the East Neuk of Fife that slopes to the Forth. Then there is no eminence known as Bal- carres hill though Balcarres Craig adjoins the Sm r fi, fc hat used to wind over the arduous

Iraills liig"and southwards to the sea But this is surelv too remote from the author's standpoint to be appropriately used in a poem that is avowedly concerned with purely local impressions. Had Balrymouth Hill which is close to St. Andrews, been utilized

for descriptive effect, the topography would have been correct, the rhythm of the line would have been as good as it is at present, and unity of composition would have been preserved. Poetic licence need not be ruth- less in its disturbance of facts.

THOMAS BAYNE.

ST. VALERY-SUR-SOMME. On a warehouse at this charming little place, facing the wharf at the entrance into the low town, there is a modern inscription which records that "De ce port en 1066 Guillaume de Normandie partit a la tete d'une flotte de 400 voiles pour la conquete de 1'Angleterre." Mr. C. B. Black, the author of a guide- book to ' Normandy and Picardy ' (London, 1899), seemingly contradicts this (p. 160) by stating that " actually he sailed from Dives," although at the same time he refers to another page (84), where a long quotation from Freeman's 'Norman Conquest of England ' (vol. iii.) con- firms the accuracy of the inscription. What actually happened was that the Conqueror started on 12 September from Dives, the quaint old village in Normandy, and, taking advantage of a westerly wind, sailed to St. Valery-sur-Somme in Picardy, beyond the limits of his own dominion, where his fleet rode at anchor from the 17th till the 27th of the same month, when at last the wished-for south wind began to blow, which enabled him to cross the Channel and land in Peven- sey harbour by nine o'clock the following morning. This should be made a little more clear in the guide-book, as tourists might be and are misled. L. L. K.

PLEASURE : ITS DEFINITION. Dr. J. W. Poli- dori, sometime Byron's physician, in a little volume 'On the Source of Positive Pleasure' (1818), has the following passage :

"Another circumstance which is as equally won- derful as the denial of the existence of Pleasure as a positive feeling, is, that this phantom which man has sought for since the creation even before the fall has never yet been defined. I do not mean that we have not had words put together, so as to assume the form of a sentence ; but from Cicero, in the definition he puts in the mouth of one of the interlocutors, in his treatise on the ' Boundaries of Good and Evil 'that pleasure is what every one feels when pleased to Maupertuis, who defines Pleasure to be what we would rather have than not, there is not a single author who has not stumbled upon this threshold in the search of its qualities."

JAMES HOOPER.

Norwich.

CUSHIONS ON THE ALTAR. In his inter- esting and amusing 'Odds and Ends ' Dean Pigpu asks (p. 133), "How is it that soft cushions are still thought requisite on the