Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/413

 9* s. XIL NOV. 2i, 1903.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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and later in his 'Lenten Stuffe.' Onion's use is the next reference I have after Nashe.

Onion says (540b), " Fellow Juniper, no more of thy songs and sonnets." This was the title of Surrey's 'Poems,' 1557. But Nashe appears to have first brought the term into vulgar, slangy use, and later it is abundantly common amongst the dramatists Dekker, Jonson, Fletcher, Shakespeare, &c. Nashe's words are: "Our babling Ballets and our newfound Songs,and Sonnets, which every rednose fiddler hath at his fingers' ends" ('Anatomie of Absurdities,' 1589; Grosart, i. 34).

Onion's affected language, " O sweet soul, how she tripped, O delicate trip and go ! " (542a) may refer to Nashe. He laughs at this favourite dancing tune in his introduc- tion to Sidney's ' Astrophel and Stella,' 1591, and uses it directly in an assault upon Harvey in his ' Foure Letters Confuted ' (Grosart, ii. 204).

Other references to Nashe may occur. I have not studied his writings sufficiently exhaustively, since the present parallels occurred to me. H. C. HAKT.

PENKILL CASTLE. In the memoir of William Bell Scott in the 'D.N.B.' Penkill Castle is said to be in Perthshire, but it is near Girvan, in Ayrshire. It is the ancient seat of a branch of the famous Scottish family of Boyd, which was descended on the mother's side from James II. of Scotland. The last representative of the line, Miss Alice Boyd, who died in 1897, was the friend of some of the most notable people of her day. Mr. and Mrs. Bell Scott were frequent guests at Penkill Castle, and he died there. Dante Rossetti was one of several visitors at the old Ayrshire "peel" when he resolved to exhume the poems that he had buried with his wife ; and it \vas by the side of the neighbouring rivulet that he conceived and elaborated his haunting lyric 'The Stream's Secret.' This title Bell Scott had previously used for one of his sonnets in the series which he named 'The Old Scotch House,' as a tribute to Penkill Castle. Distinguished members of the Boyd family are the soldier Mark Alexander Boyd, who printed Latin and Greek poems at Antwerp in 1592; Robert Boyd, Principal of Glasgow Univer- sity, 1615-21 ; and the ingenious and dis- cursive poet the Rev. Zachary Boyd, author of ' Zion's Flowers,' who sharply rebuked Cromwell to his face in a sermon preached in Glasgow High Church in 1650. It is note- worthy that the last of some great ash trees at Peri kill perished in Miss Boyd's time, and

thus seemed to give the first stage in the ful- filment of a family prophecy, the second and final stage being reached when Miss Boyd herself passed away. The legend runs thus :

When the last leaf draps frae the auld ash tree

The Penkill Boyds maun cease to be.

THOMAS BAYNE.

PONTIUS PILATE : THEODORUS. Passing through Forcheim a few weeks ago in the train, I was reminded of the curious tradition that connects the Bavarian town with the Roman governor who delivered Jesus to the executioners. A man might read both Baedeker and the Gospels without finding out that Forcheim was the birthplace of Pontius Pilate. Yet there is a mediaeval Latin rime which gives this information :

Forchemii natus eat Pontius ille Pilatus, Teutonics gentis, crucitixor Omnipotentis. (Pilate at Forcheim born, of German blood, Hang'd the Almighty on a cross of wood.)

A part of Forcheim's forest is still called the Pilatuswald, and the fields in the vicinity "Der Pilatus." The memory of Pilate has become associated with other localities in Germany, Switzerland, and France. (See a popular account of these legends by Lorenz Krapp, 'Pontius Pilatus in Geschichte und Sage,' in ' Deutsche Hausschatz,' xxix. Jahrg., S. 75 u. 86. He cites as his authorities Vora- gine, and Kelle u. Goedeke, 'Grundriss,' Bd. i. ii. iii. ff.).

In B. H. Cowper's 'Syriac Miscellanies (London, 1861, p. 61) there is an extract from a MS. in the British Museum giving part of an alleged letter from Theodorus and Pilate's reply respecting Jesus. Is anything more known of this apocryph 1

WILLIAM E. A. AXON.

Manchester.

" BETHLUISNION " : ITS ETYMOLOGY. In a paper on ' Ogham-Runes and El-Mushajjar,' read before the Royal Society of Literature, 22 January, 1879, by Richard F. Burton, the name for the Ogham characters, Bethluismon, is explained as incorporating names of trees that are not Irish terras.

The second syllable luis a quicken or mountain-ash, and the terminal syllable nin or nion = &n ash, are said to be foreign words, and at the same time the names for the letters I and n in Ogham. Nin also had another meaning that of any letter of the alphabet indifferently, a kind of general term for any letter, apparently. Burton inclined to the opinion that Bethluisnion simply stood for b I letters, and clicl not favour the sug- gestion that it stood for t>, I, n, the first,