Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/475

 s. xii. DEC. 12, 1903.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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.Sum then her Father can often make, for I have knowne when he had neigh ther money nor credit for such a purchase, being the worst of men, and his wife the worst of women, in all debaucheries : had I known their caracter, I had never married theire Daughter, nor made myself unhappy. H. Earle of Stafford."

I see from Cokayne's * Peerage 5 that Col. Chester notices the above in ' Westminster Abbey Registers,' p. 295, note 3, and that Lord Hervey, ' Memoirs,' ii. 116, calls Lady Stafford humour, and entertainment in her as any man or woman lever knew, with a great justness in her way of thinking, and very little reserve in her manner of giving her opinions of things and people."
 * ' an old French Lady, who had as much wit,

F. J. FURNIVALL.

DR. DEE'S MAGIC MIRROR. (See ante, p, 362.) MR. A. R. BAYLEY'S reference to the above in his note on 'Robert Greene and ' Roger Bacon ' prompts me to mention that it was included in the Tudor Exhibition in 1890. There were indeed two such relics on view. One was a pear-shaped polished black stone, which would, I presume, be the "disc of highly polished cannel coal." It is cata- logued as " Dr. Dee's Show-Stone or Specu- lum, into which he used to call his spirits, asserting that it was given to him by an angel. Butler says :

Kelly did his feats upon

The Devil's looking-glass a stone."

The other was a crystal globe, described in the catalogue as " Dr. Dee's Divining Crystal/' The latter was lent by G. Milner- Gibson-Cullum, Esq. ; but no owner's name was appended to the first-mentioned exhibit. The black stone can hardly be described as a . mirror, but one may well imagine the Virgin Queen gazing with interest into the crystal globe. Both these relics were presumably used by the astrologer when practising his divinations. Were they used separately or in conjunction? ^ JOHN T. PAGE.

West Haddon, Northamptonshire.

SHELLEY AND ASTRONOMY. Miss Clerk e, in her 'History of Astronomy' (p. 284), calls attention to a passage in Shelley's ' Witch of Atlas' (pointed out to her by Dr. Garnett) which almost looks like an unconscious indication of a star or planet revolving between the earth and Mars. In Shelley's time only four members of the large family of small planets were known, but all those, and nearly all that great multitude which have been discovered since, revolve beyond the orbit of Mars, a very few occasionally passing within it. But in 1898 one (since named Eros) was detected, the mean distance of which from the sun is less than that of Mars, so that

until its discovery it may be said to have been hidden (in the words of the poet) "between the earth and Mars." Lest, however, this should lead to any undue idea of astronomical knowledge on the part of Shelley, I should like to call attention to a passage in the 'Revolt of Islam ' (canto i. stanzas 40, 41), which runs thus :

For, when I rose from sleep, the Morning Star Shone through the woodbine wreaths which round

my casement were.

I watched till, by the su,n made pale, it sank Under the billows of the heaving sea.
 * Twas like an eye which seemed to smile on me.

It does not require much knowledge of astronomy to be aware that when a planet is a Morning Star it must be in the east, and rising, not setting or sinking, in the heavens.

W. T. LYNN.

Blackheath.

WE must request correspondents desiring infor- mation on family matters of only private interest to affix their names and addresses to their queries, in order that the answers may be addressed to them direct.

SIR THOMAS LOWTHER. I should be glad to know anything of Sir Thomas Lowther, Knt., from whose collection Eleazar Albin, in his ornithological work, figured several birds in or about the year 1737.

ALFRED NEWTON.

Magdalene College, Cambridge.

THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES. In the article on the Greek 'Mysteries' in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica ' reference is made to a series of papers on this subject in the Nineteenth Cen- tury, 1881. I have carefully gone through the tables of contents of the Nineteenth Century from the commencement in 1877 to 1884, the date of the volume of the ' Encyclo- paedia ' in which the article appeared, and can find no trace of such a series of papers. I wonder if any of your readers can help me by suggesting the name of the periodical in which the papers actually appeared.

COMESTOR OXONIENSIS.

"TOBOGGAN." -What is the date of the first appearance in English of this now familiar word 1 I believe the following to be the first reference to it in any French book on Canada; in English it would, I fancy, hardly appear till much later. I quote from Father C. Le Clercq, 'Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspesie,' 1691, p. 70 :

" II appartient au chef de la famille, privative- ment a tout autre, d'ordonner de cabanner ou il luy plait ...... il en ote tout le mSchant bois, coupe les