Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 2.djvu/113

 9 th S. II. AUG. 6, '98.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

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will not be confined to Britain ; for of late years it has become patent that these areas of extreme temperature are very extensive, and that when there is an excessively cold winter in England and France, even Italy is often included. I can recollect in the winter of 1881 seeing the Arno at Florence being skated upon, and icicles like a prodigious portcullis hanging from the Ponte Vecchio, some of which were seven and eight feet in length. I have known Cannae and Pompeii smothered in snow, and the entire lemon crop of Amalfi and Pa- lermo destroyed by frost. Nevertheless, I have never experienced anything approach- ing to the following, which is related by Bembo in his ' Storia Veneta,' 1. i. :

" In 1491, through the severity of the season, the [salt] water of the Grand Canal was frozen, and the Stradiots [Greek mercenaries of the Republic] held their tournament on the ice, horse against horse, with their lances."

Perhaps some of your learned readers could inform me whether the winter of that year was remarkable in England.

ST. CLAIR BADDELEY.

MORNING. In the prologue to his ' Moral Fables ' the " Venerable Master Robert Henryson, Licentiate in Arts and Bachelor in Decrees," has given the following line, which seems to call for explanation :

In ane mornyng, betuix midday and nicht. It expresses the opposite of what we now reckon the morning to be, and it will be interesting if any one can say what the poet exactly meant. Apparently afternoon or evening could not be the time of day indi- cated, because the succeeding lines read : I rais and put all sleuth and sleip asyde, And to ane vod I went alone, but gyde.

Henryson (1420-1506), who was preceptor in the Benedictine convent of Dunfermline, was the most Chaucerian of the Scottish "makaris," and some of his pieces were given as Chaucer's.

WALTER M. GRAHAM EASTON.

SYNTAX OF A PREFACE. In the introduc- tion to ' The Murder of Delicia' (1896) Miss Marie Corelli uses various forms of expres- sion that are not uncommon, and yet peculiar enough to be noticeable. As they thus occur within a conveniently narrow compass for easy reference, they may be mentioned in suc- cession as examples of that loose and easy structure which is becoming characteristic of modern English prose. On the first page the writer closes a sentence with a reference to the "superior sex," opening the next with the remark, "They will assert," &c., thus making

a plural form refer to a collective antecedent. Apart, of course, from an investigation like the present, this is a defensible construction, but at the moment it invites remark. On p. 2 occurs the expression, "There are any number of women," a form in which the syn- tax depends on the idea and not on the subject. This is further illustrated on the next page in the sentences, " A great majo- rity of the men of the present day want women to keep them " ; " The kind of men I mean have neither the courage nor the intel- ligence to fight the world for themselves " ;

and "These very sort of men are the first

to run down women's work." On p. 6 occurs the loose construction with the alternative conjunctions which besets the path of many writers as well as that of Miss Corelli. "Neither the height of tragedy," we find, "nor comedy in the woman on the stage really satisfy men so much as the happy medium." The difficulty with " as good and even better than " is illustrated on p. 7. On that page also (to refer to orthography as well as syntax) appears the commercial form " monied," which one regrets to find creeping into literature. Another objectionable spell- ing is on p. 14, in the author's reference to woman's attitude to man. "It is not by opposing herself to man," she says, " that she can be nis real helpmeet." "Helpmate" is intelligible, but "helpmeet" is absurd. It is because of the great popularity of Miss Corelli's books that it seems necessary to draw attention to these flaws of her style.

THOMAS BAYNE.

COUSIN. We are often met with perplexing designations of relationship ; nepos, for in- stance, is admitted to be quite indefinite. But " cousin " ; well, Dugdale writes of a Willoughby who left "Elizabeth, Ann, and Blanch," his cousins and next heirs. These ladies, however, were his granddaughters, being the children of his predeceased son Edward Willoughby, the eldest of whom married a Greville and founded an important family. . A. H.

THE REINTERMENT OF SIR NICHOLAS CRISPE. The enclosed cutting from the Standard of 20 June seems worthy of being preserved in ' N. & Q.' :

"A large congregation assembled at St. Paul's hurch, Hammersmith, on Saturday afternoon, to take part in the ceremony attending the reinterment of the body of Sir Nicholas Crispe, which had pre- viously been buried in the church of St. Mildred's, Bread Street, in the City of London. The famous inight was remarkable for having been one of the principal movers in the restoration of the Stuart
 * a.mily, and on his death in 1665, in accordance with