Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 2.djvu/18

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

[9 th 8. II. Jn.Y 2, '98.

is either a conscious or an unconscious humourist. What does he mean by this ?

" And so of Browning and Meredith. Who ques- tions their power or fails to appreciate their talent, though their sentences be oftenest like the Delphic Oracles in mystery ? And will the twenty -first cen- tury read their lines with less difficulty or belaud what it cannot underhand more loudly than the nine- teenth ? More likely it will relegate them (though unfairly), by the contraction of perspective, to the limbo of things unreadable."

What will the ladies, members of the Brown- ing Society, say to the great, the immortal Robert Browning being described as a writer of "things unreadable"? In truth, it is difficult, within the limits of restricted space, to do justice to J. B. S. " And Tenny- son and Goethe, will posterity bid them climb to a higher gradient up the slopes of Parnassus than that which they have already reached ? I doubt it." Imagine Tennyson and Goethe walking hand in hand up the slopes of Parnassus for the edification of mankind ! The conjunction of Byron and Keats is nothing to that. J. B. S. then writes :

"The verdict of the future is passed by a jury utterly incapable of viewing a case except through party-tinted lenses, and furnished only with frag- ments of evidence upon which to base it Gibbon,

Macaulay, Freeman, and Lecky are samples [sic] in point ; McCarthy's ' History of our Times witnesses for the plaintiff. One such volume is worth, in point of accuracy, a whole library of the former."

Poor Gibbon ! Poor Macaulay ! Poor Free- man ! and, alas ! poor Lecky ! From 1788 to 1897, behold the vicissitudes of Fame !

RICHARD EDGCUMBH. 33, Tedworth Square, S.W.

Complete accuracy implies proportion. It follows that we cannot see anything accurately unless we see its surroundings too. A certain distance of time is therefore necessary to completely accurate vision of an historical as ot space to similar vision of a scenic object This is, indeed, more necessary in the case oi an historical than of a scenic object, because in the case of the latter, however near to the object we may be, the surroundings are al there ; whereas in the other case they are not. We cannot possibly see our coiitem poraries in relation to succeeding times, anc these are not the least important part of a man's historical surroundings.

It may also be urged that a man can only be judged by his work, the value of which cannot be accurately known until its ful effect is seen. Time tries all. We can compare Shakespeare with Dante, because time has shown what the work of each wa permanently worth ; but we cannot compan

tfr. Thomas Hardy with Fielding, or Lord Salisbury with his Elizabethan ancestor, ! or we do not know either the actual or the elative value of their work.

And in all this no account is taken of the passions and prejudices which affect our vision of contemporaries far more than of the men of times past. C. C. B.

The real estimate of a man is the lasting one which he actually bears through the ages, and not that which any one generation may think he ought to bear. Therefore we do not arrive at that estimate until some of ittle thought of by his contemporaries. Many of our own day are by us over-rated. Bold a penny piece near enough to your eye and you can blot out the sun. You can have no conception of the relative size of a moun- tain while you are standing at its foot. Surely it is a sign of the " end of the age " that we are so impatient, so hasty to form judgments ; as it was said of a late critic, we are not sure of our own personal identity unless we have made up our minds about everything and everybody. Our business should be rather the patient accumulation of materials from which a later age may be enabled to form a correct estimate.
 * he ages are already past. Shakespeare was

W. C. B.

ESSAY BY CAKLYLE (9 th S. i. 368). That number of ' Chambers's Papers for the People,' vol. ix., 1851, which your correspondent says is "palpably Carlyle's," was written for the Messrs. Chambers by Mr. John Leaf, of Friskney, Lincolnshire, who about that date did a great deal of literary work for the various publications of this house. The article on Fichte and seven others (of which those on Heyne, Defoe, and Louis XVII. had also appeared in ' Papers for the People ' or ' Chambers's Repository ') were subse- quently published by Mr. Leaf as a separate volume with a sufficiently un-Carlylean title, ' Biographic Portraitures ; or, Sketches of the Lives and Characters of a Few Illustrious Persons ' (London, James Blackwood, 1861). DAVID PATRICK.

339, High Street, Edinburgh.

CITY NAMES IN THE FIRST EDITION OF STOW'S ' SURVEY ' (8 th S. xii. 161, 201, 255, 276, 309, 391 ; 9 th S. i. 48, 333, 431). Aldersgate. My remarks upon Aldersgate referred solely to the form of the word as it stands. The state- ment that it really represents " Aldred's gate" is easily verified. In the ' Liber Custumarum,' ed. Riley, i. 230, the form is Aldretfiegate, an Anglo-French spelling of Aldredesgate, As