Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 2.djvu/338

 AND QUERIES. [9* s. IL OCT. 22,

I do not myself pretend to be able to throw any light on the authorship of Junius. My object in writing is simply to vindicate the honour of the dead. W. PEASE.

Castle, Lostwithiel.

I feel it my duty as a son-in-law of the late Hon. George M. Fortescue to correct some errors in your correspondent's letters on the above subject which nave recently been brought to my notice, and to give a direct contradiction to the statement in the letter in 8 th S. iii. 189 that "Mr. Fortescue had opened a packet of letters containing the secret of Junius, and had for family reasons destroyed those letters, disregarding Lord Grenville's instructions that the name of Junius should be publicly revealed."

In the autumn of 1864, soon after Lady Grenville's death, when Mr. Fortescue came into possession of Drppmore, I had the privi- lege of assisting him in looking through Lord Grenville's papers preserved at Drop- more, an interesting but laborious task which remains fresh in my memory. I found in a cabinet despatch-box a large packet appa- rently of papers closely sealed, with these words on the cover : " To be destroyed on my death," in Lord Grenville's handwriting, with his signature and sealed with his seal. There was no date of any kind on the packet. I brought it to Mr. Fortescue, who had never before seen it. He said, after some delibera- tion, that he did not feel himself justified in disobeying Lord Grenville's explicit direc- tion that the papers should be destroyed on his death, though the packet had lain unnoticed since that event some thirty years before. The packet was then and there burnt unopened. Mr. Fortescue's impression was that the papers therein referred to private matters. It occurred to him later that they might have alluded to Junius. So far as I am aware this was the only sealed packet found among the papers and destroyed. I have heard Mr. Fortescue allude to it on several occasions. From what I knew of Mr. Pease for many years, his discretion, his con- fidential relations with Mr. Fortescue, and his respect and regard for Mr. Fortescue and his family, I cannot credit that he ever made such a communication to your correspondent, who may probably have heard elsewhere some rumour about Junius and erroneously ascribed it to Mr. Pease. I must also correct another error in the letter, ante, p. 169. in reference to the sale of Burnham Beeches. Such a sale was never even contemplated in Mr. Fortescue's lifetime, and did not take place till some years after his death.

W. W. MOORE.

SYNTAX OP A PREFACE (9 th S. ii. 105, 172, 237). Miss Corelli and her writings are un- interesting to me, and to carp at her language I consider bootless. MR. BAYNE, however, has criticized her English, and his strictures have elicited replies that must be highly encourag- ing to the swarm of slipshod writers of which this lady seems to be a distinguished member. One correspondent says of the phrase " these sort of men " that, notwithstanding it is " of course indefensible," it " must be endured as an established solecism." This is curious reasoning. Indefensible syntax is just what a person with a regard for propriety of speech cannot endure. "These sort" is not more endurable than " these kind," " these class," "these stamp," "these type," in spite of seventeenth-century writers and of Fielding in the last century, or than would be " ces sorte d'hommes " in French. I would observe here that while the correct English con- struction is "men of this sort," the French write indifferently "des hommes de cette sorte" and "ces sortes d'hommes," so that your correspondent's lady friend who always says " those sorts of things " makes use of a gallicism. Another correspondent cites Shake- speare (sorry grammarian, however great

otherwise) in excuse of "neither nor"

with a plural verb a subject which I have already dealt with (' N. & O.,' 9 th S. i. 24). A third correspondent defends "monied" and " monies " by appealing to the effete spellings of nearly three hundred years ago.

This last irregularity of spelling deserves a few words. By a rule of our accidence y is changed to_ i whenever -es or -ed is added to a word ending in y after a consonant, but no change is made when -s or -ed is added to a word ending in y after a vowel. Familiar examples, besides money, are bay, key, toy, buy, alley, attorney, chimney, donkey, journey, kidney, pulley, valley. Nothing can be said against the change of y to i, seeing that in earlier times there was scarcely any distinction between the two vowels ; but there is some- thing monstrous in the thought of changing the combination ey into ie when we would add -s, and into i when we would add -ed. " Monies " and " honied " are, in these days, oddities reconcilable, like "donkies," "mon- kies," &c., only with ignorance.

By way of pendant I would notice a de- parture from rule made by over-nice writers with regard to the plural of " fly," a convey- ance, which they must needs write " flys," as if the word were less recognizable in the plural than in the singular a refinement which is ridiculous in view of the hundreds of nouns having several meanings and a common