Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 2.djvu/369

 9 th S. II. Nov. 5, '98.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

361

LONDON, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1898.

CONTENTS. No. 45.

NOTES : The Story of the Sleeper Awakened, 361 St Leonards and Hollington, 363 Duchess of Kingston-- A Note of Gray's, 365 The Third Sex" Honi " Pinne Spiders in Hell" Will ye go and marry, Katie ?" 366.

REPLIES : The Birds of Cirencester, 369-" Mr. W. H." Portrait Rings Alcuin Club Sun-dog, 372 Perrys of Claverley Kingston - upon - Thames, 373 Leigh Mrs Gibbs Mistletoe, 374 Palk's Strait and Bay Anthony Clerke Name of Book " Neck-handkerchief " W. Dod- dington "Big an' bug" Silver Plate Moon through Coloured Glass, 375 ' Notes on Mediaeval Services ' Warning to Book-BorrowersTennyson and Scott, 376 "Baulk": " Balk" Batboe " Ringing-out "Fusil The Judge and the Treadwheel Acorus calamus, 377 Faggots to burn Heretics Edition Holt Marston and Shakspeare Gambold, 378.

NOTES ON BOOKS : Inderwick's ' Calendar of the Inner Temple Records ' Sydney's ' Early Days of the Nine- teenth Century in England ' Lang's Scott's ' Kenilworth' Thompson's 'Church of St. Saviour, Southwark" Johnson's ' Imperial Britain ' ' Fables by Fal ' ' Photo- grams of '98 ' ' New Penny Magazine ' ' Reliquary ' Antiquary ' ' Genealgoical Magazine.'

Notices to Correspondents.

THE STORY OF THE SLEEPER AWAKENED. THE story of a poor drugged or drunken man who has, through the caprice of some royal or noble personage, been suddenly con- veyed from his sordid abode to a palace or castle, stripped of his dirty rags, clothed in fine linen, placed in a splendid bed in a splendid chamber, and, on his awakening, finds himself attended by obsequious servants who, to his amazement, salute him as their lord and master, is probably in its simple elements of very ancient date. It is not my object to trace the story to its source, but to refer to its use by two of the greatest poets who ever lived Shakespeare and Calderon, the foi'mer employing it in his " Induction " to ' The Taming of the Shrew,' the latter in his exquisite comedy ' La Vida es Sueno ' (' Life is a Dream '), which is one of the glories of Spanish literature. Neither poet, so far as we know, could have got the hint from the ' Arabian Nights,' in which one of the tales turns on the same incident.

For it was in the golden prime

Of good Haroun Alraschid

that Abou Hassan's marvellous adventures came to pass. What a perennial source of interest does that book contain ! I read it when I was a boy, and now, when the winter

of age is close upon me and the snow soon to fall is gathering thick and fast, I have been spirited away to far-off sunny lands and almost become young again on turning over the glowing pages in which the story of ' The Sleeper Awakened ' is told. Some books are untranslatable Horace, for instance, and others, chiefly poets ; they lose, like a deli- cate flower, nearly all their beauty and fragrance when transplanted from their native soil ; but there are many that suffer little or nothing from the change, so great is their vitality, so human their interest. Who cares about the language in which the 'Arabian Nights' was first written, or ' Robinson Crusoe,' or many other books, both sacred and profane, that might be named 1 They are the property not of any particular nation, but of the whole human race, and are consequently immortal in every tongue. " But hoo ! I am now gone quite out of sight," to use the language of Robert Burton ; and though I agree with him that "digressions do mightily delight," I must yet confess that while they form a most pleasing nay, necessary feature in his great book, they are out of place in a short paper such as this.

It cannot admit of a doubt that both Shakespeare and Calderon made use of a story tnat must have been current all over Europe at the time when they lived and wrote. The one who played the jest is, according to all accounts, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. I think it extremely probable that Shakespeare became acquainted with it through a ballad an earlier version of the one contained in Percy's ' Reliques ' entitled ' The Frolicksome Duke, or the Tinker's Good Fortune,' which has too modern a ring about it, though " it is given from a black-letter copy in the Pepys collection." Black-letter does not necessarily imply antiquity, for Percy informs us, in a note to his ' Essay on the Ancient Minstrel?,' where he gives a list, that bhere are numbers of these "Garlands," which " had anciently the name of ' Penny-Merri- ments,' as little religious tracts of the same size were called ' Penny-Godlinesses,' " all printed in black-letter, some even as late as the year 1691. Whatever may be the age of the ballad, t has a fine old English swing about it, and s loud in its commendation of good cheer, to which our nation has always been sup- posed to be addicted when opportunity is inker. Our forefathers both in their ballads and in their plays liked a pleasant ending, ust as we do in our novels nowadays. In he ' Anatomy of Melancholy,' first published
 * iven. The ballad also ends happily for the