Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 3.djvu/109

 9* s. m. FEB. 11, m] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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pening to be talking with Mr. Thomas Watts, then Keeper of the Printed Books in the British Museum, I mentioned to him what I was doing. He asked me if I knew the early books, and without the slightest hesitation he at once named Digby (1587), Percy (1658), Thevenot (1696), and several others. This seemed to me a most astonishing feat of memory that he should know the chief old books on such an out-of-the-way subject out of the million or so under his care.

I have in later years had a little light thrown on it in a curious way. In my 'Handbook ' I give an initialism of Mr. Watts's, "P.P.C.R.," which he promised he would some day interpret for me, but never did. After his death in 1869 I heard that his father was custodian of the Peerless Pool at Islington, and therefrom I imagine that the initials are those of the Peerless Pool, City Koad. Hence his interest in swimming ; but I believe he would have given me the principal books in the same way on any other subject.

I have another instance still more remark- able. While admiring the work Dr. J. A. H. Murray was doing I had collected a number of unusual words to take to him. One of these I had come across in a seventeenth-cen- tury pamphlet. Two ladies plotting, one says to the other, We must be discreet or "our husbands will smoak us," that is, find them out. Dr. Murray kindly explained that it might take a long time to find out if this was in the MS. of the 'Hist. English Diction- ary,' as, although it had been alphabetically arranged some years previously, the subse- quent accumulations had not been. He admitted that the word was unusual, but he thought he had seen it before. He thereupon went to his bookshelves, took down 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' turned over a few leaves, and there presented me with the very word. That he should recollect this one at the end of the alphabet, he being engaged on the beginning, appeared to me to be astonishing. RALPH THOMAS.

Clifford's Inn.

EAST WINDOW AT BOLTON PERCY : THE KEMP FAMILY. (See 9 th S. ii. 522.) The church of Bolton Percy, near York, is a fine Perpen- dicular structure, built probably between 1411 and 1415, and the great east window is of remarkable size and beauty, measuring twenty-three feet in height by fourteen feet in breadth, unbroken by a transom. In the lower part of it are five full-length figures of Scrope, Bowet, Kemp, Boothe, and Neville, Archbishops of York, of the size of life, in their gorgeous robes, all of them having the

right hand raised in the act of benediction, and in the left holding a crosier.

The central figure is that of John Kemp, Archbishop of York (1426-52), thence trans- lated to Canterbury, a see he held from 1452 to 1454, and underneath is the coat : See of Canterbury, an episcopal staff surmounted by a pallium, impaling Kemp, Gu., three garbs or within a bordure engrailed arg. Under- neath the other figures are the arms of the See of York : Gu., two keys in saltire arg., in chief a royal crown or, as borne at the present day, impaling their respective coats.

A friend has recently sent me a photograph of the fine window, which is far from doing it justice, as all the colours have come out in the same hue. This must be inevitable, as the window is protected on the outside by a strong and close wire guarding, considerably obstructing the light, and in addition there is so much leadwork and so many iron bars in the window ; besides, the camera was used on rather a gloomy day. One wonders whether there is any way of tinting the photograph. On holding it against a strong light the figures come out far more distinctly, which could not be the case if it was mounted on thick cardboard.

Archbishop John Kemp was also Bishop of London from 1422 to 1426, and his nephew Thomas Kemp presided over the same see from 1450 to 1489. In the upper part of the same fine window at Bolton Percy are life-sized figures of St. Peter, St. Anna, the Virgin Mary, St. Elizabeth, and St. John the Evan- gelist. The window contains some of the finest fifteenth-century glass in England, as fine as any in York Minster, or King's Col- lege Chapel, Cambridge. The window was judiciously restored some thirty years ago by Messrs. Warrington, of London, at the ex- pense of Archdeacon Creyke, the rector, as portions of the vestments and the faces of the archbishops had been destroyed. The impaled arms are Scrope (Az., a bend or), Bowet (Arg., three stags' heads cabossed sable), Kemp (Gu., three garbs or), Boothe (Arg., three boars' heads erected sa.), Neville (Gu., a saltier arg.). JOHN PICKFORD, M.A.

Newbourne Rectory, Woodbridge.

THE AUTHOR OF '!L DON GIOVANNI.'- Larousse's ' Diction nai re des Operas ' attri- butes the book of the words of Mozart's opera 'II Don Giovanni' to the Abbe da Ponte. This is an error. The author was Lorenzo da Ponte, a Venetian, of Hebrew origin it is supposed, who was, it is true, as we learn from his memoirs, originally intended for the Church, though he never attained