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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. m. MAY 13, '99.

three-fourths of the book. There are 1,631 person: bearing the name of Rigg, and 1,539 that of Satter thwaite. As to Christian names, those which are commonly denominated Puritan are almost entirely absent ; yet here, if anywhere, we should hav expected to find them in abundance, for Lancashir was one of the most Puritan parts of Engla7id, th only one indeed, we believe, wherein during the Commonwealth the Presbyterian discipline was fully established. We think if the names in this register were compared with a similar number taken without selection from a directory of the presen! year more names derived from the Old Testament would be found in the modern than in the ancienl list. Balthazar, Bathsheba, Naamah, and Zurial are the only ones which occur to us as markedly strange. A child named Radagunga was bap- tized on 18 Oct., 1618. The infant must have derived its name in some way more or less remote from St. Radegundis, the Thuringian princess who became wife of Clotaire, King of Soissons. Perhaps her mother or some other female ancestor was a member of one of the German copper - mining colonies which were settled in Keswick and the neighbourhood in the sixteenth century. On 17 Nov., 1608, an infant was baptized " John which God sent us." Presumably the little boy was a foundling ; one wonders what name he bore when he arrived at man's estate. Hawkshead suffered terribly from the various visitations of the plague which devastated the land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The editor prints in the introduction some valuable statistics on this matter which ought to be compared with what is known relating to other parts of England.

In 1672 a man named Thomas Lancaster, seem- ingly a member of one of the old Hawkshead families, was convicted at Lancaster Assizes for poisoning eight persons, all of them his own family connexions. He was hanged and then gibbeted at a spot in the parish called Hye-wrey, adjoining his own home. Elderly people yet remember the stump of the gibbet still standing, but it has gone now. Fragments taken from this post are said to have formed a most excellent charm for the toothache. A curious mock court was held in the hamlet of Outgate in this parish not more than a generation ago. Its proceedings require investigation, if, indeed, anything beyond vague tradition has been preserved. The book is edited in a workmanlike manner, and the index of names is one of the most lucid we remember to have seen.

IN the Edinburgh Review for April there is a striking paper on ' The Origin of Diamonds.' Most people now know, though the statement when first advanced was received Math incredulity, that the diamond is a form of carbon ; but there are few who comprehend how it has come to take the form in which we see it. In fact, it is but in recent days that the processes from which it has resulted have been discovered. Now, however, it seems certain that the place

Where groweth the diamond stone is deep in the earth, and that it is formed under imniense pressure. Experiments in the laboratory, united with careful examination of the African diamond fields, have proved this almost to demon- stration. It is startling to be told that minute diamonds have been found in some aerolites. To what a wide field of cosmical speculation does this point the way ! The article on Sir Henry Wotton

is scholarlike and fair. The writer does not try to elevate him above second-rate rank ; but his name will always linger in the English memory on account of a few good verses, and from the fact that he made the memorable epigram which sets forth that "an ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." Though evidently composed in English for otherwise the point would have been lost it seems, when ren- dered into Latin, to have been treated by dull people as serious. Izaak Walton's life of Wotton is, like all he wrote, very charming. The picture is a pleasant one, and we cannot but think highly of a man who numbered among his friends such a diversity of intellect as is indicated by the very names of Donne, Casaubon, De Dominis (the Bishop of Spalato), and Bacon. Had Wotton devoted him- self to letters only, he might have achieved wide popularity. The writer makes him out as ambitious This estimate we regard as a mistake. When he accepted the legation to Venice, he seems to have done so rather to place himself in a centre of art and literature than for the purpose of acquiring power in any vulgar sense. While he occupied the post his work was discharged efficiently. It is strange to modern ideas to find such a man giving ear to a proposal for the assassination of the Lords Tyrone ana Tyrconnel, and even justifying the murder of the Duke of Guise. ' Roman Britain ' is careful and accurate. If studied, it will modify opinion in more than one direction; but it must be obvious that so wide a subject cannot be effec- tively dealt with in the narrow pages of a review. May we not hope that some time in the near future a self-denying person may be found who will give the twentieth century a new 'Britannia Romana'?

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