Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 3.djvu/411

 H s. in. MAY 27, 99.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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ar in Babrius. Here is one fable. After the ap >theosis of Hercules the gods were all in reduced to him. He received them, with th exception of Plutus, most cordially. He w; s asked why he received this god coldly ; an 1 he answered that when he was a man he ha i observed that Plutus never favoured the bet men. In another fable it is told that the bee once carried her honey to Jupiter as an offering. The god was pleased with the pious act, and promised to grant her any boon that she asked. Then she expressed tin? wish to have a sting, wherewith she might injure those who sought to take her honey. The god was displeased with her malice. He granted her the sting, but at the same time told her that if she used it she would lose her life. There is a fragment of this fable in Babrius ; but it is hardly intelligible. In a third fable it is told that Prometheus was ordered by Jupiter to mould iboth men and animals. When he had i accompli shed his work Jupiter thought that jhe had made too many carnivorous brutes, and some of these brutes were then by the command of the god transformed to men. iWhen life was given to them they showed (that their nature was that of savage beasts. 'Hence many men are sanguinary and cruel. Horace accounts for the animal passions in ihumanity somewhat differently : Fertur Prometheus, addere principi Limo coactus particulam undique Desectam, et insani leonis Vim stomacho apposuisse nostro.

Book I. Ode 16.

Most of Croxall's fables are in the Greek collection, but the originals sometimes have been spoilt by the translator. In ' The Shep- herd turned Merchant' it is said, "He loaded the ship with a cargo of dates, and set sail or a mart that was held upon the coast of A.sia five hundred leagues off." This is some- hing like carrying coals to Newcastle. But here is nothing about carrying dates to Asia n^the Greek. And the playfulness of the rjginal is lost in the translation. In the H'iginal, when the merchant sees the sea calm i second time, he exclaims, "Ah ! it wants nore dates." He hints that the sea smiles upon him in order that it may tempt him to . second voyage, and have the opportunity f swallowing a second cargo of dates. This -emark of the merchant is not in Croxall's 'ereion. E. YARDLEY.

NOUNS OF SINGULARITY. In a well-known )assage of the book of Job that holy man leclares to God, " I have heard of Thee by he hearing of the ear, but now mine eye ieeth Thee " (xlii. 5). In the Lamentations of

Jeremiah we read, " Mine eye runneth down with water" (i. 16) : and there are similar ex- pressions in the Psalms. It is the function of the eyes to see and to weep, and of the ears to hear, so that one organ may well stand for both. So also, in " The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father" (Ezekiel xviii. 20), "the son" is put for the offspring generally. Never- theless the use of the singular, as if a man had but one eye, one ear, one son, is strange. One would have expected the more natural form of Isaiah vi. 10, " lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears," and of Psalm cxix. 136, "Mine eyes gush out with water."

But there is a common form of expression which is not so easily justified. A recent in- stance may be seen in the latest volume of the ' Dictionary of National Biography,' Iviii. 232 a, where it is related of a hero that he received "a musket-shot in the thigh and another in the leg," as if a man were pro- vided only with one of each. Surely there is no such abstract thing as thigh-ness or leg- ness, neither is it the function of thighs and legs to receive shots. When Malchus was wounded by St. Peter it was in his right ear; the man who was healed on the Sabbath day had his right hand withered. What English- man would be satisfied with being told that Nelson was wounded in the eye and in the arm? W. C. B.

PROVERB. "Hast thou not heard how the blind eateth many a fly?" This occurs in the Calendar for the year 1539, as in Gasquet's one-volume ' Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries,' 1899, pp. 382, 383.

ED. MARSHALL, F.S.A.

CHARING CROSS. The popular pronuncia- tion of "Cherring Cross " may be justified by the original spelling of the word. The first three occasions on which it is mentioned in Hardy and Page's * Calendar of Feet of Fines for London arid Middlesex ' are the following : 31 Hen. III., John de Abendon conveyed premises in Chering to John, son of John (i. 31) ; 34 Hen. III., Martin le Parmenter and Mary his wife conveyed a messuage in the parish of St. Margaret atte Cherring to Robert de Bumpton and Alice his wife (i. 33); 41 Hen. III., Richerus, son of Geoffrey de Cruce, conveyed the rent of a tenement at "le Chering" at Westminster to Walter, master of the Hospital of St. James without London (i. 38). Mr. Wheatley, in his ' London, Past and Present,' i. 353, says, " The origin of the word Charing has not been satisfactorily explained," and in a note he cites the opinion of Canon Taylor (' Words and Places,' p. 502) that the