Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 4.djvu/339

 9* b. iv. Nov. li, w.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 393 berry on Wednesday night," &c. In the fol- lowing letter to Mann of 29 Aug. Walpole ■writes: "A journey of amusement into York- shire would excuse my not having writ to you above this month, my dear Sir," &c. Both these letters, which were obviously written after Walpole's return from Yorkshire, are placed by Cunningham before that to Bentley, which was written from Yorkshire. The letter to Bentley should therefore precede the two others, and should come between Nos. 475 and 476 in Cunningham's edition. In the 4to. ed. of Walpole's 'Works' (1798), in which this letter was first printed, it is placed between letters of 1752 and 1753. This date is impossible, because in the body of the letter Walpole refers to the death of the Countess of Oxford, which took place in December, 1755. Walpole himself gives a note on this lady (printed in the 4to. edition), which is omitted by Wright and which Cun- ningham replaced by one of his own. In the same letter Walpole describes a visit to Wharnclifi'e Lodge, the seat of Edward Wortley Montagu. Walpole copied for Bent- ley's benefit an old inscription in honour of Sir Thomas Wortley. the builder of the Lodge. In the 4to. edition the inscription is given in a paragraph, with very little variation from modern spelling. In this form it appears in every edition down to that of Cunningham. Cunningham, however, replaced the para- graph by a copy of the inscription in an earlier spelling, and added the following note with Walpole's name : " I have copied the in- scription in the text from Hunter's ' South Yorkshire,' ii. 329. Walpole." Cunningham adds on his own account: "The transcriber of his letter had very carelessly copied the quaint old spelling. Cunningham." The first part of this note cannot have been Walpole's. Joseph Hunter, author of the 'History of South Yorkshire' mentioned above, was not born until 1783, and his history was not pub- lished until 1828, thirty-one years after Wal- pole's death. As regards the second part of the note—the letter to Bentley belonged to the collection reclaimed by Walpole after his quarrel with Bentley, and subsequently an- notated by Walpole himself with a view to publication. The letter and inscription passed under Walpole's eye without his making any note upon them ; it seems therefore pretty evident that the orthography of the inscrip- tion was Walpole's own, and was not due to a " transcriber." In Letter 462, addressed to Conway, and dated 16 April, 1756, Walpole writes: "I could not tire you or myself with all the de- tails relating to this foolish road bill." In the 4to. ed. of his ' Works' (1798), in which most of the letters to Conway were first printed, appears a note by Walpole on the words "road bill." It runs as follows :— " The Paddington or New Road, which the Duke of Bedford opposed as making a dust behind Bed- ford House, and from some intended buildings being likely to interrupt his prospect. The Duke of Grafton warmly espoused the other side of the question." In Wright's collected edition of the ' Letters' (1840) this note was transferred from the letter of 16 April to a letter to Conway of 25 March (then first published), where the note is appended to the following passage :— " A new road through Paddington has been pro- posed to avoid the stones: the Duke of Bedford, who is never in town in summer, objects to the dust it will make behind Bedford House, and to some buildings proposed, though, if he was in town, he is too short-sighted to see the prospect. The Duke of Grafton heads the other side." Any one reading this passage and note in conjunction (as printed by Wright) might well wonder at Horace Walpole's thus repeat- ing himself. This ineptitude of Wright's is adopted without question by Cunningnam. In Letter 23, addressed to West, and dated 27 Feb., 1740, N.S. (Cunningham's ed., vol. i. p. 37), Horace Walpole mentions one Martin, a painter. Cunningham, in a note, conjectures that this person is " David Martin, a Scottish portrait-painter of some note," &c. Whoever Walpole's Martin was, Cunningham's identi- fication is impossible, since, according to the ' Dictionary of National Biography,' David Martin, the painter, was born in 1737, and was therefore only three years old when Walpole's letter was written. Helen Toynbee. The Mistakes of the Learned. —The mistakes of the learned are more important, and therefore more dangerous, more in- structive, and more interesting, than those of the ignorant. One might compare them to the spots on the sun. Is there any volume containing a treatise on such mistakes ? One should include therein M. Benan's assertion, in his ' Histoire du Peuple d'lsrael,' that the body of Jezebel was devoured by horses ; and that of his autobiography about his Basque relatives, where he evidently means Gascon, the two epithets being, except etymologically, as distinctive as black and white. A notable chapter in such a compilation would be about the literary source or errors as to the phenomena of nature, that is to say I blunders in natural history. The Times of I 26 Sept. calls attention in a leading article ! to the strange fancies of Dr. Johnson and