Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 4.djvu/400

 444 NOTES AND QUERIES. [9-s.iv. Nov. 25,-99. and scorching answer of the great lawyer, " but we spell manners with two n's." I may be permitted to give another anecdote of him. When a judge, he met the Lord Chancellor Eldon, who remarked that there was a similarity in their titles. "Yes, my lord," was the happy retort, " but it is all in my eye." A. Q. Reid. Auchterarder. Prince Charles Stuart (9th S. iii. 387, 471; iv. 74).—The Rev. H. Whitehead, in ' Bramp- ton in 1745' (p. 55), says that some years ago he had considerable correspondence with the late Mr. W H. Henfrey, the well-known numismatist, who, in one of his letters, said : " Mrs. Hetherington, who was a great Jacobite, subsequently left Cumberland, and came with her daughters (she had no son) to reside in London. She was a great friend of Lady Primrose; and both ladies hid and entertained Prince Charles Edward when he paid his secret visits to London. It is now known for certain that on one of those visits he was formally received into the Protestant faith at the church of St. Mary-lo-Strand. I have an independent family account of this interesting occurrence, which Mrs. Hetherington greatly assisted in bringing about. I have also the Bible the prince used on the occasion." I should have said that Mr. Henf rey's great- great-grandparents were Hetheringtons. Mr. Whitehead's paper will be found printed in Transactions or the Cumberland and West- moreland Association for the Advancement of Literature and Science, No. xii., 1886-7. F. L. Mawdesley. Delwood Croft, York. The Montreux Churchyard Inscrip- tion (9th S. iv. 188, 313).—Prof. Attwell's supposition that the English lines are a trans- lation from the corresponding French in- scription will seem most unlikely to any reader who will take the trouble of criticizing the versification of the French lines. They are manifestly incorrect, and the second line alone contains two grave mistakes, first as to the number of its syllables (thirteen, instead of twelve), and also on account of a very dis- agreeable hiatus (pitie" aux). Furthermore, the short verse Ayez Pitie des Pauvres is so poor itself that, among all the possible conjectures, I should be inclined to reject, a priori, Prof. Attwell's supposition, and to suggest that, firstly, the original lines must be the English, and that, secondly, the French are only a very bad translation, the author of which is either an uneducated French passer- by or some English resident, possibly the author of the original verses, who wished to try his hand at French poetry. If, however, the French lines are the original, their author had the rare luck to gain very much by being translated into English, which is far from a common fate. Maurice Kuhn. Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. " Orsidue " (9th S. iv. 248, 330).—There can be little doubt that this Protean word, of which assady is perhaps the oldest form, goes back to an Arabic original. Asad, " wildly guessed " by Prof. Skeat, properly means, as he remarks, " lion "; its use in the sense of " gold " is confined to the alchemists, whose sacra fames and sound knowledge of human nature impressed upon them the advantages of a high-flown mystical jargon. Assady, 1 am convinced, has nothing to do with this precious " Quintessentia Solis, or Fifth Wisdom of Gola," which was far too transcendental ever to stamp its image on the current coin of the vernacular. More- over, among the numerous Arabic synonyms for gold we find lasjad with its adjective 'asjadi=golden. Hence (this is but a tame guess) come assady and orsidue—the latter possibly influenced by French or. It has occurred to me that assady may be a corruption of al-shadhr, meaning (a) pieces of gold that are picked up from the mine; (6) beads made of gold to form divi- sions between pearls and jewels. Whether the poetic prejudice in favour of second thoughts is here justified, let doctors deter- mine. Muhibbu 'l-Adab. Earls of St. Pol (9th S. iv. 169, 293, 3861— The counts of St. Pol were distinguished peers of France. Voltaire thought that one of them had the fruitless honour of con- demning King John of England to death as the vassal of Philip Augustus :— " Les juges furent sans difficulty les memes qu'on voit, quelques mois apres, tenir la memo assemblee de parlement a Villeneuve le Roi: (2 mai, 1204) Kudos, due de Bourgogne ; Herv<5, comte de Nevers ; Renaud, comte de Boulogne; Gaucher, comte de Saint-Paul."—' History of the Parliament of Paris,' chap. viii. A peer of this name is mentioned in another part of the same work :— "28 mars, 1302.—Les communes, sous le nom de tiers <5fcat, assisterent done par deputes aux grands parlcments ou etats generaux tenus dans feglise de Notre Dame. On y avait eleve un trdne pour le roi; il avait aupres de lui le comte d'Evreux son frere, le comte d'Artois son cousin, les comtes de Hainaut, de Hollande, de Luxembourg, de Saint- Pol, de Dreux, de la Marche, de Boulogne, de Nevers: e'etait une assemblee de souverains."— Chap. ii. In the third part of ' Henry VI.,' Queen Elizabeth says:—