Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/223

 9- s. v. MARCH IT, inoo.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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"PARSIMONY," NOT "PARCIMONY" (9 th S iv. 285). I concur in this protest ; but it really seems rather hopeless to judge by another word. Not long ago, when the part of the 'N.E.D.' appeared with the word "dispatch,' it was noted by the reviewers that dis was the proper way to spell it. Notwithstanding this, the press, almost without exception, ha been lately spelling the word " despatch. Spelling reform seems a terrible difficulty. We want something authoritative and yet not anything that will stop expansion. I think, now the Times has fathered 'The Century Dictionary,' it ought to adopt its spellings, such as labor, color, &c., otherwise what becomes of all the praise with which it has been heralded ? The Times has followed the Daily Chronicle in publishing ; why not in spelling " dispatch " 1 KALPH THOMAS.

PRINCE OF WALES AS DUKE OF CORNWALL (9 th S. v. 4). It is by no means correct to say that he was " only this for one month of his life," for His Royal Highness was born Duke of Rothesay, Great Steward of Scotland, Earl of Carrick, and bore other titles, enumerated in an article entitled ' Ayrshire Titles of the Prince of Wales,' which I contributed to the Irvine Herald last year. For what reason the heir - apparent has been shorn of these Ayrshire titles in peerage books and by the official heralds remains to be seen.

W. M. GRAHAM EASTON.

CHURCHES BUILT OF UNHEWN STONE (9 th S. v. 68, 154). Only the actual walling of St. Just-in-Penwith Church, Cornwall, is of stones built up in their natural shape, and looking something like great mosaic. The "dressings" are of moor granite. There is nothing symbolical or masonic about the treatment. In East Anglia there are scores of old churches whose walling is of rough flints built in precisely the same way. Be- sides Great Clacton Church, Essex, mentioned by W. B., the tower of East Mersea Church in the same county may be mentioned as constructed of the nodules of laminated stone found thereabouts in the London clay. The Church of the Good Shepherd, on the outskirts of Mafeking (Bechuana- land), is constructed entirely of large u:i- burnt bricks (each measuring about 2 ft. by 1 ft. by 1 ft.). Such sun-dried bricks are also used for walls around some of the kraals in the native town adjacent to Mafeking. These walls are washed over, after erection, with a thick coating of clay and water, upon the surface of which the blacks, with pointed sticks sometimes, scratch geometrical designs (scraffito, in fact), often taking by no means

unpleasing forms. In this yearning for orna- ment they are far and away ahead of the average Briton or Boer in South Africa, whose homes in country places are generally hopelessly ugly. HARRY HEMS.

Fair Park, Exeter.

"INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF FAMOUS LITERATURE" (9 th S. v. 24). I have not seen the print of the house in which Gold- smith lodged alluded to by MR. WOODALL, but I am inclined to think that it may- be taken from the frontispiece to vol. xliii. of the European Magazine, which will be found reproduced, with the omission of an inscription and a slight alteration in detail, in Thornbury and Walford's * Old and New London,' vol. ii. p. 480. I can verify the accuracy of this drawing, inasmuch as more than half a century ago I was personally familiar with the locality in which the house was situate, and in the spring of 1850 (fifty years ago !) I was in the habit of frequently visiting the house itself (for business purposes) and knew every room in it. It (the house) was on the westward side of a quadrangle (of houses) entered from the top of the Old Bailey, on the west (the left- hand) side going from Ludgate Hill. The name " Little Old Bailev " had then officially disappeared from London street nomencla- ture for eighty-eight years ; but down to 1803, the date of the engraving, it was still popu- larly retained. Old readers of * N. & Q.' will be able to recall the shop of the pioneer of "discount" booksellers, the late Mr. Richard Fleckner Dunn, which stood adjacent to and on the north of the Old Bailey entrance to this square, a business which is still carried on under the name of R. F. Dunn & Co. on Ludgate Hill. This quadrangle was known as Green Arbour Court, and the house in which Goldsmith lodged in 1758 was No. 12, and faced the entrance from the Old Bailey. It, with its neighbouring houses, as I have intimated above, formed the fourth side of the quadrangle, and its right-hand angle, as the explorer entered, was pierced by an open square-headed aperture which " gave " directly on a most steep, even precipitous, flight of steps leading down to a narrow thoroughfare called Seacoal Lane, which ended westward in Farringdon Street, a little to the north of the then bare walls of the vacant Fleet Prison, a site now occupied >y the Congregational Memorial Hall. These teps, which descended the steep slope of the eastern side the westward -looking face of the Fleet Valley, had in the last years jf their presence in situ useful hand-rails,