Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/29

 9 > s. v. JAN. is, im] NOTES AND QUERIES.

LONDON, SA TVRDA Y, JANUAR Y IS, 1900.

CONTENTS.-No. 107.

NOTES : Mr. Dilke on Junius, 21 Was Shakespear Musical ? 22 Murder of the Emperor Paul of llussia, 23 Dr. Johnson and Vestris " International Library o Famous Literature," 24 " Hopping the wag " " Chiaus Portrait by the Marchioness of Granby, 25 "Flan nelized " "Boytry " "Bathetic " Discoverer of Photo graphy Cliurch older than St. Martin's Enigma b; Praed "Hanky-panky," 26.

QUERIES : -" Seek " or " Seeke " Sutty, Bookseller, 26 Dress of Charterhouse Scholars -Nursery Rimes " Dan ' Chaucer Walter Holmes Peter Travers Emery Family

United Empire Loyalists Wharton Holbein Gateway in Whitehall, 27" Hail, Queen of Heaven " " Farntosh ' Fall of the Koman Empire-William Duff" Tankage " Dr. Hayden, of Dublin -' The Book of Praise,' &c. Fathe Gordon The Word " Slang " Taltarum " Anchylo stomeasis "Cecil, Lord B ur lei gh Egyptian Chessmen 28-De Benstede or Bensted Family, 29.

REPLIES : Origin of the English Coinage, 29 " Up Guards, and at them ! " " Papaw "Artists' Mistakes, 3-

Worcester Dialect Black Jews Poet Parnell St Mildred's, Poultry, 33 Aldgate and Whitechapel Un claimed Poem by Ben Jonson "Newspaper," 34 Rubens's Portrait of the Marchesa Grimaldi Instru mental Choir Newman and 'N. & Q.' ''Mary had a little lamb" "Hoodock" Future of Books and Book men Thames Tunnel, 35 Child's Book "Nets," 36 Garrard, Master of the Charterhouse Venn : Mountford 37 "By the haft "-Double-name Signatures for Peers

Lincolnshire Sayings "Elixir Vitse " in Fiction "None, "38.

NOTES ON BOOKS: 'Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. LXI. Ward's 'The Bride's Mirror ' Leland's 'Un published Legends of Virgil ' Blew's ' Racing.'

Notices to Correspondents.

MR. DILKE ON JUNIUS.

WHEN Notes and Queries recently celebrated its Jubilee, Mr. Merton Thorns most cour- teously offered for publication some of the letters which Mr. Dilke had written to his father. One of them will be of much interest to the readers of 'N. & Q.' While Mr. Dilke edited the Athenceum, he wrote many reviews of books concerning Junius, which were collected and pub- lished in 1875 by his grandson, Sir Charles W. Dilke, with the title 'Papers of a Critic.' I read these papers not only with interest, but profit, and with pardonable gratification that the view which I had formed of Francis and Junius, and made public in 1874 in my 'Wilkes, Sheridan, Fox,' had been formed without knowing what Mr. Dilke had written long before. Since then I have never ceased regretting that Mr. Dilke did not live to read the facts which have been made public and which confirm his inferences.

The chief point in Mr. Dilke's letter is the phrase " I never was a hunter after Junius." For that reason he was the better critic. The writer who has his own Junius makes light of the evidence in support of claims put

forward on behalf of other men. Quite un- consciously he ceases to be a critic and becomes an advocate. The late Mr. Hay ward who, like Mr. Dilke, was a vigorous and skilful opponent of the theory concerning Francis, had no Junius to offer for acceptance or scorn. In the Athenaeum for 9 April 1898 I ventured to write that 1 did not care who wrote the letters signed "Junius," my self- imposed task of demonstrating that Mr Dilke and Mr. Hay ward were justified in their conclusions as to Francis having then been accomplished.

It may help some readers of Mr. Dilke's letter to explain his reference to Mason In a review of the correspondence of Horace Walpole and Mason which appeared in the Athenceum for 17 May, 1851, Mr. Dilke amused himself, as he phrased it, by speculating whether the author of 'The Heroic Epistle' either alone, or in concert with Walpole might not have written the letters signed ' Junius." He may not have known that Walpole had satisfied himself that Junius was Wolfran Cornwall, who died in 1789 while Speaker of the House of Commons. Horace Walpole's 'Hints for discovering Junius' appeared in facsimile in the Athe- naium for 24 January, 1891. Neither can Mr. Dilke have known that Mason's hand- writing does not resemble the Junian hand in any particular. Mr. Dilke hints in the following letter that he "could perhaps throw out other and even better speculative possibilities." I have been told on excellent authority that Mr. Dilke considered George Steevens as a possible Junius.

76, Sloane Street, Friday.

MY DEAR SIR, -They sent up last night from Wellington Street the 'Critical Memoirs, 3 for which I am greatly obliged.

hu 1 * 1 ^ 110 *' I, fear ' in the remotest degree probable that the twelvemonth will enable me to solve the J unms mystery for many reasons, one being all- sufficient, 2 never wax a hunter after Junius You "ill be surprised at my saying so, but it is the fact

[ have always, in my idle way, been a curious nquirer into two or three periods of our history the last and worst the early part of the reign of Ueorge II., and thus, incidentally, I was led to test the accuracy and truthfulness of the edit, of 1812 14 at J.s Letters. Some papers which Sir Harris Nicolas wrote for the Athenaum, and in which he assumed all true, led to a discussion, and he thought t better to stow them away until he had leisure to jxamme critically. This was only " labouring in ny vocation."

Subsequently circumstances* made me seek the jumbing influences of a pursuit that occupied he mind without exciting it, and I renewed my


 * The death in 1850 of Mrs. Dilke. -CHARLES W.

/ILKE.