Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/325

 9*s. V.APRIL 2i, i9oa] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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This is not the case ; Mr. Boucicault's mother reminded him of the song and suggested its insertion, but could only remember the first four lines. All the rest is original, and was written by Mr. Dion Boucicault himself. This is the version which is now, I believe, universally accepted and sung ; but there is undoubtedly an older version, which was in vogue at the beginning of the century, and was probably very much older.

J. FOSTER PALMER. 8, Royal Avenue, S.W.

AUTHORS OF QUOTATIONS WANTED.

They eat and drink and scheme and plod,

They go to church on Sunday ; And many are afraid of God, And more of Mrs. Grundy.

D. B.

An antique stone, The relics spared by old decay, As records often stand alone Of races that have passed away. And when historic light is thrown With a dim, uncertain ray, Traditions of an ancient state A ruin may corroborate.

JAMES HOOPER.

Suites.

ARTISTS' MISTAKES. (9 th S. iv. 164, 237, 293 ; v. 32.)

I AM delighted that you have opened your columns to an exposure of this care- less habit. Surely that impartial, firm, yet gentle corrector, dear old 'N. & Q.,' could not be more worthily employed. I had long meditated calling attention to the habit, and were I to detail all the instances I have noted, and accompany the enumeration with ade-

?uate correction and merited animadversion, could fill an entire number of your invalu- able serial. I must make a few instances suffice, but they shall, 1 promise you, be flagrant examples of error.

Take the eminent Sir Walter Besant's ' London,' the text a treasure of accurate in- formation, the result of profound research, but what can we say of the illustration of that thoroughfare evidently assumed to be taken from the long since demolished Butcher Row 1 Fleet Street apparently professing to be delineated as it appeared during "the spacious days of great Elizabeth," with a ruffling gallant in jauntily hung cloak, rapier cocked at the correct angle, plumed hat and "paned" trunk hose, with busy housewives abroad on marketing cent, the inevitable child accompanying, under the overhanging storied
 * Fleet Street' (edition 1894, p. 255), a view

houses of a narrow street, the vista of which is closed by the Temple Bar not erected until a century later than the period ob- viously proposed to be depicted, from the design of Sir Christopher Wren the Temple Bar of our own day !

A century and a half ago correctness in local accessories was not desiderated as it is to-day, and so Will Hogarth's anachronistic sin against the same ugly structure may be lightly regarded. But still there is the error. In that artist's illustrations to 'Hudibras,' 'Roasting the Rumps at Temple Bar,' a function which the mob gleefully performed in 1659-60, a glaring anachronism is pre- sented.

The lines from Butler thus essayed to be illustrated are from part iii. canto ii., begin- ning with line 1,505, "That beastly rabble that came down," and going on for twenty- four lines, concluding with the words " re- spective offices of state." We are in no un- certainty as to the date of this orgy. (See Peyps's 'Diary,' under date Saturday, 11 Feb- ruary, 1660.) In Hogarth's plate the back- ground is formed by the Temple Bar in situ which was not erected until 1670-2 ! But we may infer that the plate was one of a series of "pot-boilers," and that the artist gave little or no thought to historical accuracy. His labour hereanent was obviously an adapta- tion of a print current a century before his time, illustrating a pamphlet published in 1679, entitled ' Narrative of the magnificent Procession and burning of the Pope at Temple Barre Nov r 17 th 1679 oeing the anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's Coronation,' the pam- phleteer falling into an error common to the thoughtless in the seventeenth century of indiscriminately ascribing the date of Eliza- beth's accession to the throne to that of her birth or of her coronation, and keeping the 17 November indifferently as either under the popular appellation of "Queen's Day." (See Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas's 'Chronology of History,' p. 168, col. ii. sub tit. 'Queen's Day' and note.)

Such a comparatively recent (and re- volting) exhibition as an execution outside grim old Newgate (the edifice now itself doomed), one would have thought, must have escaped misrepresentation within six- teen years of the exhibition of the last of these ghastly spectacles. Yet in Major Arthur Griffiths's admirable 'Chronicles of Newgate,' vol. ii. p. 246, the engraving en- titled ' Preparing for an Execution ' shows the gallows (the cross-beam) parallel to the front of the gaol instead of, as it really was as must in 1884 have been well within the