Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/445

 9 th S. V. JUNE 2, 1900.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

437

Were they both encircled by the garter, anc both accompanied by the motto "Dieu el mon droit " 1 Burke is not quite explicit on these points. By the way, Godwin's 'English Archaeologist's Handbook ' gives Elizabeth i " red lion and white greyhound." E. L.-W.

OLD SONGS. Can any one refer me to ful versions of two old songs ? The first begins :

Sweet Ellen the fair from her cottage had strayed ; To the next market town tripped this beautifu maid.

The second, I think, runs thus :

Stay, traveller, tarry here to-night ; [The night is dark, the wind blows loud,] The moon has, too, withdrawn her light, And gone to rest behind a cloud.

Draw near the hearth and take a place; Until the hour of rest draw nigh, Of Robin Hood and Chevy Chase [We'll sing unto our palates high.]

Had I the means I 'd use you well, 'Tis little I have got to boast ; But should you of this cottage tell, Say Hal the woodman was your host.

As well as correct versions of the words, I should like the old airs of these songs.

C. SWYNNERTON.

OLD PERSIAN TRANSLATION OF THE GOSPELS Cornelius a Lapide (Steen), a professor at Louvain in the beginning of the seventeenth century, says in his ' Prcemium in Evangelia,' vol. i. cap. iii. p. 11 of Antwerp edition of 1732, that Jerome Xavier, the well-known missionary at Akbar's Court and a grand- nephew of St. Francis Xavier, sent from Agra to the Jesuit College at Rome a copy of a Persian translation of the Gospels. The copy was dated 790 A.H. or 1388 A.D., but Steen, who had seen and used the manuscript, thought that the translation must have been made at a much earlier period, as it contained many obsolete words. Can any reader inform me if the MS. is still in existence, and if it has been catalogued and described 1 Also if the translation is the same as that published in Walton's ' Polyglott,' vol. v., and supposed to have been made about 1341 1

H. BEVERIDGE.

"Sous." In the ' Rosciad,' 11. 309-10, Churchill writes : Next came the Treasurer of either House, One with full purse, t'other with not a sous.

According to lexicographers, when the form sous is used as a singular, the final s is mute. Which is correct 1 THOMAS BAYNE.

Helensburgh, N.B.

[When a French word such as sous is anglicized rules scarcely apply.]

" NEITHER FISH, NOR FLESH, NOR GOOD

RED HERRING." (9 th S. v. 125, 290.)

MR. SMITHERS has referred us to John Hey wood's 'Proverbs,' published in the year 1546, for a very early use of this expres- sion in a printed book. The * Musarum Delicise; or, the Muses' Recreation,' by Sir John Mennes, or Mennis, and Dr. James Smith, first appeared in 1651, so if the phrase be really found in that work, for MR. MARTIN is not certain, the authority is not of much account, so far as time is concerned. I cannot, indeed, furnish a reference earlier than the one to Heywood, but I can show that the proverb was employed long before the days of either Sir John Mennes or John Dryden. In Thomas Nash's " Lenten Stuff, concerning the Description and first Procreation and Increase of the Town of Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk : With a new Play never played before, or the Praise of the Red Herring," London, 1599 (reprinted in the second volu-me of the ' Harleian Miscellany '), I find the say- ing with only a slight change in the order of the words, which was probably meant to be emphatic. From this most amusing pamphlet I make the following extract :

"Other disgraceful proverbs of the herring there are, as ' Never a barrel better herring ; Neither flesh nor fish, nor good red herring,' which those, that have bitten with ill bargains of either sort, have dribbed forth in revenge, and yet not have them from Yarmouth ; many coast towns, besides it, enterprising to cure, salt, and pickle up herrings, but mar them ; because they want the right feat, how to salt and season them. So I could oluck a crow with poet Martial, for calling it putre halec, the scauld rotten herring ; but he meant that of the fat reasty Scottish herrings, which will endure no salt, and in one month (bestow what cost on them you will) wax rammish, if they be kept ; whereas our imbarrelled white herrings, flourishing with the stately brand of Yarmouth upon them, scilicet, the three half lions, and the three half ishes, with the crown over their head, last in long /oyages, better than the red herring," &c.

The reference in Nash is to Martial's ' Epi- grams,' lib. iii. 77. I quote from a copy of ipud Franciscum Hackium, A J66j," which iame copy, as an inscription informs me, was presented by a late distinguished pro- jonsul of the British Empire to his beloved ion John ("Filio meo charissimo Johanni") n the year 1835. I withhold the name, but annot help saying that the gift of such a )ook by a father to his son is a thing cal- ulated to make one wonder, to say the least.
 * he edition published at " Lugd. Batavorum,