Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 6.djvu/476

 -396 NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. vi. NOV. 17,1000. in fllachcoocFs Magazine, vol. 1.: ' Spanish Gypsy,' by George Eliot: and 'Legal Lore relating to Gipsies," may be of assistance to MR. PLATT. EVERARD HOME COLEMAN. 71, Brecknock Road. "LoviOT" (9th S. vi. 149, 233, 338).—At the second reference Liddell and Scott's 'Lexicon' is given as an authority for the statement that according to Pliny (xxx. 11) jaundiced persons are cured by looking at a certain yellow bird which he calls icterus. I cannot find this in Philemon Holland's ver- sion, but I do find the following:— " Last of all. the Witwall,* or Lariot [tit], which is all over yellow, being not Been all winter time, appeareth abmit the sunsteeds." — Book x. chap. xxix. p. 287 b. Evidently this is the same bird, but nothing more is said of it. C. C. B. A CONTEMPORARY ON SCOTT (9th S. vi. 301). —Trusting to memory—never a safe, and very often a disastrous expedient—T said that Scott acknowledged the authorship of the "Waverley Novels "at "a famous dinner in January, 1827." As it is best to be quite accurate, I now correct this, and state that the dinner was the Theatrical Fund dinner which took place on 23 February, 1827. Sir Walter Scott was chairman, and in reply to the toast of his health proposed by Lord Meadowbank, who formally announced that the Great Unknown was now revpalod. said that he had to plead guilty to the charge (Lockhart's 'Life of Scott,'vii. 19, ed. 1838). My friend MR. PICKFORD draws my attention to Lockhart's confident assertions rrparding the author of ' Waverley' in ' Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk' (1819). Lockhart was let into the secret some time before the publica- tion of ' Ivanhoe' in December, 1819. " But," he says, "had he favoured me with no such confidence, it would have been impossible for me to doubt that 1 had been present some months before at the con- versation which suggested, and. indeed, supplied, all the materials of one of its moat amusing chapters."— Ibid., iv. 343. Lockhart had been for some time a persona grata at Abbotsford, and he became Scott's son-in-law in 1820. It is curiously interesting to find Scott himself, in a letter to Miss Edge- worth, written in 1824, ingeniously parrying the question of authorship, and referring in the following terms to Mrs. Grant of Laggan, whom his correspondent had named as one of those that had confidently associated his name with the novels:— Chlorion. "Good Mrs. Grant is so very cerulean, and sur- rounded by BO many fetch-and-carry niintreases and mi&seses, and the maintainer of such an unmerciful correspondence, that, though I would do her any dndnesa in my power, yet I should be afraid to be very intimate with a woman whose tongue and pen are rather overpowering. She is an excellent person, notwithstanding."—Ibid., v. 331. FTe would, that is. have been afraid to include VTrs. Grant in the select number that had leen in the secret practically from the first, •>ut, as we have seen by reference to the " un- merciful correspondence," she had all along an assured faith on the subiect. Scott after- wards helped her—not without some asser- tiveness from the " cerulean " element—to a pension from the Civil List. THOMAS BAYNE. SHAKESPEARE AND CICERO (9th S. v. 288,462; vi. 56, 154. 214, 316).—I know not how Shak- speare got one of his sonnets from the Greek, but he himself was incapable of translating the Greek poem. Perhaps Ben Jonson or some other scholar helped him. It would be strange if Shakspeare had no knowledge of the translation of Homer made by his fellow- dramatist Chanraan ; but be it granted that he had looked at it and taken some hints from it, it is evident that he had no concep- tion of Homeric character. Nor did he know anything about the Greeks. Timon of Athens and Ulysses are men such as Shakspeare alone could draw, but they are not Greeks. Ajax and Achilles are very far from being Greeks. It is impossible that anybody who really knew Homer could have drawn such portraits of Aiax and Achilles as Shakspeare has drawn. I did not remark all the mis- takes that are to be found in "Troilns and Cressida.' "Bull-bearing Milo" is one ana- chronism. There are some strange mistakes in Chaucer ; but Chaucer lived in a barbarous acre, Shakspeare in an age of great learning. Withal, it is clear that Chaucer knew much more Latin than Shakspeare did. In the fol- lowing lines Shakspeare makes canus the Latin for dog :— Great Hercules is presented by this imp, Whose club killed Cerberus, that three-headed canus; And when he was a babe, a child, a shrimp. Thus did he strangle serpents in his manus. 'Love's Labour's Lost. I am surprised that he made this mistake, for his language showa that he certainly knew some Latin. E. YABDLEY. "OWL IN IVY BUSH" (9th S. vi. 328).—I have long known Dr. A. Clarke's story of the Epworth parish clerk and of Mr. (not Mrs.) Wesley? giving out the Psalm in Epworth