Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 6.djvu/563

 vi. DEC. is, i9oo.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 467 For which our Hampdens and our Sidneys bled, I would at least bewail it under skies Milder, among a people less austere. Cowper, 'The Winter Morning Walk.' You ask me why, though ill at ease, Within this region I subsist, Whose spirits falter in the mist, And languish for the purple seas. It is the land that freemen till, That sober-suited Freedom chose, The land where, girt with friends or foes, A man may speak the thing he will. ShimliI banded unions persecute Opinion, and induce a time When single thought is civil crime, And individual freedom mute; Though power should make from land to land The name of Britain trebly great;. ^ Though every channel of the state Should till and choke with golden sand ; Yet waft nie from the harbour mouth, Wild wind ! I seek a warmer sky : And I will see, before I die, The palms and temples of the South. Tennyson. _ I remarked once before in ' N. & Q.' a likeness between Thomson and Cowper, but I did not observe, and perhaps others have not observed, the thoroughness of the like- ness. In ' Winter' is the expression " con- tiguous shade," and with this, and with a line in ' Summer,' A boundless deep immensity of shade, Cowper has made a line which he owes entirely to Thomson, The boundless contiguity of shade. E. YARDLEY. I do not know if the following come within the category :— Hallo ! Ye pampered jades of Asia! Marlowe, 'Tamburlaine.' Holla! ye pampred Sires of Rome ! Holla ! ye pampred Rabinea [?] of the West! Heylin, ' Survey of the Estates of Guernsey and Jersey,' ii. 324. AYEAHR. Two CHURCH BRASSES : MYLLETT AND PAYNTEE.—I have been fortunate in rescuing the two original brass inscriptions described below. If any reader can help me in finding the home of these brasses, I shall be pleased to restore them after due verification. The dealer from whom I secured them said they came from the Cotteswolds. This is possible, as both names occur in Gloucestershire wills, but up to the present time the numerous inquiries have been unavailing. Expanding the contractions, the inscriptions read as follows. 1. Size 24 in. long by 2 J in. wide :— "Off your charitie pray for the soull of John Myllett Gent & Alice his wife which I John decessid the xii day of Februarie anno Domini MVCXVII on whois soulls Ihesu have mercy." 2. Size 9J in. long by 2 in. wide :— "Orate pro anima Johannis Paynter qui obiit x | December anno Domini MVCXXVI cujus anima propi(tietur Deus)." The inscriptions each occupy two lines as marked. The Oxford University Brass- rubbing Society is still doing its utmost to trace whence the brasses were extracted. JOHN E. PRITCHAED. Bristol. OLYMPIAS AND KISAGOTAMI.—In the fabu- lous accounts of the Macedonian conqueror, which Dr. Wallis Budge has collected in his ' Life of Alexander a Series of Translations from the Ethiopia' (London, 1896), there is more than one statement of a device for the consolation of Olympias for the death of her son. Thus in the ' History of Alexander' by Abu-Shaker we are told that the hero when dying wrote to his mother a letter, in which he said:— " Sorrow not, but make a great feast and gather together all sorts of men, and say unto them,' Who- soever hath been attacked by sorrow let him not eat of this repast.' Then straightway shalt thou know that there is consolation in my words." When Olympias prepared the feast under these conditions, " no man drew nigh to the repast, and then she knew that there was none in the world who had not suffered sorrow" (pp. 397-8). In the 'Christian' Olympias is sent to beg water from a house where no one has died (p. 532). This recalls the Buddhist legend of Kisagp- tami, in which the same essential thought is presented in a similar, but more pathetic form. There the story is told of a young mother carrying her dead babe in her arms and begging her neighbours to give her some medicine to cure the strange malady of her son. One of them directs her to Buddha. He bids her bring him a mustard seed from a louse where no one lias lost a child, husband, parent, or friend. She sets out on this quest^ put receives for answer, " Alas! the living are lew, but the dead are many. Do not remind us of our deepest grief." Thus she learnt that death was the lot of all, and, convinced of the vanity of " life's fleeting show," she be- came a disciple of Gautama. The legend is iven in various works on Buddhism. I may refer to Dr. Paul Carus's 'Gospel of Buddha' London, 1899, p. 186), where the name of the sorrowing mother appears as Krisha Gautami. The Buddhist phrase, "The dead are many, >ut the living are few," receives an illustration n these Ethiopic stories of Alexander. One if the questions put by the Two-horned Con-