Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 6.djvu/59

 9*s.vLj0LY2i,i9oo.) NOTES AND QUERIES. 45 Messrs. Ward, Payne, Wilkinson, and Baker, and newspaper representatives. The lugger is given the right number of masts (three) in a drawing in the Illustrated London New*, 21 August, 1875, p. 189, giving Webb "hot coffee by moonlight." Here Webb is repre- sented wearing blinker*. On p. 221 are two other illustrations, ' Nearing Calais' and ' Webb Landing.' Webb's feat Drought forth several publica- tions ; the most mendacious was one entitled ' Captain Webb's Swimming Companion,' with which he had nothing whatever to do. It was simply a reprint or a plagiarism (of Thevenot, 1699) originally published in [1844]. It seeuns to me an absurd refinement that a man should wear drawers to swim the Channel, but one would have thought that it would have been mentioned in some of the accounts. Only after his death, however, does it incidentally occur when in the Times and in ' Swimming Notes and Record' [by Robert Watsonl 9 and 16 May, 1885, we learn that in his Channel swim he wore "silk trunks," an American—i.e., United States (?)— name for silk drawers ; at another time they are referred to as the " scarlet breech clout." He wore the same in the final swim, but they were torn from his body by the force of the water. What a number of the principal persons are now dead : Webb—poor fellow !—A. Q. Payne, Wilkinson, Chambers, Dr. Henry Smith, and the lugger Ann, broken up some years ago and her type obsolete, so that there is not now a single boat of her rig at Dover. Mr. Toms is alive, though not residing at Dover; so are Webb's two children (he was married in 1880), and his widow is now Mrs. England, enjoying, I hope, quiet peacefulness after the great troubles she had to pass through. A new edition of Payne's 'Art of Swim- ming,' with an index, is most desirable, or perhaps a new book incorporating Webb by Payne and Webb's own articles, and giving a proper biography. It is one that should be in every school library, for the excellent advice and good and manly counsel. It requires a peculiar temperament to be able to rise from a perusal of Webb's great 8wim without a tear of joy in one's eye, and a feeling of pride that such indomitable courage and extraordinary powers of endur- ance should have been exhibited by an Englishman. RALPH THOMAS. Clifford's Inn. LITERARY PARALLEL : ADDISON—TENNYSON. —I think the following parallel is interesting, especially as it is improbable that Tennyson was thinking of Addison when he wa^ writing his 'Idyll.' The passage may perhaps have been in the poet's mind unconsciously:— "I am enraged in this speculation by a sight which I lately met with at the opera. As I was standing in the hinder part of the box I took notice of a little cluster of women sitting together in the prettiest coloured hoods that I ever saw. One of them was blue, another yellow, and another philo- mot [explained in a foot-note as the russet yellow of dead leaves—feuille morte]; the fourth was of a pink colour, and the fifth of a pale green. I looked with as much pleasure upon this little party- coloured assembly as upon a bed of tulips, and did not know at first whether it might not be an embassy of Indian queens; but upon my going about into the pit, and taking them in front, I was immediately undeceived, and saw so much beauty in every face, that I found them all to be English. —Spectator, No. 265 (Addison's). So dame and damsel glittered at the feast Variously gay: for he that tells the tale Likened them, saying, as when an hour of cold Falls on the mountain in midsummer snows, And all the purple slopes of mountain flower* Pass under white, till the warm hour returns With veer of wind, and all are flowers again ; So dame and damsel cast the simple white, And glowing in all colours, the live grass, Rose-campion, bluebell, kingcup, poppy, glanced About the revels. Tennyson, ' The Last Tournament,' 11. 225-33. JONATHAN BOUCHIER. Ropley, Hampshire. NELSON'S SIGNAL AT TRAFALGAR.—The fol- lowing extract from a letter addressed to the Times (26 June) should, I think, find a per- manent place in 'N. & Q.,' where it will be accessible for future reference :— "Mr. George Carslake Thompson writes from 26, Duke Street, Cardiff: ' With regard to Judge Baylis's assertion that the only suggestion of Nel- son's signal officer was the substitution of " expects " for "confides" — certainly not "England" for " Nelson " (Times, 16 June)—my grandfather, Capt. George Browne, who died at Bridgwater in 1858, during the latter part of his life confidently asserted that the request to be allowed to make the latter substitution, on the ground of economy in signalling, was made by him. Mr. O'Byrne, in the " Dictionary of Naval Biography," says that Browne was the officer who received the signal verbally from Lord Nelson (his authority for this statement being a communication from G. Browne himself), and he gives the substitution of " England " for " Nelson " as the change which was made; but he attributes the suggestion to Pasco. I have in my possession a manuscript note by the late Capt. Karslake, my grandfather's lifelong friend, made upon the margin of an old local newspaper, which may be interesting with regard to the question of one substitution or two. After Riving some particulars of the officers of the Victory, the note continues as follows: "Peter Parker was promoted on the 1st August, 1804—and Browne, wno was one of the signal mid- shipmen (as well as myself), was appointed to the vacancy—thus obtaining hi8 commission about air