Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/111

 9<" s. vii. FEB. 9, 1901.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

103

is an entry of 'Locrine' in the 'Stationers' Registers ' under date 20 July, 1594, but none of * Selimus,' either there or elsewhere.

I have said that ' Selimus ' is full of ' The Faerie Queene.' Here is an incomplete list of words some of them very rare in the literature of the time and in most cases it can be shown that they occur in parallel passages of the play and the poem. The list is confined to words that occur in the first three books of 'The Faerie Queene.' I will follow the list up by illustrations :

Assays, battleous, besprent, bless (for bliss), carke, (to) character, chrystaline, dolorous, dreeriment, embay, endarnaged, enhance, faitour, fantastic, game (=lust, venery), gushing, gyre, hugy, hurtle, hurtling, lewd (=ignorant), (to) mask, peirsant, puis- sance, reave, rebutted, recomfort, re-vest, ruinate, smpuldring, steel-head, stent, sur- quedry, thrillant, tomb-black, tronked, un- eath, valiance, vermeil, warray.

CHARLES CRAWFORD. ( To be continued. )

HORACE WALPOLE AND HIS EDITORS.

(Continued from 9 th S. vi. 483.) LETTER 2,263 (Cunningham's ed., vol. viii. p. 401), addressed to the Hon. H. S. Conway, was first printed in Wright's collected edition of the ' Letters' (London, 1840, vol. vi. p. 197), with the date "Strawberry Hill, Sunday, Aug. 27, 1783," a date which was adopted by Cunningham. Aug. 27, however, in 1783 fell not on Sunday, but on Wednesday. Horace Walpole himself states that the letter was begun on Sunday, so that there is no question about the day of the week : "Though I begin my letter on and have dated it Sunday, I recollect that it may miss you if you go to town on Tuesday, and there- fore I shall not send it to the post till to-morrow." The letter was almost certainly written in July and " begun " on the 27th of that month, which fell on Sunday. According to the present arrangement of the letters, Horace Walpole is represented as writing both to Conway and to Lady Ossory on the same day (27 Aug.) two quite different statements as to the visit of a certain Prince de Hessenstein to Strawberry Hill. To Conway (in the letter under dis- cussion) he writes :

" The Prince d'Hessenstein has written to offer me a visit I don't know when. I have answered his note, and endeavoured to limit its meaning to the shortest sense I could, by proposing to give him a dinner or breakfast."

To Lady Ossory (to whom he had not pre-

viously written since 4 Aug.) he says (Cun- ningham's ed., vol. viii. p. 400), "A Prince de Hessenstein has lately been to dine here." The letter to Conway and the letter to Lady Ossory obviously then cannot have been written on the same date.

At the beginning of the second portion of this letter, dated "Monday morning," Horace Walpole writes :

"As I was rising this morning, I received an express from your daughter [Hon. Mrs. Darner], that she will bring Madame de Cambis and Lady Melbourne to dinner here to-morrow."

The dates of this letter are pretty clearly fixed by a passage in Walpole's letter to Earl Harcourt of 5 Aug. of this year, which evi- dently refers to the same dinner party. Writing on that day, he says (Cunningnam's ed., vol. viii. p. 397) :

" Madame de Cambis dined with me last week, and who do you think came with her? Diane de Poitiers of the next reign. You will guess who I mean when I tell you she was a little em- barrassed with sitting over against a picture that cost me more than three hundred shillings. Madame de Cambis, who is not yet deep in the Chronique Scandaleuse, telling me what and whom she had

already seen, said, and 'J'ai vule de .' I

replied, without looking up, 'II est fort beau.'"

Walpole here speaks of the dinner party (previously mentioned to Conway) as having taken place " last week," which would exactly fit Tuesday, 29 July that is, the "to-morrow" of the second half of the letter (that dated "Monday morning"). The "Sunday" on which the first part was written would there- fore be Sunday, 27 July.

The above-quoted passage from the letter to Conway as to Mrs. Darner's bringing Madame de Cambis and Lady Melbourne to dinner at Strawberry Hill serves to reveal the identity (hitherto, I believe, unknown) of the " Diane de Poitiers " of the letter to Lord Harcourt of 5 Aug. with Lady Melbourne (Elizabeth Milbanke, daughter of Sir Ralph Milbanke, fifth baronet, of Halnaby, York- shire, and wife of Peniston Lamb, Viscount Melbourne). Lady Melbourne, at this time thirty years of age, was, as Horace Walpole says elsewhere, " at the head of the fashion, or ton, as they were called " (' Last Journals/ vol. ii. p. 448). Her position was parti y due to her husband's wealth and splendid house in Piccadilly, which enabled her to give magnificent entertainments, and partly to her personal and mental attractions. Wai- pole's pseudonym for her was due to the fact that sne was at this time the object of a passing fancy on the part of the Prince of Wales, who had lately dismissed Mrs. Robinson, and had not yet been fascinated by