Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/13

 9* s. vii. JAN. 5, i9oi.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

sold his goods and spent the produce in dis- tributing bread and wine to the poor. He had been expelled from one of the cities for being a Christian " (xxxi. and xxxii.). This story dates, it is believed, from the third cen- tury. Does the reply of Polyxena indicate that Christians of those days were abstainers from wine ? If so, what is to be said of the distribution of bread and wine to the poor by the disciple of Philip? Are we to regard that act as well-meaning, but uninstructed? Or was abstinence from wine the custom only of women? Or is it merely to be regarded as personal to Polyxena and her companion ? The story is not without ascetic exaggerations in its incidental references to " the filth of marriage " (xxxi.).

WILLIAM E. A. AXON. Manchester.

" COLLATE." This verb, as a synonym of the somewhat rare collation, " to take a 'slight repast," appears at least once in literature :

"Before we enter this room, there is another, where any one who pleases may collate." Lady Pomfret (1741), 'Correspondence between the Countess of Hartford and the Countess of Pomfret' (1805), vol. li. p. 304.

Here we have a back-formation, as in burgle, edit, greed, jell, jeopard, Thomas Fuller's pillor, and the American nast. F. H.

Marlesford.

AN ADULTERATE QUOTATION. Coleridge, in Southey's l Omniana' (1812), vol. ii. p. 17,

has, "Low cunning, habitual cupidity

caledomanize the human face." Henry Nel- son Coleridge, editing his uncle's ' Literary Remains' (1836-39), substitutes coarsen for the word originally used and emphasized by italics; and the 'Oxford Dictionary,' under Coarsen,' is misled by his sophistication. Rather frequent are the proofs that he did not labour under hypertrophy of literary conscience. Caledonianize must wait till the ' Dictionary ' is followed by a supplement.

>r i F. H.

Marlesford.

"RusTiCNESS." It is, perhaps, not quite fair to an author to judge him by the report of his utterances passed through the medium of a shorthand note-taker. We regularly do it, of course, in reference to statesmen and others in public position whose opinions and actions are being constantly submitted through the press for consideration and discussion. Here, however, while the general tenor of a given deliverance or the bearing of a line of action may be regarded as definitely expressed and finally ascertained, the details are necessarily and quite properly, left in abeyance, We do

not hold a speaker to the minutiae of his diction or the hypotheses underlying any particular conclusion he has reached till he has supervised the report of opinion or state- ment and sanctioned its appearance. Carlyle did not himself superintend the publication of his lectures delivered in London about 1837 on the ' History of European Literature and Culture,' and both he and his biographers thought they had served their immediate purpose and then been finally departed from. But they were found, apparently well re- ported, among the papers left at his death, by one of Carlyle's auditors, and they were published in 1892 by Messrs. Curwen, Kane & Co., Bombay. Speaking of John Knox, one of his favourite heroes, Carlyle is represented, at p. 145 of this work, as mentioning the "natural rusticness" of the Reformer, of whom he says other inevitable and charac- teristic things. "Rusticness," rather than "rusticity," is probably what occurred to the lecturer in the press of the moment, speaking as he did from notes and not from manuscript. THOMAS BAYNE.

Two OF A NAME IN ONE FAMILY. As there have been several instances of this in the following contemporary instance, which has just met my eye, may be worth recording. In the Standard of 10 Sept., 1900, is a notice of an inquest at Tonbridge on a father and three daughters who were burnt to death in that town. The names of the two elder daughters were Hilda Jessie Tattam, aged sixteen, and Hilda Georgiana Tattam, aged twelve.
 * N. & Q.' of late from registers, &c., perhaps

W. R. TATE.

Walpole Vicarage, Halesworth.

" A STILL SMALL VOICE," 1 KlNGS XIX. 12.

It does not say much for knowledge of the Bible in our days that a book is in its "twenty-ninth thousand in England and America," in which the erratum in the passage which follows remains uncorrected :

" When Moses was on the mountain it was after ', the various physical commotions and manifestations that he heard the ' still small voice,' the voice of his own soul through which the infinite God was speaking." 'In Tune with the Infinite,' p. 106, by Ralph Waldo Trine (London, George Bell & Sons, 1900).

R. M. SPENCE, D.D.

Manse of Arbuthnott, N.B.

SCOTTISH DANCE. (See 9 th S. vi. 404.) In all probability the dance mentioned by W. C. B. which he saw at Hull was the Highland dance called "Ghillie Callum," a favourite competitive dance at clan gatherings. It is one difficult of execution, as there are said to