Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/435

 9* s. vii. JUNE i,i9oi.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

427

simple, but not easily explained. I will send a specimen sheet, showing the method of arrangement, to any who propose to join. Members would be expected to work upon a uniform plan, and to undertake to examine their respective indexes for names in which other members happened from time to time to be interested. If only fifteen join a start can be made, but there is plenty of scope for ten times that number.

Let me conclude with an extract from a review which appeared in the Daily Chronicle of 29 August last :

"He who makes a good catalogue confers a great boon on his fellow-men, though none but those in charge of [or who use] great libraries can really appreciate the boon ; they alone can realize what an enormous mass of information exists on every subject, and can understand how useless it all is until properly catalogued and rendered available to students. We are waking up to the necessity of classification and organization in the world of books.

On all sides there are signs that the near future

will be signalized by the systemizing of the know- ledge we already have, rather than by great strides in the direction of further gains."

These remarks apply with peculiar force to genealogical research. I will gladly explain the plan at greater length to any who will address me direct.

GEORGE F. TUDOR SHERWOOD. 50, Beecroft Road, Brockley, S.E.

MODERN BOOKS : THEIR INCONVENIENCES. Here are two books soliciting me : Mr. Churton Collins's 'Ephemera Critica' and Mr. Butt's 'Highways and Byways in East Anglia.' The latter is, perhaps, the more immediately interesting of the two, but I choose the other because it weighs seven ounces less. The books are almost exactly of the same size (the lighter one has twenty- one pages more than the other), and both are substantially bound in cloth. The difference in weight is enormous, and tells heavily against Mr. Dutt's book, which is positively burdensome. Why should it be so 1

May I also ask why the inner margin of books is often so narrow that one has to bend the books backwards till the binding cracks to be able to read them ? This is the case with the naw edition of Gray's 'Letters' published by Messrs. Bell & Sons, a volume otherwise purely delightful. The wonder is increased by the fact that there is an ample outer margin. C. C. B.

ILLUSTRATIONS TO ' THE MILL.' Who illus- trated by hand the poem of 'The Mill/ a Moravian tale, written in 1829 by Francis, first Earl of Ellesmere, which figured in the catalogue of T. Wenman Martin, Esq., who

died, I think, in Seymour Street, Portman Square, in the sixties 1 Can any one tell me how much the poem then fetched, as I am informed it is now very scarce 1 ? Mr. W. Martin was a great collector of pictures and engravings, and I have some specimens from his collection. J. M. S.

ENGLISH ORATORY. A correspondent writes to me :

"Can you tell me of any book on English orators and oratory in the last two centuries ? I have to write an essay on the causes of the decline of rhetoric since the days of Burke and Sheridan. I suppose it comes chiefly from reporters and news- papers."

Will the Editor, or any one else, kindly respond to this appeal 1

JONATHAN BOUCHIER.

[There is ' The World's Best Orations,' 10 vols. (St. Louis and Chicago, Kaiser).]

" ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME." Can any reader give me references for the well-known quotation, " All roads lead to Rome " ?

W. B. W. [Juvenal has "Omnia Romse cum pretio."]

"RYMMYLL." What is the above word in Barbour's ' Bruce,' xii. 577 1 I give the con- text :

Ther men mycht se ane hard battale,

And sum defend and sum assale,

And mony a riall rymmyll ryde

Be roucht thair [apon] athir syde.

Jamieson gives no clue. H. P. L.

AMERICANA. Can any of your readers state if " An Abstract or [sic] the Lawes of New England as they are now established. London, printed for F. Coules and W. Ley at Paules Chain, 1641," 15 pp. small 4to, with frontis- piece and "Table of the Chapters," is a rarity ? I find it bound up in a volume of seventeenth-century tracts in my possession.

H.

COMTESSE DE SEGUR. I shall be glad of particulars of, or information where I can find biographical details of, the life of Madame la Comtesse de Segur, nte Ros top- chine, who wrote ' Memoires d'un Ane.'

A. G.

THE SURNAME KEMP. The surname Kemp is commonly derived from the A.-S. cempa, whence we have the words kemp and kempery used in old ballads. In early documents the ancestors of the present Kemps are in many instances described as "de Campo," "de Campis," or "atte Camp," with evident reference to their place of abode. On con- sulting the 'H.E.D.' I find the obsolete