Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 8.djvu/269

 9*s. viii. SEPT. 28, 1901.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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his eldest brother, John Rolt, was "aged about 18 years" in 1634, and was therefore born in 1616, the youngest brother was pro- bably between thirty and forty years of age when he departed this life in 1652.

In the Genealogist for January (vol. xvii. p. 145) there will be found a very interesting paper by Mr. J. Horace Round on ' Sir Thomas Rolt, " President of India." ' Sir Thomas Rolt was the third son of Edward Rolt, of Pertenhall, co. Bedford, by his (second) wife Mary, daughter of Sir Oliver Cromwell, of Hinchinbrooke, K.B., and he was therefore a second cousin of the supposed unfortunate victim of the plague at Smyrna. Mr. Round is himself a descendant of Sir Thomas Rolt, who was also connected with an extinct branch of my own family. Sir Thomas, who died 9 September, 1710, left two children, Edward and Constantia. The latter, who married John Kyrle-Ernle, had an only child, Constantia, who married Thomas, Viscount Dupplin, and died s.p. in 1753. Nearly ninety years before that date the fashionable world of London had been startled by the news of the elopement of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, with Eliza- beth, the only daughter and heiress of John Malet, with whom the long line of Malets of Enmore, co. Somerset, came to an end after a tenure lasting through five centuries. The story is told by Pepys under date 28 May, 1665. Lord Rochester was arrested and sent to the Tower ; but he eventually married the lady, by whom he had a son, Charles (who succeeded as third Earl of Rochester in 1680, but died under age the following year), and three daughters, coheiresses to their brother, of whom the eldest, Anne, married firstly Henry Baynton, of Spye Park and Bromham, co. Wilts, by whom she had a son, John, and a daughter, who on her brother's death brought Spye Park to her husband, Edward Rolt, the only son of Sir Thomas. Lady Anne Wilmot married secondly Francis Greville, eldest son of Lord Brooke (who died in the lifetime of his father), and became the ancestress of the present Earl of Warwick. Her next sister, Elizabeth, married Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich ; whilst the youngest, Lady Malet Wilmot, became the wife of John Vaughan, Viscount Lisburne, whose daughter Anne married Sir John Prideaux, sixth baronet of Netherton, co. Devon. Sir John Prideaux, who survived till 1766, had, among other children, John Prideaux, a brigadier-general, who was acci- dentally killed by the bursting of a shell at Niagara in 1759, after having married his cousin Elizabeth, the daughter of Edward

Rolt and sister of Sir Edward Baynton Rolt, Bart., of Spye Park. The eldest son of General John Prideaux, Sir John Wilmot Prideaux, eventually succeeded to the baronetcy, and one of his sisters was the " Miss Prideaux " whose career as an actress I endeavoured to trace in ' N. & Q.,' 8 th S. ix. 85, 253. Mr. Round points out, as an illus- tration of longevity, that though Sir Oliver Cromwell had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1598, his grandson Sir Thomas Rolt lived half way through the reign of Queen Anne, while his great-great-grandson Sir Edward Baynton Rolt "died, at the good old age of ninety, so recently as 1800."

W. F. PKIDEAUX.

THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE. Few compilers of Russian grammars have, I imagine, resisted the temptation of quoting a well-known passage (which has also found its way into an old number of 'N. & Q.') to the effect that Russian combines " the majesty of the Spanish, the vivacity of the French, the strength of the German, the sweetness of the Italian, and in addition energetic con- ciseness in its imagery, with the richness of the Greek and Latin." I have recently dis- covered another passage of the same sort, probably but little known. It occurs in a note at the bottom of p. 123 of a French translation of Gogol's curious novel 'The Dead Souls ' (vol. ii.) :

" C'est [la langue russe] un deluge de diminutifs, d'augmentatifs, de pe*joratifs, et de frequentatifs, non settlement dans les substantifs, mais dans les adjectifs, dans les verbes et dans les adverbes, qui de"montre tout d'abord a 1'observateur que cette langue est la plus nai've de 1'Europe, la plus jeune, la plus pittoresque, la plus ppetique, la moins fatiguee, la moins epur^e, la moins philosophique, la plus fantasque, la moins saisissable pour tout Stranger. C'est du vin qui fermente a rompre les cuves et les tonnes : on ne le boit pas encore, et dejk il porte k la tete."

T. P. AKMSTRONG.

DAVENANT AND * THE THIRD PART OF TOM DOUBLE.' On 5 November, 1710, Swift wrote in the ' Journal to Stella ' :

"Davenant has lately put out a foolish pamphlet called ' The Third Part of Tom Double ' ; to make his court to the Tories, whom he had left."

Mr. Aitken writes (p. 58, n. 2, of his edition of the 'Journal') that ''in 1707 [Davenant] published ' The True Picture of a Modern Whig Revived, set forth in a Third Dialogue between Whiglove and Double,' which seems to be the piece mentioned in the text, though Swift speaks of the pamphlet as 'lately put out.'" I think that Swift is referring to a more recent pamphlet of Davenant.