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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th s. vm. NOV. 9, 1901.

CHALICE AS RACE CUP (9 th S. viii. 162, 272). Apropos of the REV. SIR OSWALD HUNTER-BLAIR'S reply, the following is an instance of a silver flagon meant for secular use being converted into a chalice. In 1629 Sir Edwyn Sandys bequeathed to his friend Nicholas' Ferrar a silver flagon in remem- brance of his friendship. That flagon may be seen now in Little Gidding Church, the chalice of the sacred Communion silver, bearing the following inscription, put on it by Nicholas Ferrar :

What Sir Edwyn Sandys bequeathed

To

The remembrance of friendship His friende hath consecrated

To

The Honour of God's Service. 1629.

MICHAEL FERRAR.

" ASK NOTHING MORE OF ME, SWEET " (9 th S.

i. 389; viii. 334). Mr. Swinburne's poem is called 'The Oblation,' and is from 'Songs before Sunrise' (first edition, 1871). It lias been so much changed for the purpose of setting to music that I give a copy of it from the 1892 edition :

THE OBLATION".

Ask nothing more of me, sweet ; All I can give you I give.

Heart of my heart, were it more, More would be laid at your feet : Love that should help you to live, Song that should spur you to soar.

All things were nothing to give Once to have sense of you more,

Touch you and taste of you, sweet, Think you and breathe you and live, Swept of your wings as they soar, Trodden by chance of your feet.

I that have love and no more Give you but love of you, sweet :

He that hath more, let him give ; He that hath wings, let him soar ; Mine is the heart at your feet

Here, that must love you to live. It will doubtless surprise those who only know the poem as set to music to be tolc that it is addressed not to any mortal maiden but to Liberty ; any one who will give him self the pleasure of reading ' Songs befor< Sunrise' will find this to be the fact.

HORACE WM. NEWLAND. Stokeleigh, Torquay.

STONE PULPIT (9 th S. viii. 325). The stone pulpit near the Abbey Church, Shrewsbury has never been known as the u Druids Pulpit," even amongst the most ignorant o the population of the town. I speak as one who has lived there for over sixty years, is the reading pulpit of the refectory, anc still stands in its original position, although

he walls of the refectory have long since r anished. Good authorities consider it to >e fifteenth-century work, but it may be arlier. W. P.

NOTES ON BOOKS, &c.

Andrea Mantegna. By Paul Kristeller. English Edition by S. Arthur Strong. (Longmans & Co.) T is not often that a monograph of so much import- ance as that before us, the ultimate appeal of which 's to be to the German public, far more enlightened n such matters than is the English, first sees the ight in this country- Such, however, is in the present instance the case, and the English edition of this study of the work of Andrea Mantegna appears before the German. That it does so is due to the suggestion of Mr. Strong, librarian to the House of Lords and at Chatsworth, under whose editorial supervision the rendering has been executed. This study of Mantegna will do much to popularize knowledge concerning a man whose greatness is uncontested, but whose severe ind in a sense statuesque method has narrowed the circle of his admirers, and who until modern lays of scientific research was regarded with nore astonishment than appreciation. A prin- cipal aim of Herr Kristeller is to associate Mantegna with the great humanist movement of the fifteenth century, the chief seat of which is Northern Italy. In common with most pre- vious biographers, and in conformity with the statement of the artist, who calls himself civis Patavinus, he disregards the assertion of Vasari that Mantegna was born in the country near Mantua and the recently discovered and even more autho- ritative declaration in the ^4 rcAm'o Veneto, xxix. 191, that he belonged to Vicenza, and accepts him as a Paduan. It was at least in Padua, after his adop- tion by his master Squarcione, himself a Paduan and the most celebrated teacher of his time, that the youth of Mantegna was passed, and the influences to \\hich he was subject belonged wholly to the pagan renascence. Squarcione personally is pro- nounced unable to have exercised any lastingly beneficial influence over the intellectual growth of his greatest pupil, and Mantegna must apparently be acquitted of ingratitude in the annulling of his contract with Squarcione on the ground of his being too young to sign away a portion of his future liberty. That Mantegna derived from Squarcione anything more than the mixing of colours and the mere practical part of technique is disputed. The ideals by which he was animated reached him from Venice. In Jacopo Bellini is found the most direct influence to which Mantegna in his early days was subject. Giovanni Bellini, whose paintings were until recently ascribed to Mantegna, came under the same influences. With the arrival of Donatello in 1443 at Padua began the Paduan school of the fifteenth century. The Venetian influence which had pre- vailed with Mantegna was combated by the Tuscan. Mantegna was, however, a Venetian by tempera- ment as well as by training ; and such he remained in essence, though he received from Donatello aid to the free and characteristic expression of his own untrammelled observation of nature. An account of the Paduan school, of which Mantegna is the true founder rather than the outcome, follows,