Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 9.djvu/379

 9* s. ix. MAY io, 1902.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

371

several instances, one of them from Fulle himself : " But Comicall was the end of Job and all things restored double to him." Thi is followed by another from Hale : " Th Comical part of the Lives of Men are too ful of Sin and Vanity, and the Tragical par thereof too full of Sin and Misery."

C. C. B.

GORDON, A PLACE-NAME (9 th S. ix. 29, 133 256). In the 'Scottish Clans' (W. & A. K Johnston) is the note :

" The first Gordon of whom there is any distinc. trace is Richard of Gordon, said to be the grandson of a famous knight who slew some monstrous aninia in the Merse in the time of Malcolm III. Tha Richard was Lord of the Barony of Gordon in thi Merse is undoubted, as between 1150 and 1160 h< granted from that estate a piece of land to the monks of St. Mary at Kelso, a grant confirmed by his son Thomas. Other Gordons figure in history about this time, apart from Bertram de Gordon, whose arrow in 1199 wounded Richard of England at Chalons."

1 Chambers's Encyclopaedia' says :

" No proof has been found of any connection be tween the Gordons of France and the Gordons oi Scotland. There is little or no doubt now that the Scottish Gordons took their name from the lands of Gordon in Benyickshire. Their earliest historian, writing in the sixteenth century, says that these lands, together with the arms of three boars' heads, were given by King Malcolm Ceanmohr (1057-9^ A.D.) to the progenitor of the house, as a reward for slaying, in the forest of Huntley, a wild boar, the terror of all the Merse. But in the eleventh century there were neither heraldic bearings in Scotland nor Gordons in Berwickshire. The first trace of the family is about the end of the twelfth century, or the beginning of the thirteenth century, when it appears in record as witnessing charters by the great Earls of March or Dunbar, and as granting patches of land and rights of pasturage to the monks of Kelso."

The earliest historian of the Gordon family was an Italian monk of the Cistercian monas- tery of Kinloss in Moray, whose account, written in the middle of the sixteenth cen- tury, is still in manuscript, and is entitled 'Historise Compendium de Origine et Incre- mento Gordonise Familise, Johanne Ferrerio, Pedemontano,authore, apud Kinlos A.D. 1545, fideliter collectum.' Consequently, as he mentions that the earliest Gordon bore the three boars' heads, those arms must have been, in any case, in use in 1545 (the date of his manuscript) and before. They are still borne by the Marquis of Huntly and the Earl of Aberdeen. RONALD DIXON.

46, Maryborough Avenue, Hull.

GORDON AS A RUSSIAN SURNAME (9 th S. ix. 148). MR. BULLOCH is right. The name Gordon is fairly prevalent among Jews. We have a young novelist of that name. I remem-

ber also reading a brilliant Hebrew novel written by a Russian writer of that name. My own impression is that the name is gene- rically Hebraic in formation, evolving itself possibly out of " Yardine "= Jordan. Perhaps the Y and the J are difficult of pronunciation by Russians, and so became hardened into G. Jews are wont to play tricks with their names in this way for prudential reasons. The theory of transposition from "Grodno" may be dismissed for the reason that MR. BULLOCH so learnedly recognizes.

M. L. E. BRESLAR.

NAPOLEON'S FIRST MARRIAGE (9 th S. ix. 347). Probably your querist, if he wants "the romance of Napoleon's first marriage," will not be satisfied with a " trustworthy account " of the marriage, as there was, indeed, no romance about it. A sufficiently accurate account of the facts, as now known from the most recent publication of original documents, is to be found in the latest life of Napoleon namely, 'Napoleon,' by Mr. Watson, just pub- lished by the Macmillan Company. D.

DELAGOA. AND ALGOA (9 th S. v. 336, 424; vi. 16, 479). There seems to be no disposition to dispute the supposed derivation of these South African place-names from Goa, the capital of the Portuguese settlements in India, so that it is perhaps worth while accentuating the supposition by quoting bhe following from an article in the Empire Iteview of December, 1901, by Mr. J. B. Firth, on 'The Nomenclature of South Africa* :

"Cape Agulhas, the most northerly promontory, leadland, and the little island of St. Croix in Algoa Bay is the spot where Diaz landed and set up a luge cross to mark his zeal for the Christian reli- gion. But the Portuguese passed on and left the jreat prize to others. Their goal was India, and ,wo place-names survive to tell the story of their imbition in the most succinct form. Algoa was heir port of call on the way to Goa, in India ; )elagoa was their port of call on the return voyage, ^hese two words are an epitome of Portuguese olonial policy."
 * akes its name from the needle-shaped rocks of the

J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.

HONORIFICABILITUDINITAS (9 th S. ix. 243).

am inclined to think that this word was amiliar in Shakespeare's time from its use n some well - known medical book. The ollowing passage, which I quoted in the iterary World on 15 February, 1901, from homas Nash's ' Lenten Stuff/ would appear o favour that supposition. "Physicians," ays that lively writer, "deafen our ears with the honorificabilitudinitatibus of their eavenly panacea, their sovereign guiacum, heir treacles, their mithrjdates compacted of