Notes and Queries articles from June 1997

Notes and Queries archives from June 1997

The second edition of 'Wing' completed.
June 1, 1997... Congratulations and the gratitude of all users - librarians, scholars of English and Classical literature, British history, the history of theology, law, philosophy, the natural sciences, medicine, British topography, the fine arts, music, the...

The earliest old English place-names in Scotland.
June 1, 1997... As has long been recognized, the place-names of southern Scotland represent primary source material relating to early Anglian settlement. Documentary sources are, as Nicolaisen points out, 'meagre', so that place-names represent 'the only...

Vacancies in heaven: the doctrine of replacement and Genesis A.
June 1, 1997... The poet of the Old English Genesis A spends a brief moment after the fall of the seditious angels to reflect on an idea, which, though hardly a central theme in early medieval theology, was nevertheless a well-rooted one. In Genesis A, the...

Unidentified citations of Augustine in Anglo-Latin writers.
June 1, 1997... In order to establish that a work was known in Anglo-Saxon England - the goal of J. D. A. Ogilvy's Books Known to the English, 597-1066, which we are revising as the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture - it makes little difference if an...

The 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' for 949 and Olaf Cuaran.
June 1, 1997... The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 949 (in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 636) is the brief Her corn Anlaf Cwiran on Nordhhymbra land 'In this year Olaf Cuaran came into Northumbria.'(1) This Olaf, son of Sihtric of York, is first...

Some patterns in the non-historical demonstrative usage of the 'Peterborough Chronicle' Annals 1070-1121.
June 1, 1997... The annals for the years 1070-1121 of the Peterborough Chronicle are remarkably close linguistically to what we understand as 'classical' late West Saxon, despite their East Midlands origin. This is not surprising. As Cecily Clark suggested in...

Gawain's helmet.
June 1, 1997... In the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the 'scene' describing the arming of Gawain in readiness for his adventure is described by the poet in considerable detail, giving rise to substantial critical attention in terms of its symbolism....

The place-name Hardy.
June 1, 1997... The place-name Hardy in Lancashire(1) (now part of the joint parish of Chorlton cum Hardy) is recorded as Hardey in 1555 and 1588(2) and as Hardeye in 1525.(3) No earlier spellings are available, and no firm etymology has yet been established....

Of mops and puppets: the ambiguous use of the word 'mop' in the Towneley Shepherds' plays.
June 1, 1997... Something generally ignored by writers on medieval drama is that one of the most crucial roles in the mystery plays was probably never played by a live actor for, although there is little firm evidence to support this claim, it seems highly...

Familiariarity breeds contempt: on the use of 'well-known' in OED.
June 1, 1997... Having recently consulted OED for some research I was engaged on, I came across the denotation of ass, sb.(1) a.1.: 'well-known quadruped of the horse kind'. This made me wonder if well-known is a necessary part of the definition or the added...

John Milton among the neo-Latinists: three notes on Mansus.
June 1, 1997... Milton's Latin poem Mansus has been studied from a number of perspectives and in a variety of contexts: as a Renaissance reworking of the panegyric tradition,(1) as a clever fusion of classical motifs and topoi,(2) and more recently as a...

Milton and two Italian humanists: some hitherto unnoticed neo-Latin echoes in 'In Obitum Procancellarii Medici' and 'In Obitum Praesulis Eliensis'.
June 1, 1997... (i) In Obitum Procancellarii Medici Milton's poem on the death of the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor, Dr John Gostlin, opens with a gnomic statement addressed to mankind in general, advocating obedience to the laws of fate, and submission and...

'Mugiles' and 'Raphani': Milton's 'Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda', 142. 11-13 and Catullus 1.15.19.
June 1, 1997... At Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, 142.9-13 Milton denounces More in these words: Tene experiemur, ancillariole, tene moeche, aut stylum tum, ancillis tantummodo metuendum? cui si quis raphanum aut mugilem solum intenderit, actum...

Milton and Sir Francis Bacon's 'A Wise and Moderate Discourse, Concerning Church-Affaires' (1641).
June 1, 1997... Milton's close familiarity with one of Sir Francis Bacon's lesser-known works, A Wise and Moderate Discourse, Concerning Church-Affaires, written at the height of the Admonition controversy in 1589 but first published posthumously in 1641,(1)...

The Proem to Henry More's 'The Praeexistency of the Soul.'
June 1, 1997... Henry More's The Praeexistency of the Soul is a learned piece which requires a learned commentary.(1) Sometimes his allusions to the Classics are distorted by more modern intermediaries,(2) sometimes the concatenation of two motifs is an index...

'Paradice's Only Map': a plan of Nun Appleton.
June 1, 1997... Students of Andrew Marvell and the seventeenth-century estate poem have long been concerned to establish the appearance of Lord Fairfax's house at Nun Appleton. The question of which, if any, of several near-contemporary illustrations depicts...

The unrecorded second edition of Samuel Parker's 'A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie' (1670).
June 1, 1997... While Samuel Parker's A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1670) is remembered primarily as the target of Andrew Marvell's deflating wit in The Rehearsal Transpros'd (1672), it was at the time a major statement on the iniquities of toleration...

The dating of Defoe's 'Atalantis Major.'
June 1, 1997... On 26 December 1710, Daniel Defoe wrote to his employer Robert Harley from Edinburgh, saying that there had fallen into his hands the manuscripts of 'Two Vile Ill Natur'd Pamphlets' aimed against the Government and that he hoped to be able to...

Giles Jacob's Conduct of Life.
June 1, 1997... In the British Library are three editions of a small work entitled Essays Relating to the Conduct of Life. The first edition (1717) was published by Edmund Curll; the second (1726) by T. Cooke; and the third (1730) by J. Hooke. Internal and...

A source and context for Pope's "To Mr. Gay'. (Alexander Pope)
June 1, 1997... In 1720, Pope commissioned Godfrey Kneller to paint a portrait of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu dressed in her Turkish costume, a pose intended to capture all the exotic infatuation the poet had felt for Lady Mary since about 1716.(1) Her two-year...

Judging unjust judges: new sources for Swift's Letter to Molesworth. (Jonathan Swift; Lord Viscount Molesworth)
June 1, 1997... In his Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Molesworth, the Drapier criticizes, among other things, the decision of Lord Chief Justice Whitshed to discharge, in November of 1724, the Grand Jury for refusing 'to make a presentment'...

A botanical source for Christopher Smart.
June 1, 1997... The little that has been written about Christopher Smart's poem 'The Hop-Garden'(1) usually considers it in relation to Virgil and the English Georgic tradition.(2) The choice of subject matter is agreed to derive from Smart's childhood in...

'Tom Jones' And Alsatia.
June 1, 1997... In Book VIII, chapter xiv of Tom Jones, the Man of the Hill describes his arrival in London after leaving Oxford in disgrace. Passing through the Inner Temple, 'very hungry and very miserable', he meets Mr Watson, who subsequently leads him to...

Additional information about Eliza Haywood's 1749 arrest foe seditious libel.
June 1, 1997... The December 1749 arrest of Eliza Haywood (1693?-1756) for seditious libel due to her involvement with a pamphlet about the Pretender, A Letter from H - G - g, Esq. . . . To a Particular Friend, has been briefly mentioned in connection with...

Samuel Richardson and 'Mr. Norris': Richardson's letter to Millar 8 August 1750.
June 1, 1997... In their massive biography of Samuel Richardson, T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel quote a line of poetry from Richardson's 'letter of sympathy on a recent bereavement' to Andrew Millar (8 August 1750). Where Richardson credited the poem to...

A Note on Mary Leapor's reputation.
June 1, 1997... Roger Lonsdale, Betty Rizzo, Richard Greene, and Donna Landry have all drawn attention to various notices of the contemporary reception and reputation of the poet Mary Leapor (1722-46).(1) In addition to these it may be worthwhile to point out...

William Blake, Edmund Spenser, and William Kent.
June 1, 1997... Robert Gleckner has recently provided a lengthy, scholarly monograph based on a series of close and often persuasive readings in order to justify his contention that Blake's 'criticism' of Spenser is part of the very fabric of the former's...

Sterne and 'The History of Cold-Bathing.'
June 1, 1997... One of the more esoteric texts to find its way into Tristram Shandy is The History of Cold-Bathing (1702) by Sir John Floyer and Edward Baynard; Sterne alerts us to his familiarity with that work in volume VI, chapter 36, where Tristram quotes...

An unnoted book society (?) in eighteenth-century derby.
June 1, 1997... The Special Collections division of Michigan State University Library possesses a copy of Thomas Pennant's Tour in Scotland in a 1771 edition. A sheet of paper glued to the verso of the front cover bears a number of names and dates and presents...

An editor of The London Magazine (1732-85): Alexander Hogg.
June 1, 1997... It has long been established that Isaac Kimber edited The London Magazine from 1732-55 and Edward Kimber edited it from 1755-69, but NCBEL records no subsequent editor for the 1770-85 period. It is certainly of interest, therefore, that the...

A brief note on Beckford's 'Queen of Delusions'. (William Beckford's unpublished letters)
June 1, 1997... In studying the manuscripts of William Beckford (1760-1844), one is forever indebted to the labours of Lewis Melville, who early in this century attempted to present a generous selection of Beckford's unpublished letters, in The Life and...

'The Observer' essay serial in the Bristol and Bath Magazine, 1782-1783.
June 1, 1997... In my 'The Original not Identical to the Collected Bristol and Bath Magazine, 1782-1783',(1) I noted briefly that No. 6 of the seven-instalment serial 'The Observer' had reprinted, without acknowledgement, an essay in Colman and Thornton's...

Colman the Younger's 'Surrender of Calais': the French source. (writer George Colman)
June 1, 1997... 'The Surrender of Calais is as interesting as a tragedy can be without poetry in it', Hazlitt wrote in a review of 1816.(1) By that time The Surrender of Calais, George Colman the Younger's masterpiece, had enjoyed a quarter of a century of...

Cowper's 'To a Young Lady with a Present of Two Cockscombs' and Gentleman's Magazine. (poet William Cowper)
June 1, 1997... One of Cowper's attractive occasional poems, 'To a Young Lady, with a Present of Two Cockscombs', puns on cockscomb = (a) an ornamental plant of the genus celosia, (b) a fop: Madam, - Two Cockscombs wait at your command, And, what is strange,...

Cowper in the Christian Miscellaney. (poet William Cowper)
June 1, 1997... The St. James' Chronicle for 28 January 1792 carried an advertisement for the publication, that day, of the first number of the Christian Miscellany 'By Benjamin Kingsbury'. Kings-bury was, in fact, merely the editor; his introduction to the...

'Mrs. Barbauld's School' and its poetic staff.
June 1, 1997... In 1775 Johnson said of Anna Letitia Barbauld that she 'was an instance of early cultivation, but in what did it terminate? In marrying a little Presbyterian parson, who keeps an infant boarding-school, so that all her employment now is "To...

The poems of William Cowper, volumes II and III: addenda and corrigenda.
June 1, 1997... I am now able to repair some deficiencies in volumes II and III of The Poems of William Cowper, edited by myself and Charles Ryskamp and published by the Clarendon Press in 1995. 1. The Head Master of Westminster School has kindly granted...

A source for Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.
June 1, 1997... The eighteenth-century Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe is famous for having lived a reclusive and an uneventful life. As Deborah D. Rogers comments in Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography (London, 1996), Christina Rossetti planned to write...

On the authorship of 'The Inspector' (1800-1802), an essay serial in The Lady's Monthly Museum.
June 1, 1997... Unrecorded in Melvin R. Watson's catalogue of essay serials in British magazines of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries(1) is the seventeen-instalment, irregularly appearing 'The Inspector' (March 1800-February 1802) in the magazine...

Captain Thomas Morris and the Royal Literary Fund.
June 1, 1997... Captain Thomas Morris (1732-1818), like his brother Captain Charles Morris (1745-1838), is known to historians of eighteenth-century Anglo-America as a minor writer and soldier.(1) The records of the Royal Literary Fund, however, shed new light...

Franklin's Ephemera in Oriental (Cross-Over?) Guise. (Benjamin Franklin)
June 1, 1997... The sources and analogues for Franklin's philosophically whimsical 'Ephemera'(1) have been bountifully explored by the editors of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, by Alfred Owen Aldridge (as long ago as 1954),(2) and this writer in notes to...

On authorship of essay serials in the European Magazine and The Lady's Monthly Museum: George Brewer and G. Bedingfield.
June 1, 1997... In my 1982 study of 'The Miscellaneous Publications of George Brewer (17661816?)',(1) I had no reason to challenge Melvin R. Watson's tentative assignment of 'The Juvenile Monitor'(2) to George Brewer, because it was signed 'G.B.', as Watson...

The short novels of The Lady's Monthly Museum: emendations to Robert Mayo's The English Novel in the Magazines.
June 1, 1997... Reviewing the longer fiction in The Lady's Monthly Magazine (begun in July 1798) has unveiled a body of information not recorded in Robert Mayo's The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815, and not published elsewhere.(1) As Mayo's catalogue...

Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on His Life and Influence.
June 1, 1997... On the dust-cover of this book, Professor Christopher Brooke acclaims it as an 'outstanding scholarly event'. Dust-covers are no place to look for balanced judgements. But what Brooke claims is no less than the truth. To say 'sensational' would...

The Poetic Art of Aldhelm.
June 1, 1997... Aldhelm (d. 709) deserves an apologist like Andy Orchard, who has thoughtfully highlighted the achievements of a Latin writer unfairly saddled with an obscure reputation. Aldhelm wrote an octosyllabic poem describing a storm, a prose treatise...

Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of Beowulf - Manuscript.
June 1, 1997... This book falls into two equally interesting halves. The first section consists of a series of essays which focus in different ways on how monsters, monster-slayers, and the monstrous are associated with the sin of pride in certain Anglo-Saxon,...

Byrhferth's Enchiridion.
June 1, 1997... This is a fine edition of an important Anglo-Saxon/Anglo-Latin text. It seems that Byrhtferth of Ramsey, sometime pupil of Abbo of Fleury, was unique in the England of AEthelred the Unready, 'the one Anglo-Saxon scholar of his time who was in...

The Endless Knot: Essays on old and Middle English in Honor of MArie Boroff.
June 1, 1997... The sixteen essays in this volume cover the range of Marie Borroff's distinguished contributions to Middle English scholarship. In view of her seminal work on alliterative metre, it is fitting that two essays are concerned with the alliterative...

England the Nation: Language, Literature and National Identity.
June 1, 1997... This is an excellent book: obviously it concentrates on a trough between the familiar peaks of earlier thirteenth-century and later fourteenth-century English literature, but its importance is not limited to this aspect. Professor...

A Book of Middle English.
June 1, 1997... John Burrow's and Thorlac Turville-Petre's A Book of Middle English, now in a second, revised edition, is an indispensable tool for the teaching of Middle English (c. 1150-c. 1400) to undergraduates. When the first edition was published in...

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre.
June 1, 1997... After Chaucer and Old English literature, medieval theatre is the third subject from the English Middle Ages to be presented in a Cambridge Companion: a fair tribute to the dynamic development of this field of scholarship. Archival research has...

The Towneley Plays, vol.I Introduction and Text; vol. II Notes and Glossary.
June 1, 1997... This edition of the Towneley Plays supersedes the previous Early English Text Society edition by George England and Alfred Pollard, first published in 1897. That edition was itself based partly upon the first edition of the plays by James...

English Preaching in the Late Middle ages.
June 1, 1997... 'That there was a conscious effort by some individuals to promote preaching by secular priests in the parishes, and, indeed, that there was a new energy among seculars in the fifteenth century' is 'the chief contention of the present study'...

Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary.
June 1, 1997... Wright outlines her aims in the introduction to this splendid study: to present evidence for the London dialect of the Middle English and early Early Modem period, to recover Middle English Thames-related technical vocabulary, to define the...

Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence.
June 1, 1997... Focusing on language and linguistic change in early modern English, Sociolinguistics and Language History presents a series of 'pilot studies' which aim to investigate the applications of modern sociolinguistic and variationist methodology in...

The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture.
June 1, 1997... This volume brings together a diversified and at times eclectic group of twenty essays, each focusing on some dimension of the Renaissance in Scotland. An additional feature of the collection is that each contributor acknowledges the influence...

Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchanism and Its Counterdiscourses.
June 1, 1997... This challenging and absorbing study seeks to revitalize the familiar critical debate over the impact of Petrarchanism on English Renaissance literature. Exploring such issues as the role of rivalry in love poetry, questions of sameness and...

Shakespeare's 'Edward III'.
June 1, 1997... There is an inevitability in the appearance of this edition of Edward III. Nature abhors a vacuum: into the space left by the exploratory hesitancy and caution of scholars vis-a-vis this impressive Shakespeare apocryphal play, Dr Eric Sams has...

Shakespeare, Theory and Performance.
June 1, 1997... This collection takes as its starting point the range of critical theories that have developed since the publication in 1977 of J. L. Styan's seminal study, The Shakespeare Revolution. James Bulman's introduction claims that like others of...

A Midsummer Night's Dream.
June 1, 1997... The format of the Shakespeare in Performance series has been changed. Future volumes will be larger in size and the revised Series Editors' Preface suggests there will be other subtle differences. Where the original Preface claimed that 'The...

Hamlet.
June 1, 1997... The format of the Shakespeare in Performance series has been changed. Future volumes will be larger in size and the revised Series Editors' Preface suggests there will be other subtle differences. Where the original Preface claimed that 'The...

The Good That Lives After Them: A Pattern in Shakespeare's Tragedies.
June 1, 1997... George Held's The Good That Lives After Them is one 'of two interconnected volumes'. The first apparently offers a 'teleological interpretation of Aristotle's theory of tragedy' and deals with Sophocles, while this second examines...

Shakespeare's festive Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre.
June 1, 1997... George Held's The Good That Lives After Them is one 'of two interconnected volumes'. The first apparently offers a 'teleological interpretation of Aristotle's theory of tragedy' and deals with Sophocles, while this second examines...

Shakespeare and the Constant Romans.
June 1, 1997... A delightful popular tune of the 1960s goes Except now and then in Rome I get that old yen in Rome And when in Rome I do as the Romans do Just what it is that the Romans do, if they are characters in Early Modern plays, is the subject of...

"Antike Roman": Power, Symbology, and the Roman Play in Early Modern England, 1585-1635.
June 1, 1997... A delightful popular tune of the 1960s goes Except now and then in Rome I get that old yen in Rome And when in Rome I do as the Romans do Just what it is that the Romans do, if they are characters in Early Modern plays, is the subject of...

Reading Shakespeare Historically.
June 1, 1997... Reading Shakespeare historically, contrary to its title, does not focus only on Shakespeare but also includes essays on Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, as well as a more general piece on the discipline of...

The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649.
June 1, 1997... The Theatrical City is a collection of essays which puts into practice the stated wish in much recent work on early modern texts for genuine interdisciplinary study, and is therefore valuable both in itself and as a foretaste of future work of...

Divided Empire: Milton's Political Imagery.
June 1, 1997... The motivation for this study was to provide a substantial examination of the importance of John Milton's experience of government and of public service for the composition of his major English poems, namely Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,...

Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642-1660.
June 1, 1997... It is, I suppose, a mark of devoted scholarship which can begin this way: I set to work on this project in the late 1960s, in fact . . . I remember clearly the smell of tear gas drifting up to my windows from the University's well-kept...

The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing.
June 1, 1997... As a product of the intersection between psychoanalysis and semiotics in literary criticism, this book seeks to test the problematic relationship between historically variable representations of identity, aesthetic activity, and sexuality. The...

Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship Under Charles II.
June 1, 1997... This is a well-written and perceptive account of the relationship between print culture and the position of Charles II. Weber argues that there was a fluid realm of discourse and power during the reign, generated by the instability of the...

Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents.
June 1, 1997... It is still a commonplace notion that women did not participate in the theatre of the English Renaissance. A new volume of plays and documents edited by S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, however, demonstrates that women participated in all...

Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook: Constructions of Femininity in England.
June 1, 1997... It is still a commonplace notion that women did not participate in the theatre of the English Renaissance. A new volume of plays and documents edited by S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, however, demonstrates that women participated in all...

Jonathan Swift and the Burden of the Future.
June 1, 1997... This book gives us quite an interesting and different way to view Swift's works, particularly his satire. Noting that his is the first substantial study of Swift's ideas about the future, Chalmers declares the aim of the investigation to be 'to...

The Poems of Ossian and Related Works.
June 1, 1997... This is a publication which is long overdue. Despite the enormous, long lasting and widely spread popularity of Macpherson's work, there have been very few twentieth-century editions: Otto Jiriczek's Heidelberg facsimile reprint of 1940, James...

Sheridan Studies.
June 1, 1997... [pounds]30 a night for twenty-four performances for the Drury Lane company in the 1790-1 season; a benefit of [pounds]500; by 1802 [pounds]53,000 in the funds - facts about Mrs Sarah Siddons taken from Mark Auburn's introductory survey of...

Critical Issues in Editing Exploration Texts: Papers Given at the Twenty-eighth Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 6-November 1992.
June 1, 1997... This collection draws attention to the basic truth that editors and compilers had a significant influence on the content of their travel texts, leading in some cases to a remoulding of the original to the editor's own design. The six chapters...

Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism.
June 1, 1997... To offer to 'theorize satire' in a series of 'essays in literary criticism' is to promise not only an investigation of methodological tensions but some indication of ways in which they might be resolved. There are glimpses of both in this...

Shorter Works and Fragments.
June 1, 1997... The editors of the Collected Coleridge were inevitably left with the difficult question of how to present the odds and ends of Coleridge's literary endeavours, and decided to sweep them all up in two fat volumes of Shorter Works and Fragments....

The Bodleian Shelly Manuscripts, vol.XXI, Miscellaneous Poetry, Prose and Translations from Bodleian MS. Shelly adds.
June 1, 1997... One can only speculate on how some major English poets might have responded to the suggestion that one day their personal memoranda, correspondence, and creative writings would be subjected to the rigorous analysis (comparable in some ways to...

Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World.
June 1, 1997... In Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran have gathered together twenty-three essays which were originally presented as papers at the international conference organized in 1992 by the Keats-Shelley...

Spiritual History: A Reading of William Blake's Vala, or The Four Zoas.
June 1, 1997... Andrew Lincoln began his labours on The Four Zoas for a doctoral thesis at Bangor in the seventies, under the supervision of an excellent scholar, David W. Lindsay. Since those days he has distinguished himself as a minute but, at the same...

Robert Browning's Rondures Brave.
June 1, 1997... Appearing in nearly a third of his poems and throughout his career, the circular conclusion is so characteristic of Browning it seems remarkable no one has devoted a detailed study to it before. Michael Bright studies the methods and the...

Two Poets of the Oxford Movement.
June 1, 1997... Of the two Edgecombe's book is the more easily accessible for the general reader. In this study of Keble's Christian Year (1827) and of Newman's contributions to Lyra Apostolica (1836), the author makes an impassioned plea for Keble as poet to...