Notes and Queries articles from June 1998

Notes and Queries archives from June 1998

An analogue, and probable source, for a metaphor in Alfred's preface to the Old English translation of Augustine's 'Soliloquies.' (King Alfred the Great of England's translation of St. Augustine of Hippo's work)
June 1, 1998... As it stands, the text of Alfred's Preface to his translation of Augustine's Soliloquies begins with an elaborate metaphor: . . . Gaderode me thonne kigclas, and stuthansceaftas, and locsceaftas, and hylfa to aelcum thara tola, the ic mid...

Misunderstood rhetorico-syntactical glosses in two Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. (textual annotations)
June 1, 1998... In a rare moment of consensus in the debate over what makes a manuscript a 'classbook', Michael Lapidge and Gernot Wieland agree to dismiss as uninteresting small groups of Latin glosses in two Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.(1) A Christ Church,...

More glosses in early medieval English manuscripts. (textual annotations)
June 1, 1998... In reading the manuscripts consulted by A. S. Napier and Herbert Dean Meritt for their collections of Old English glosses interlinear or marginal, in ink or scratched,(1) one is always impressed by their thoroughness. The lexicography of...

Dogs that won't hunt and Old English ghost words.
June 1, 1998... Medieval writing errors and modern misreadings can, alone or together, add spurious words to the Old English lexicon - 'ghost words' that would have been unknown to an Old English speaker. I recently happened across an example in the...

Odda in 'The Battle of Maldon.' (warrior in a pivotal battle between the English and Danish armies; Old English poem)
June 1, 1998... Hi bugon tha fram beaduwe the thaer beon noldon: thaer wurdon Oddan beam aerest on fleame,...(1) (Then they fled from the battle, those who did not want to be there: there the sons of Odda were the first in flight,...) (The Battle of...

Vincent of Beauvais and Alfonso the Learned. (13th-century Dominican friar and a teacher of the children of King Louis IX of France; King Alfonso X of Spain)
June 1, 1998... Vincent of Beauvais (1190-1264), a Dominican friar and a teacher of King Louis IX's offsprings, wrote the most influential encyclopedia in Medieval Europe. It is well known that the Spanish King Alfonso X the Learned had Beauvais's work for it...

Glutton's black mass: 'Piers Plowman,' B-text, passus V 297-385. (character in Anglo-Saxon poem)
June 1, 1998... Lines Event 297-306 Glutton, on his way to church to hear Mass and make confession, is persuaded into the tavern 307-19 He is greeted by a company of revellers 320-36 The bartering for garments ...

Calchas, renegade and traitor: Dares and Joseph of Exeter. (character in English Geoffrey Chaucer's poem 'Troilus and Criseyde' and Dares Phrygius' volume 'Ilias'; translator of Dares Phyrygius' 'Ilias')
June 1, 1998... In the tragedy of Troilus (in both Chaucer's and Boccaccio's tellings), the crucial element is the defection of the seer Calchas from Troy to the Greeks. If Calchas had stayed in Troy, Criseyde would not have had to leave, and presumably she...

A Hocclevean Balade. (Middle English poet Thomas Hoccleve)
June 1, 1998... In the original Index of Middle English Verse, the only source cited for Thomas Hoccleve's Male Regle was Huntington Library MS HM 111, the well-known holograph copy; but in the Supplement to the Index a further source is added: 'Canterbury...

A fragment of Lydgate's 'Troy Book' in the inner temple library. (author John Lydgate)
June 1, 1998... Lydgate's Troy Book is extant in nineteen more or less complete, early manuscript copies and four manuscript fragments. All four of the fragments are from the first book (or, in one case, the first and second books) of Lydgate's text.(1) There...

William Worcestre on 'Glembogh' and Velvelle.' (15th-century geographer's description of areas in Wales)
June 1, 1998... Modern scholars have sharpened their wits on the information (not always accurate) on place-names and topography collected by William Worcestre (1415-82). Professor Coates has, for example, shown that Worcestre's 'Worthing Island' near...

Clanvowe's 'Boke of Cupide,' lines 185-6. (late 14th-century poet Sir John Clanvowe)
June 1, 1998... One of the dangers of romantic love, according to the cuckoo in Sir John Clanvowe's The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, or The Boke of Cupide,(1) is that of being abandoned: And therfor, nyghtyngale, holde the nye, For leve me wel, for al thy...

A new Anthony Wood manuscript. (17th-century scholar and archivist)
June 1, 1998... Two related manuscripts were recently identified in Christ Church library, Oxford. One of them is a legal document, dated 1151; the other is Anthony Wood's accompanying bibliographical attachment of c. 1667. Their shelf-mark is Christ Church...

Earlier than in 'OED':"The Black Dog' and 'Crap'. (entries in the diary in 18th-century diary of Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi)
June 1, 1998... Hester Lynch Thrale, later Mrs Piozzi, kept a diary in which she recorded all manner of things. In at least two instances she uses words earlier than the first entry in OED. At page 785 of her Thraliana, a short title, edited by Katherine C....

The earliest non-family life of Jane Austen. (English woman author)
June 1, 1998... In the early 1840s, the scholar George Long (1800-79) planned an ambitious Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, of which he was a very active committee member. He edited four volumes between 1842 and...

'Strange fits of passion': Wordsworth and Mrs. Radcliffe. (poet/author William Wordsworth; woman author Ann Radcliffe)
June 1, 1998... Though Ann Radcliffe continued tirelessly to attach rational explanations to inexplicable events, she found new freedom towards the end of her career in the notion that feeling itself could be irrationally based. For The Italian (1797), the...

John Stewart and the burying of books in Wordsworth's 'Prelude.' (18th-19th century philosopher; poet/author William Wordsworth)
June 1, 1998... Wordsworth begins book five of The Prelude by describing an uncanny dream set in the 'Arabian waste'. The dream involves a knight tiding a dromedary and carrying a stone and a shell. The stone and shell are recognized, Wordsworth says, 'in the...

Wordsworth's 'Sonnet upon Westminster Bridge' and Night I of Young's 'Night Thoughts.' (poet/author William Wordsworth; poet Edward Young)
June 1, 1998... That Young influenced Wordsworth is a fact well attested. Scholars have noted precedents for the design of The Excursion in Night Thoughts, which Wordsworth knew so well that he half quoted, half paraphrased, one of its lines in the 1793...

Coleridge the ostrich and Capell's Shakespeare. (poet/critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge; editor Edward Capell's preface in the 1767 10-volume edition of 'Mr William Shakespeare his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies)
June 1, 1998... On 14 October 1803 Coleridge wrote to Thomas Poole: I lay too many Eggs in the hot Sands with Ostrich Carelessness & Ostrich oblivion - And tho' many are luckily trod on & smashed; as many crawl forth into Life, some to furnish Feathers for...

Greek and Latin in Coleridge's notebooks. (poet/critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
June 1, 1998... Coleridge's notebooks abound in Greek and Latin, German, and Italian. Non omnia possumus omnes; and Kathleen Coburn, their editor, sought help where she needed it. In German and Italian she was well served; in Greek and Latin less well. I have...

The first recorded occurrence of the word 'Coleridgean.' (term alluding to poet/critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
June 1, 1998... According to Oed (1989), the word 'Coleridgean' first occurs in a letter written by Stuart Mill in 1834. However, an anonymous contributor to the Critical Review (1756-1817) antedates this recording by almost thirty years. In an August 1805...

Isabella Lickbarrow, Lakeland Quaker poet: more facts.
June 1, 1998... After the mention in Notes and Queries (17 February 1866)(1) little attention was paid to the work of Isabella Lickbarrow until the facsimile reprinting of her Poetical Effusions (1814) by Jonathan Wordsworth in 1994.(2) This was accompanied by...

Benjamin West and Henry Fuseli in fiction, 1828. (18th-19th-century painters)
June 1, 1998... The literary device of having a contemporary or virtually contemporary - historical figure appear briefly in a walk-on part in a novel seems to have been popularized by Henry Kingsley, with Florence Nightingale in Ravenshoe (1862) and Lord...

'One Touch of Nature': allusions to 'Troilus and Cressida' in James Hogg's 'Three Perils of Woman.' (play by dramatist William Shakespeare; author of 1823 novel)
June 1, 1998... Hogg's Three Perils of Woman, published in 1823, appears to be the only nineteenth-century novel to allude to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Only two of these allusions have even been pointed out, and their wider thematic significance...

Hood, Clare, and the 'Mary' chain. (19th-century poet Thomas Hood; 19th-century poet John Clare's poem 'My Mary')
June 1, 1998... Thomas Hood's quirky, resonant, and disturbing piece 'A Lay of Real Life', first published in the Comic Annual for 1835, has not previously been recognized as a literary response to a poem by John Clare, entitled 'My Mary', first published in...

Further quotations and allusions in Hazlitt: the Bible, Milton, Pascal, Gray, Churchill, Burke, Cowper, 'Peter Pindar,' and 'Tiddydoll' (Smollett and Gilray). (featured in 21-volume 'The Complete Works of William Hazlitt'; John Milton, Blaise Pascal, Thomas Gray; Charles Churchill, Edmund Burke, William Cowper; book written by John Wolcot in early 1790s; nickname)
June 1, 1998... The references are to P. P. Howe's edition of The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols (London, 1930-4) by volume and page number, followed by the title of the relevant book or essay. V, 371 (A View of the English Stage) '. . . Mr...

Thomas Campbell and General Pepe. (18th-19th-century poet; Italian freedom fighter Guglielmo Pepe)
June 1, 1998... The poet Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), well known in his day for his long poem The Pleasures of Hope, was a constant sympathizer with revolutionaries seeking liberty for their people. The French Revolution in its early days, the slave trade, the...

Did Wordsworth drink to Browning's health? (poet/author William Wordsworth; poet Robert Browning)
June 1, 1998... THE relationship between Robert Browning and William Wordsworth has hitherto received little attention. Only one story about the two poets has remained well known, and about this story there is a degree of uncertainty. The one occasion upon...

Two unpublished Macaulay letters. (author Thomas Babbington Macaulay)
June 1, 1998... Two letters not in The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay (6 vols, 1974-81), edited by Thomas Pinney, are held in the Special Collections of Wellesley College Library. Wellesley also holds the printer's proof of the illustrated 1847 edition...

The writing on the cartridge; a note on Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Mary Barton' and Charles B. Tayler. (authors)
June 1, 1998... Was Elizabeth Gaskell familiar with the Revd Charles B. Tayler's collection of religious tracts entitled Social Evils, and their Remedy, published in London between 1833 and 1835? More specifically, had she seen the last of these narratives,...

The chronology of Charlotte Bronte's 'Villette.' (woman author)
June 1, 1998... When exactly is Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853) set? The vaguely uncertain critical consensus seems to be that Villette is set at some unspecified time in the early 1840s and is roughly contemporaneous with Charlotte Bronte's own residence...

Edward Casaubon and Isaac Casaubon. (character in woman author George Eliot's 1872 novel 'Middlemarch'; 16th-century French scholar)
June 1, 1998... The debate about whether Mark Pattison was the prototype for Edward Casaubon has distracted attention from the rather more obvious possibility that the character of Edward Casaubon is based on that of his namesake, the sixteenth-century French...

An unpublished Matthew Arnold letter. (19th-century poet, essayist and critic)
June 1, 1998... On 21 July 1849, in his capacity as private secretary to the Marquis of Lansdowne, Matthew Arnold wrote a letter to the former Mayor of Cork, Richard Dowden, in connection with the forthcoming visit of Queen Victoria to that city. The letter,...

William Morris and J.W. Mackail. (poet/artist/craftsman; biographer)
June 1, 1998... J. W. MACKALL said he could have written a more revealing biography of William Morris. 'How extraordinarily interesting one could make thc story, if one were going to dic the day before it was published.'(1) Fortunately, he left some clues to...

William Morris and the word 'brother.' (poet/artist/craftsman)
June 1, 1998... What is it that compels some biographers to reach for a fanciful interpretation when a plain one is near at hand? In a poem written at the time when his marriage was failing, William Morris has a woman call her lover 'Brother!' And as a...

Notes on Oscar Wilde: two unpublished letters from the National Library of Scotland. (19th-century Irish dramatist)
June 1, 1998... Two unpublished letters recently discovered in the National Library of Scotland offer an insight into several aspects of Oscar Wilde's biography. The first letter is written in Wilde's hand on monogrammed notepaper and the recipient is noted in...

Another swipe at W.P. Frith by Oscar Wilde. (painter William P. Frith; Irish dramatist)
June 1, 1998... On 27 November 1979 the German autograph dealer J. A. Stargardt of Marburg (now of Berlin) sold an ALS of Oscar Wilde which has hitherto escaped notice. The letter was bought by an anonymous collector and has not been registered so that all we...

An allusion in Oscar Wilde's 'The Canterville Ghost.' (Irish dramatist)
June 1, 1998... In Notes and Queries in 1978, Philip E. Smith drew attention to an obscure late nineteenthcentury materialist philosophy called HyloIdealism. Its main proponents were the slightly less obscure poet, Constance Naden (who coined the term), and...

Vandyke and Hardy's 'Squire Petrick's Lady.' (Flemish portrait painter Anthony Van Dyck; English poet/novelist Thomas Hardy's short story)
June 1, 1998... According to Martin Ray, Hardy's short story 'Squire Petrick's Lady' contains an 'historical anachronism'.(1) In the story, which belongs to the collection A Group of Noble Dames, 'the illustrious house ennobled as Dukes of Southwesterland' is...

Hardy's revision of fact and fiction. (English poet/novelist Thomas Hardy)
June 1, 1998... In a recent issue of Notes and Queries, Martin Ray published two articles on Hardy and revision which came to contradictory conclusions. In the first of these, 'Hardy's "The Lady Icenway": A Note on the Wessex Edition of A Group of Noble...

Joseph Conrad and William Mathie Parker. (English author; Scottish journalist and critic)
June 1, 1998... Three previously unpublished letters from Joseph Conrad have recently come to light and are reproduced below. These letters were written to the Scottish critic and journalist, William Mathie Parker, between September 1919 and January 1920. They...

Conrad's 'Lord Jim': the source of the 'Sephora' incident. (English novelist Joseph Conrad)
June 1, 1998... In Conrad's novel, Marlow recalls the courageous death of Little Bob Stanton, the chief mate who was drowned 'trying to save a lady'smaid in the Sephora disaster' off the Spanish coast (ch. 13): All the passengers had been packed tidily into...

D.H. Lawrence's futurist reading: two errors in footnotes from the second volume of the Cambridge letters. (author)
June 1, 1998... There are two errors in footnotes concerning Lawrence's Futurist reading in the second volume of the Cambridge edition of Lawrence's letters.(1) 1. The editors state (180) that the only English translations of the Italian Futurists available...

'Testament': an unpublished war poem by Siegfried Sassoon. (English author/poet)
June 1, 1998... Testament For the last time I say War is not glorious Though lads march out, superb and fall victorious, - Scrapping like demons, suffering like slaves, And crowned by peace, the sunlight on their graves. You swear we crush the Beast; I...

The Bishop and Crazy Jane: an unpublished Yeats letter. (poet/author William Butler Yeats)
June 1, 1998... A likely source for William Butler Yeats's motif of the bishop and Crazy Jane is to be found in an unpublished letter written by him on 1 July 1935 to the novelist Gerald O'Donovan, who had once been a Roman Catholic priest in Loughrea, Co....

A lost paragraph in the Cambridge edition of D.H. Lawrence's letters. ('Letters of D.H. Lawrence, vol 6, March 1927-Nov 1928'; author)
June 1, 1998... The editors of the Cambridge Edition of the letters of D. H. Lawrence have skipped a whole paragraph in their translation of one of Lawrence's letters written in German, in volume VI of the Letters (1991). The short paragraph, written in...

More classical roots for Forster's 'The Road from Colonus.' (English author E.M. Forster)
June 1, 1998... In his short story 'The Road from Colonus' (1904),(1) about an aging Englishman's missed chance at salvation after a spiritual epiphany inside a large plane tree in Greece, E. M. Forster makes overt reference to Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus at...

'The Sentinel' by Rebecca West: a newly discovered novel. (woman author)
June 1, 1998... In June 1996, while working on the Rebecca West Collection in the McFarlin Library, Tulsa University,(1) I came cross a manuscript of an unfinished novel by 'Isabel Lancashire', entitled 'The Sentinel'. This novel is in fact Rebecca West's...

The Composition of Old English Poetry.
June 1, 1998... H. MOMMA. Pp. xiv + 205 (Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 20). Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press, 1997. [pounds]35.00 (ISBN 0-521-55481-0). This book deals with the rules governing Old English poetic...

The Alexandreis of Walter of Chatillon.
June 1, 1998... DAVID TOWNSEND, A Twelfth-Century Epic. A Verse translation. Pp. xxix + 214 (The Middle Ages Series). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Hardbound $37.50 (ISDN 0-8122-3347-6). Water of Chatillon's Alexandreis, which became...

Latein und Volkssprache im deutschen Mittelalter 1100-1500.
June 1, 1998... NIKOLAUS HENKEL and NIGEL F. PALMER (eds), Regensburger Colloquium 1988. Pp. ix + 402. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1992, DM 138 (ISBN 3-484540011-1). An intricate initial from the 'Translatio Barbarica' of the Psalms by Notker of St Gall...

The Evolution of the Text.
June 1, 1998... CHARLOTTE BREWER, Editing Piers Plowman. Pp. xv + 459 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 28). Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press, 1996. [pounds]45.00 (ISBN 0-521-34250-3). In this fine volume Brewer primarily...

Selected Poems.
June 1, 1998... WILLIAM DUNBAR. ed. PRISCILLA BAWCUTT. Pp. xii + 451 (Longman Annotated Texts). London and New York: Longman, 1996. [pounds]50.00 (ISBN 0-582-06188-1). This is the first major edition of Dunbar since James Kinsley's complete one (Clarendon...

John Bale.
June 1, 1998... PETER HAPPE. Pp. xvii + 174 (Twayne's English Author Series 520). New York: Twayne; London, Mexico City, New Delhi, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto: Prentice Hall, 1996. [pounds]16.95 (ISBN 0-8057-7048-8). Glaring unflinchingly from the knotty...

Shakespeare's Earliest Tragedy: Studies In Titus Andronicus.
June 1, 1998... G. HAROLD METZ. Pp. 309. Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1996. [pounds]35.00 (ISBN 0-8386-3653-5). The book makes an inauspicious start: it has no introduction and the preface...

King John.
June 1, 1998... JOSEPH CANDIDO (ed.). Pp. xvi + 415 (Shakespeare: The Critical Tradition). London and Atlantic Highlands: Athlone, 1996. [pounds]80.00 (ISBN 0-485-81001-8). That Shakespeare's history plays are deeply concerned with historiography has become...

Shakespeare's Imagined Persons: The Psychology of Role-Playing and Acting.
June 1, 1998... PETER B. MURRAY. Pp. viii + 256. London: Macmillan; Lanham: Barnes & Noble Books, 1996. Hardbound [pounds]40.00 (ISBN 0-333-63448-9); paperbound [pounds]12.99 (0-333-64836-6). Shakespeare's Imagined Persons, by implication at least,...

The Taming of the Shrew.
June 1, 1998... WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. Ed. FRANCES E. DOLAN. Pp. xv + 347 (Texts and Contexts). Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1996. Paperbound [pounds]7.50 (ISBN 0-312-10836-2). This edition of The Taming of the Shrew sets out to...

King Richard II.
June 1, 1998... MARGARET SHEWRING. Pp. xiv + 206 (Shakespeare in Performance). Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. [pounds]40.00 (ISBN 0-7190-2719-5). This is another valuable contribution to the Shakespeare in Performance series....

Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance.
June 1, 1998... JOYCE GREEN MACDONALD (ed.). Pp. 187. Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997. [pounds]29.00 (ISBN 0-8386-3656-X). A central concern of this stimulating collection of eight essays is...

Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama.
June 1, 1998... KATHERINE M. QUINSEY (ed.). Pp. ix + 244. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Hardbound $39.95 (ISBN 0-8131-1945-6); paperbound $17.95 (0-8131-0871-3). This is a useful and well-organized collection which fills a gap in...

Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel.
June 1, 1998... LENNARD J. DAVIS. Pp. xiv + 245. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Paperbound $16.50 (ISBN 08122-1610-5). With its unassuming size and clearly argued thesis about the intertwined character of journalism and fiction before...

The Conversational Circle: Reading the English Novel, 1740-1775.
June 1, 1998... BETTY A. SCHELLENBERG. Pp. ix + 165. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996. $34.95 (ISBN 0-8131-1990-1). With its unassuming size and clearly argued thesis about the intertwined character of journalism and fiction before 1750,...

The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics... A Facsimile Edition, With Full Transcription and Commentary... Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. VIII: Fair Copy Manuscript of Shelley's poems in European and American Libraries...
June 1, 1998... PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Volume Fill. Fair-Copy Manuscripts of Shelley's Poems in European and American Libraries . . ., ed. Donald H. Reiman and Michael O'Neill. Pp. xxxii + 444. New York and London: Garland, 1997. $195.00 (ISBN 0-8153-1151-6)....

Shelley's Poetry: The Divided Self.
June 1, 1998... SIMON HAINES. Pp. x + 276. Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, St. Martin's Press, 1997. [pounds]35.00 (ISBN 0-333-59707-9). Among the ever-increasing number of critical studies on the Romantic poets, it is hardly surprising that some...

Robert Browning.
June 1, 1998... ADAM ROBERTS (ed.). Pp. xxxii + 828 (Oxford Authors). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hardbound [pounds]35.00 (ISBN 0-9-254203-6); paperbound [pounds]13.99 (0-19-282372-8). Assembling a representative selection of the...

Retrospect and Review: Aspects of the Literature of the GDR, 1976-1990.
June 1, 1998... ROBERT ATKINS and MARTIN KANE (eds). Pp. iii + 348 (German Monitor No. 40, General Editor Ian Wallace). Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi 1997. Paperbound Hf1.50.00 (ISBN 90-420-0167-4). Retrospect and review contains twenty-three essays -...