Various

“ And after all if Your Ladyship were not by I would say that My Lady Carteret's Box (as you disdainfully call it instead of a Tea-chest) is a most beautiful piece of work, and is oftener used than yours, because it is brought down for tea after dinner among Ladyes, whereas my escritoire never stirrs out of my closet, but when it is brought for a sight. ”

“ It is conceited and fantastical: so are they. It seems to be what it is not: so do they. Its very essence is transposition, involution; what one might call a sort of Jump-Jim-Crow-ism: and so is theirs. Hence the partiality which they have always shown for the anagram: their Rebuses, Almanacs, Annuaires, and collections of trifles are full of them. One-half of the disguises adopted by their anonymous writers are in the shape of anagrams, formed from their names; and one of them has gone the length of composing and publishing a poem of 1200 lines, every line of which contains an anagram. ”

“ When, in 1707, Scotland treated of an incorporating union with the realm of England, she treated as an independent and sovereign power, and the Treaty of Union was concluded with her in that character: a treaty which was at least as beneficial to England as it was to Scotland, by precluding in all time to come the intrigues of France with the Scottish sovereign and nation. [235]
That Scotland was able for so many centuries to defend her liberties and independence against the powerful kingdom of England, does her great honour. ”

“ Who ever before heard of the conquest of Scotland? It is true, that, on repeated occasions, the English made successful inroads into that kingdom, sometimes of a larger, sometimes of a less extensive character; but the Scottish nation never did "lie at the proud foot of a conqueror." ”

“ Has the anagram become altogether extinct, or is it only awaiting the advent of some competent genius to restore it to its proper rank in the republic of letters?
To me it is clear that the real cause of the prevailing dearth of anagrams is the great difficulty of producing good ones. Good anagrams are, to say the least of it, quite as scarce as good epic poems ”

“ I beg your Ladyship will prevail on Sr Robert Worsley to give me a Vicarage in the Isle of Wight; for I am weary of living at such a distance from You. It need not be above forty pounds a year.
"As to Mrs. Barber, I can assure you she is but one of four Poetesses in this town, and all Citizens' wives; but she has the vogue of being the best: yet one of them is a Scholar, and hath published a new edition of Tacitus, with a Latin dedication to My Lord Carteret. ”

“ It is hard enough to credit the theory, that the plane of oscillation of a pendulum is partially independent of the rotatory motion of the earth, but still not impossible, considering that the effect of the presumed cause is not inconsistent with the results of à priori calculation. For instance, during the swing of a two-seconds pendulum, the angular motion of the earth will have been 1', or thereabouts, which, supposing the oscillation to be independent, would produce an appreciable angle on an index circle placed concentric with the pendulum, and at right angles to its plane of oscillation. ”

“ What every one learns from the almanac, over and above Easter and its consequences for the current year, is that what happens this year is no index at all to what will happen next year. And even those who preserve their almanacs, and compare them in long series, never have been able, so far as I know, to lay hands upon any law connecting the Easters of different years, without having had recourse to the very complicated law on which the whole calendar is constructed. ”

“ Barber is for Your Ladyship's continued favors to her, nor have I known any person of a more humble and gratefull spirit than her, or who knows better how to distinguish the Persons by whom she is favored. But I will not honor myself so far, or dishonor you so much, as to think I can add the least weight to your own naturall goodness and generosity.
"You must, as occasion serves, Present my humble respects to My Lord and Lady Carteret, and my Lady Dysert, and to Sr Robert Worsley. ”

“ The prisoner is legally in the custody of the sheriff when sentence is passed in court, and he leaves the court in that same custody. The judgment so pronounced is itself the warrant, though a short memorandum or note of it is officially made at the time; unless the judge reprieves or suspends the sentence, no sheriff waits for any further authority, and as for the unfortunate delinquent, no judge, sheriff, or gaoler ever supposed that any copy of a warrant was to be handed to the prisoner himself! ”

“ In the meantime, and until some competent authority has pronounced on the point, I propose that such of your readers as are interested in the question make experiments for themselves, dividing them into four classes, viz., with the plane of oscillation E. and W., N. and S., N.E. and S.W., N.W. and S.E.; take the mean of a great many, and communicate them to the editor of "NOTES AND QUERIES;" and I venture to say that such a collection will do more towards confirming or disproving the theory absolutely, than all the papers we have yet seen on the subject. ”

“ It is not generally known, that upon the marriage of Mary to the Dauphin in 1558, Scotsmen were naturalised in France by an ordonnance of Henry II.; and that, in like manner, by an act of the parliament of Scotland, all Frenchmen were naturalised in that country. The ordonnance granting these privileges to Scotsmen within the realm of France, is printed in the Scottish statute-book along with the Scottish act granting similar privileges to Frenchmen within Scotland. ”

“ The shores of the world's ocean are empires. There are, or have been, the British empire, the German empire, the Russian empire, and the empire of the Great Mogul, the Chinese empire, the empire of Morocco, the four great empires of antiquity, the French empire, and some others. The poet does not intend names and things in this very strict way, however," &c.
What empires the poet did mean there is surely no difficulty in discovering, for those who wish to understand rather than to cavil. The very next line to that quoted is—
"Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?" ”

“ There are so very few consecutive and methodical readers left, that it is not surprising that Mr. Blackwell, the editor of Bohn's Mallet, should have adopted the groundless charge of one Magnusen against Olaus Wormius, who understood Ragnar's death-song much better than certain ironical dilettanti of Cockneyland. Charlemagne's secretary, Paul Warnefrid, the Lombard deacon of Aquileia, swears that, about 200 years after the event, King Ratchis had shown him the cup made out of Cunimund's skull, in which Queen Rosamund, his daughter, refused to drink, in the year 574. ”

“ The moderns have given unequivocal proofs of their fecundity in the same line, and the anagrammatic labours of the French nation alone would form several volumes. Indeed, to that nation belongs the honour of having introduced the anagram; and such is the estimation in which "the art" was held by them at one time, that their kings were provided with a salaried Anagrammatist, as ours are with a pensioned Laureate. How comes it then that a species of composition, once so popular, has found no representative among the many learned correspondents of your popular periodical? ”

“ That misprint of 1818 is followed by the Oxford edition of 1848, vol. iv. p. 77. l. 12., Apol. pars vi. cap. 8. div. 1.
I have said that the Oxford Jewel of 1848 professes to follow the Latin Apology of 1562, as a copy of the Latin title, with the date 1562, is prefixed to the Oxford edition, vol. iv. p. 1.: but the colophon appended to that reprint, p. 95., is strangely dated 1567. Was there any Latin edition of the Apology printed in that year? And, if so, why are different dates given for the title and colophon of the Oxford reprint? ”

“ I am in some doubt whether envy had not a great share in your work, for you were I suppose informed that my Lady Carteret had made for me with her own hands the finest box in Ireland; upon which you grew jealous, and resolved to outdo her by making for me the finest box in England; for so Mrs. Barber assures me. In short, I am quite overloaden with favors from Your Ladyship and your Daughter; and what is [219] worse, those loads will lye upon my Shoulders as long as I live. ”

“ But let any gentleman make the experiment, and he will find that, instead of a step, the intermediate space will present to his astonished legs a surface co-extensive with the wide field of modern mediocrity. ”

“ W. FRAZER'S Query, which are the towns or districts in England in which Borough-English prevails, or has prevailed, and whether there are any instances on record of its being carried into effect in modern times, would require more knowledge than any individual can be expected to possess of local customs throughout the country to give a full answer to; but if all your legal correspondents would contribute their quotas of information on the subject, a very fair list might be made, which would not be uninteresting as illustrative of this peculiar custom. ”

“ Neither is it easy to imagine that the commonplace lines quoted in Reed's Biographia Dramatica, vol. i. p. 687., from Stevens's poem called "Religion, or the Libertine Repentant," and "Winifreda," could have been the production of the same person. We learn also from Reed, that, owing to a pirated edition of Stevens's songs being published at Whitehaven, he in 1772 printed a genuine collection of them at Oxford. ”

“ We believe our success is due to the manner in which, thanks to the ready assistance of zealous and learned Friends and Correspondents, we have been enabled to supply a want which all literary men have felt more or less: and believing that the more we are known, and the wider our circulation, the greater will be our usefulness, and the better shall we be enabled to serve the cause we seek to promote. ”

“ Barber, corrupted by the obligations she hath to you, would pretend that I over reckon six months, and six hours a day. Be that as it will, [220] our best virtuosi are unanimous that the Invention exceeds, if possible, the work itself. But to all these praises I coldly answer, that although what they say be perfectly true, or indeed below the truth, yet if they had ever seen or conversed with Your Ladyship as I have done, they would have thought this escritoire a very poor performance from such hands, such eyes, and such an imagination. ”

“ The Saxons, also, upon condition of not openly practising Christianity, were permitted to inhabit with them; for all the citizens were idolaters down to the final destruction and fall of the city. Yet in customs, manners, and hospitality there is not a more worthy nation, or so worthy a one, to be found. The city was full of all sorts of merchandise (kaufwahr) from all countries, and had everything which was curious, luxurious (lustig = lustful) , and necessary; and a king of Denmark destroyed them a great fleet of war. ”

“ In giving an account of the copies of it in the Lambeth Library, I stated that I knew of no other copy of this edition, except one in the Douce collection in the Bodleian. Eight years have elapsed since that time, and I have not heard of any; and as circumstances have lately led to my being engaged about the book, I shall be glad if you will allow me to ask whether any of your many learned correspondents know of a prior edition, or of any other copies of this one of 1488? ”

“ Among about a score which he quotes, there is not one that can be reckoned a tolerable anagram, while by far the greater number are no anagrams at all. An anagram is the change of a word or sentence into another word or sentences by an exact transposition of the letters. ”

“ The sculptures which have been preserved with comparatively little injury for upwards of six centuries on the western front of the venerable cathedral of Wells have long excited the wonder and curiosity, as well as admiration, of all who looked upon them. ”

“ The horn is very conspicuous on the heads of men in the Nineveh (Asshur) sculptures, still, as a fashion, retained in Ethiopia (Cush, Abyssinia [4] ) , the origin of the Chaldeans, through Nimrod the Cushite (Gen. x. 8.) , who probably derived their chief sustenance from the river Tigris (Hiddekel) . Subsistence from (1) fishing, (2) hunting (e.g. Nimrod) , (3) grazing, and (4) agriculture, seems to have succeeded in the order named. The repeated appearance of fish on the same sculptures, is in allusion, doubtless, to the name Nineveh (= fish + habitation) ”

“ To speak my own thoughts, the work itself does not delight me more than the little cares you were pleased to descend to in contriving ways to have it conveyed so far without damage, whereof it received not the least from without ”

“ I may add, that all those coins of Constantius which bear an A behind the portrait, certainly belong to Gallus.
E. S. TAYLOR.
Proverb; what constitutes one? (Vol. iv., p. 191.) .
—There can be no doubt that, according to modern usage, any short sentence which is commonly used, whether by way of enunciating a principle, foretelling a consequence, describing a situation, or recommending a course of action, &c., is a proverb. Brevity is an essential: that is, we apply the term proverb to nothing but apophthegms. In truth, nothing but what is said in few words can be frequently said by all. ”

“ The citizens are customed like the other Pomeranians, but they are considered somewhat awkwarder (unhandlicher = unhandier) . It is a curious custom of this land and city that generally more inhuman things take place there than anywhere else; and that I may relate something, I will tell of a dreadful occurrence that lately happened there. [9] Of Wollyn there is nothing more to be written, except that the revered Master Doctor Joannes Buggenhagen was born in this city, who is no insignificant ornament both of the holy New Testament and of his fatherland. ”

“ Bootikins.
—Horace Walpole speaks in many of his letters of the great benefit he had experienced from the use of bootikins in his attacks of gout. In a letter to George Montagu, Esq., dated July 31, 1767, he says:
"Except one day's gout, which I cured with the bootikins, I have been quite well since I saw you."
Eight years afterwards his expectations of cure from them were not so high. In a letter to the Rev. Mr. Cole, dated June 5, 1775, he remarks:
"I am perfectly well, and expect to be so for a year and a half. I desire no more of my bootikins than to curtail my fits." ”