appears to have been too confidential over the "J'ai été surtout ravi de l'harmonie du chant. Il y a bien loin de semblables accords aux beuglements des chantres de nos cathédrales et au bruit rauque des serpents qui les accompagnent. Les Français, d'ailleurs si rarement dotés par la nature, sont, je pense, le peuple de l'Europe qui chante le plus mal." W. H. QUARRELL SUPPOSED PORTRAIT OF FIRST EARL OF of the Commons in 1575, and Lord Chief Baron of I should be glad of any information which may tend to corroborate my theory, and also to ascertain who may have been the artist by whom the portrait was painted. Are there in existence any well-authenticated portraits of the first Earl of Nottingham; and where? I have recently purchased an engraving purporting to be that of a portrait of him, dated A.D. 1681; but it appears, so far as one can judge from an engraving, to be that of a dark rather that of a fair haired man, and I cannot distinctly identify the features in the two portraits, although there seem to me to be some points of resemblance between them. Ipswich. JOHN H. JOSSELYN, [A portrait, attributed conjecturally to Luttrell, is p. 1665.] I am owner of a fine oil painting, a life-size half-length portrait of a gentleman, or nobleman, dressed in a black doublet, apparently velvet, richly adorned on the shoulders and arms with heavy gold bullion lace, and wearing a deep collar and cuffs of fine lawn. He is an elderly man, large-framed and stout, and has fair hair, worn long under a black skull cap, a thin fair moustache and small chin tuft, a well-shaped and slightly aquiline nose, and a double chin. He stands by described in Smith's Catalogue of Engraved Portraits, a table on which lies a massive gold or gilt mace, on which the letters C. R. are plainly readable, and holds in his right hand a paper or parchment scroll, bearing an inscription, of which so much as is visible identifies it with the title of the statute 13 Car. II. c. 1, viz., "An Act for Safety and Preservation of His Majesty's Person and Government against Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Attempts"; which fixes the date of the portrait as not before 1661, and probably within a few years after that date. I have arrived at a conclusion that the portrait may be that of Sir Heneage Finch, Lord Keeper in 1674, Lord Chancellor in 1675, and first Earl of Nottingham, for the following reasons :— The portrait came to me through my late mother, daughter of Scarlet Browne Bell, eldest son of Henry Bell, which Henry and his male lineal ancestors owned Wallington Hall, Norfolk. Wallington Hall came into the Bell family in the seventeenth century, when Philip Bell (eighth son of Sir Robert Bell, of Beaupré Hall, Norfolk, and great-grandson of Sir Robert Bell, Speaker THE YULE OF SAXON DAYS. (Continued from 8th S. viii. 483.) Norse tradition points us to the far Asaland-most probably Asia-from which Odin came, and the underlying affinities of race and language attest its truth. How much of Scandinavian mythology, with its constant warfare between good and evil, is akin to Persian belief, and how much of Hebrew tradition underlies them both is a question too wide for so brief an essay. But a clearer light is thrown upon the worship of Thor when we remember him as the Beskytter, the protector, the shelter, and find that Houssa, Uzzi, or Husi is the divine protector among the tribes of the Euphrates and the descendants of Ishmael. From this name the Gothic huse, English house, is evidently derived, showing that the "sheltered hearth," that is the house, literally bore his name. Philology takes us still further when it traces Thor or Thorah to the Hebrew for law or order received from Sinai. Thus, as far back as we can go, among the earliest vestiges of the faith of our Scandinavian forefathers, we find these ideas in close association-Thor, the embodiment of protection, law and order, united with thunder and fire; the blazing pile of pine-logs; the assembling of the free; the rejoicing of the reunited family at the feast of the home, when children, followers, and bondmen were gathered around the father and king. The Thorsthing or Housethings, now shortened into Hustings, only survives amongst us as the name of the polling place. But in Yarmouth, the oldest seaport on the Norfolk coast, where the Danish element prevailed long after the Conquest, we find the ancient chartered court of the borough was formerly called the Court of Husting, now the court of record; all the crimes committed within the borough being tried there. Amongst the Teutonic nations he who gave the largest entertainments was held in the most esteem. These feasts commonly lasted several days. No guest thought of departing until the empty bowls and the increasing heap of bones showed that the abundant provisions were consumed. Athenaus describes à Gaulish feast which lasted a year without interruption. Not only every individual of the tribe, but every stranger also who chanced to pass through the country, was made welcome. It was a belief sanctioned by long established custom that at the festive board men spoke out their real thoughts with greater boldness and formed their most daring plans. In speaking of the Germanic race, Tacitus says: "When they wanted to reconcile enemies, to form alliances, to appoint chiefs, or to treat of war and peace, it was during the repast they took counsel-a time in which the mind is most open to the impressions of simple truth, or most easily animated to great attempts. These artless people during the conviviality of the feast spoke without disguise, and next day weighed the counsels of the former evening. They deliberated at a time when they were not disposed to deceive, and took their resolution at a time when they were least liable to be deceived." Such were the traditionary customs which regulated the Saxon Yuletide. If in this spirit the father and king of the nation deliberated with his eldermen and warriors, so likewise the father -consulted with his sons. We must now turn to Kentish customs for additional light upon the early Yule, for the Saxon settlement upon the Kentish shore had grown into a kingdom before the descendants of Odin cast the lance against their idols and listened to the gentler teachings of Christianity. About one hundred and seventy years after the daring escape of the Northmen from the legions of Probus, the cowardly Vortigern requested Saxon aid. In answer to his invitation 1,500 men landed on the coast of Kent. Three ships brought them over, and they were therefore called "the men of the three ships," "the short sword men," or Saxons. Their leaders, the brothers Hengist and Horsa, are spoken of as the greatgrandsons of Odin, and, as their old songs express it, "They followed gaily the track of the swans. The lapse of time between the arrival of the three ships and the escape of the exiles suggests the identity of their ancestral Odin with the leader of that gallant band. The Northmen held the transmigration, or rather the reincarnation of souls. They believed by giving a child the name of a distinguished man, especially of his own forefathers, the soul of his name-father was transfused into the child. Thus we find St. Olaf was named after his most famous ancestor King Olaf GurstadAlf, and in his day the common people believed that the old king was really born again in St. Olaf. Among a race cherishing ideas like these the heroic mariner could not fail to be regarded as the incarnation of their god Odin, the heaven father and victor king. We must now recall the familiar story of Hengist's first winter in England. The feast he gave to Vortigern, when Rowena presented the wassailbowl to the British king, was undoubtedly the first Yuletide ever kept within our white-faced isle. Many have ascribed the origin of the Saxon wassail to the daughter of Hengist. Others identify it with the grace-cup of the Greeks and Romans; but there seems more reason to suppose the presentation of the wassail-bowl was as closely associated with the Saxon Yule as the ivy with which the bowl was wreathed. Brand tells us of an ancient custom among the Kentish villages, for which he can offer no explanation, although it was kept up as late as 1779, referring to the holly and ivy with which they decorated their houses at Christmas. In this traditional observance the mistletoe has no partanother indication of its purely Saxon origin. We must remember the holly is the only thing remaining alive and green throughout the dark winter of the frozen north, where they reverence it as the Grantra. Therefore we may conclude it was "a symbol dear" to Hengist and Rowena before their winter in Britain. Brand adds, the holly and ivy which decorated the Kentish farmhouses at Christmas were never taken down until Shrovetide. Was this the limit of the ancient Yule? The village maidens then collected the witbering ivy and bound it into a bundle, which they denominated the ivy-girl. Meanwhile the village boys had got possession of the holly, which they had twisted into the rude effigy of a man. By nightfall their respective bonfires were lighted; but the holly-boy was nowhere to be found. Girlish craft had stolen him away, and all the stealthy cunning of the lads was now exerted to get possession of the ivy-girl by way of reprisal. Of course they succeeded, and by the time the holly-boy was discovered blazing in the maidens' bonfire the ivy-girl was carried off in triumph and burnt likewise with much shouting and glee. In this curious practice we cannot fail to perceive a marked personification of these hardy evergreens-a personification we again meet with in an old ballad of the days of Henry VI. preserved in the British Museum. Here the holly and ivy are placed in opposition : Old Ballad of the Days of Henry VI. Let Holly hafe the maystery, as the manner is. Ivy hath a lybe, she laughit with the cold; Ivy hath berries as black as any slo; Holly hath byrdys a full fayre flock, This weeping ivy with her maidens can have no than the climber in the shade to typify their love in adversity and their fidelity unto the absent ones they were mourning as the dead? Sorrow reigned; no bird but the owlet was heard, no laughter but the laughter from the cold, when holly and his merrymen appeared within the hall, and joy and mirth took the place of weeping and despair :Nay, Ivy, nay; it shall not be i-wys; Let Holly hafe the maystery, as the manner is. The story of that return was sure to be repeated when those parted ones gathered around the king's fire. Even if this occurrence did not originate the custom, it must have imparted an added zest to the old feast of Thor, and made the family reunion the one indestructible characteristic of the Yule by the sheltered hearth. This was the festival which the father of Rowena introduced into Britain. A similar antithesis is found in the garland gay which crowned the head of the boar-the most conspicuous dish at the Saxon Yule feast-and the rosemary, another funereal herb, which was placed in its mouth. After Rowena's day the preparation of the wassail-bowl evidently belonged to the maidens, who wreathed it with ivy and carried it round with appropriate songs. E. STREDDER. 21, Stowe Road, Shepherd's Bush, W. (To be continued.) JEREMY TAYLOR.-On 14 Jan., 1635/6, Jeremy Taylor was admitted to a fellowship at All Souls' College, Oxford, and his biographer, the Rev. Henry Kaye Bonney, observes, that "at this time the Papists circulated a report that he was strongly inclined to enter into communion with the Church of Rome." Mr. Bonney believed, however, that the authority upon which this rests must be considered very doubtful, and that the best answer to the report was an appeal to Taylor's works, "which contain nothing that savours of Romish errors; but, on the contrary, abound with arguments against them." He also quotes from the first Letter to one tempted to the Communion of the Church of Rome,' a passage already printed in Still, if this were all, it is hard to see why theN. & Q.' (4th S. vi. 391), to the effect that the funeral emblems are given to the female, while allegation was perfectly a slander." the brightness and merriment ascribed to the holly are always male, and stranger still why the weeping ivy is placed without the door and the dancing holly within, a position which the youngest Viking, the beardless boy, would have scouted and contemned. But if we accept the holly and ivy as the memorials of the return of the exiled Goths from the borders of the Euxine, they full of meaning :— Ivy stands without the door and is full sore acold. What attitude could more vividly describe the desolation of those Saxon women, hopelessly watching through that weary "mother night" of separation and suspense; or what more fitting emblem 66 The Rev. Robert Aris Willmott, in his work on Bishop Jeremy Taylor' (1847), speaks (p. 99) of the "improbable story of his intended secession to the Roman Church," and adds that "we must close our ears to the universal teaching of his works, before we can believe that he had ever turned a favourable eye upon the papal superstition." Anthony à Wood appears to be the first writer who referred to the rumour. His words are: "About the same time [that he was admitted a fellow of All Souls'] he was in a ready way to be confirmed a member of the church of Rome, as many of that persuasion have said, but upon a sermon delivered in S. Mary's Church in Oxon. on the 5 of November (Gunpowder-treason day), an. 1638, wherein several things were put in against the papists by the then vice-chancellor, he was afterwards rejected with scorn by those of that party, particularly by Fr. à S. Clara, his intimate acquaintance; to whom afterwards he expressed some sorrow for those things he had said against them, as the said S. Clara hath several times told me."-"Athenæ Oxonienses,' ed, Bliss, iii. 782. Wood was first introduced to Franciscus à Sancta Clara at Somerset House on 29 Aug., 1669, and afterwards visited him frequently in London. THOMPSON COoper, F.S.A. THE SEA-SERPENT.-It is interesting to find that the sea-serpent was known in remote antiquity. Some myth relating to it appears to have existed among the Accads, who, blending with later arriving races, helped to form the population of ancient Chaldea. Speaking of the worship of serpent gods, Lenormant says in 'La Magie chez les Chaldéens,' 1874, p. 207:— Franciscus à Sancta Clara above referred to was a learned Franciscan friar, whose real name was Christopher Davenport, and who sometimes passed under the name of Hunt. He was born at Coventry in 1598, and died at Somerset House, in the Strand, on 31 May, 1680. For some years he lived in concealment at Oxford, or in the neighbourhood, being on terms of friendship with Dr.attributes, and one of the figures of Ea [lord of the Barlow, the Bodleian librarian. Heber, in his 'Life of Jeremy Taylor' (p. xvi), expresses the opinion that "when Davenport, as Wood assures us, ascribed to Taylor a regularly formed resolution of being reconciled to the church of Rome......it is most reasonable, as well as most charitable, to impute the assertion to a failure of memory, not unnatural to one so far advanced in years as he must have been when Wood conversed with him." Wood's assertion is, however, confirmed in a remarkable manner by a passage occurring in a very rare work, which is not to be found, I believe, in the Library of the British Museum. This is entitled, "The Literary Life of the Rev. John Serjeant, written by himself at Paris, 1700, at the request of the Duke of Perth"; and it was published at London in 1816, 8vo., under the editorship of the Rev. John Kirk, D.D. Serjeant, or more properly Sergeant, who was a distinguished controversial writer on the Catholic side, after referring to his reply to Bishop Taylor's 'Dissuasive from Popery,' makes the following positive state ment : "The Accads made of the serpent one of the principal terraqueous surface of the earth, and of the atmosphere], and we have a very important allusion to a mythological serpent in these words of a dithyramb in the Accadian tongue placed in the mouth of a god, perhaps Ea...... Like to the enormous serpent with seven heads, the weapon with seven heads, I hold it. Like to the serpent which lashes the waves of the sea [attacking] the enemy in face-devastatrix in the shock of battles, extending its power over the heaven and the earth, the weapon with [seven] heads [I hold it].'" The words given in brackets are emendations filling spaces where the text is mutilated in the original. G. W. MOTTOES FOR SUNDIALS.-Some of the readers of N. & Q.' may like to know that there are upwards of three hundred of these in Charles Leadbetter's 'Mechanick Dialling; or, the New Art of Shadows,' 8vo., 1773, pp. 101-116. It would be well if they were reprinted in 'N. & Q.' or elsewhere, as I think the book containing them is rare. I do not call to mind ever having seen a copy except that in the library of the Society of Antiquaries. EDWARD PEACOCK. [See Indexes to N. & Q.,' passim.] FOLKLORE RELATING TO MARRIAGE AND BAPTISM.-A short time since I was at a wedding in Lincolnshire. On the important morning the bridegroom had an interview with his mother-inlaw to be in the garden of her house, it not being considered right that he should come indoors until after the marriage ceremony. I believe he had dined with the bride and her family the night before. "Mr. Hunt, otherwise called Sancta Clara, a Franciscan, a worthy and grave man, did assure me, that when Dr. Taylor was a Master of Arts in Oxford, he had converted him to the Catholic faith, and was about to reconcile him; but it happened, that there running a whisper in the university that he was inclined to Popery, the Vice-chancellor, to give him occasion to clear himself, put him upon preaching the 5th of November sermon, which he did, and (as is the fashion) did in it tell twenty lies of the faith and faults of Catholics. Fear of the world, and of losing his repute in the university, made him to commit that fault; for he was far from having yet received the Holy Ghost to strengthen A working man in Yorkshire was advised to him; yet he still preserved his former intentions. But call his child Giles or Michael, because of the dates Mr. Hunt would not yield to reconcile or absolve him, of its birth and baptism; but he declined, saying till he had first by some public writing made satisfaction" the saints would want it" if he made it their for the lies he had preached and printed (as his sermon was by order of the Vice-chancellor) against God's church, and had retracted the falsehoods he had preached; which he, valuing the praise of men more than the glory of God, would not do, and so lost his halfvocation, and continued as he was. In Cromwell's days he had published his Liberty of Prophecying,' in which he was very civil to Catholics. But now the Church of England scrambling up again at King Charles his restoration, and he having got a bishopric, he was become our greatest enemy.' namesake. This idea is probably of Protestant growth, as in earlier times it was quite general to name a child after the saint who presided over its birthday. ST. SWITHIN. MATTHEW ARNOLD'S 'CROMWELL.' (See 7th S. vii. 287, 414; 8th S. vi. 448; vii. 156).-As this poem, I believe, is very scarce-I fancy it is not even in the London Library, but I am not sure— · But in the early days of the Tractarian movement the adoption of this costume was a sure sign that the wearer sympathized with that section of the High Church party then known as Puseyites. And after Cardinal Newman went over to the Church of Rome, these garments were stigmatized with the epithet of M.B., which briefly meant Mark of the Beast." I think it may interest your readers, or some of Pale phantom hosts, like shadows, faint and far, d'Osbor'? LI, 131-58. Si la mer prononçait des noms dans ses marées, JONATHAN BOUCHIER. M.B. COATS AND WAISTCOATS.-During the last few days I have come upon the following two passages which seem worthy of preservation in N. & Q.' There are probably many readers of the younger generation to whom the letters M.B., when applied to coats and waistcoats, must present an impenetrable mystery. It may be as well, then, to say that they were originally used to describe a long clerical coat which came down nearly to the heels of the wearer, and a waistcoat which hid his shirt entirely from view, after the manner of a cassock. The waistcoat is now almost universally worn by the clergy, and the coat, with a considerable shortening of its tail, still survives. "Third, I really fear whether a profane person like me, a carnal west country alderman, in a white hat and brown holland trousers, would not be somewhat out of character among the cloud of M.B. coats, which I conceive a meeting of the E.C.C.C.S. (as Hope writes it) to present."-Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman, D.C.L., LL.D.,' by W. R. W. Stephens, B.D., vol. i. p. 46, letter from E. A. F. to the Rev. B. Webb, dated 22 April, 1854. "Betsy had arranged this 'object' in a pink bed-gown of her own, a pair of the minister's trousers turned up nearly to the knee in a roll the thickness of a man's wrist, and one of the minister's new-fangled M.B. waistcoats, through the armholes of which two very long arms escaped, clad as far as the elbows in the sleeves of the pink bed-gown."-See The Colleging of Simeon Gleg.' in Mr. S. R. Crockett's Bog Myrtle and Peat,' p. 268, London, 1895. It is, perhaps, worth while noticing that in 1895 a minister of the Scotch Kirk is represented as wearing as a matter of course a garment which in 1845 was considered to be the badge of the extreme Romanizing party of the Church of England. C. W. PENNY. Wokingham. ORAL TRADITION.-The following clipping from the Scotsman of Tuesday, 19 November, seems worthy of preservation in N. & Q.':— father of the Church of Scotland, attained his ninety"The Rev. Dr. Smith, of Cathcart, Glasgow, the second birthday yesterday. The reverend gentleman, who continues to enjoy good health, bas been minister of the parish of Cathcart for sixty-seven years, and celebrated his pastoral jubilee in 1878. He retains a wonderful memory, and has a recollection of conversing with a soldier who carried arms at Culloden." Thus the account of an event which happened a hundred and fifty years since, may to-day be had only at second hand. R. M. SPENCE, M.A. Manse of Arbuthnott, N.B. HAPPY TEXT.-At the conference of the And Institute of Journalists, held at Exeter in Septem- B. W. S. A NEW CRYPTOGRAM.-At this time of year new puzzles are sometimes in vogue. Most cryptograms are really very easy to solve. Their usual defect is that the same symbol always means the same thing. I offer for solution the |