of the same character as that hidage mentioned in the Woodstock dispute (1163) as paid to the sheriff for administering and defending the shire. But this must be very problematical.

4. Murder.-Here, again, MR. WADDINGTON'S explanation seems wide of the mark. Why should not this be simply the murdrum, the fine laid upon a district in which a corpse was found? Exemption from the murdrum is thus easy to understand. It is said to have been abolished in cases of accidental death in 1259 (Ann. Burt.

476,484). Brighton.

J. H. ROUND.

Westminster, from a MS. of the Time of King
Henry VI."
EDWARD PEACOCK.

I would add an additional fact to those enumerated by F. S. W. He has pointed out that judges, queen's counsel, solicitors, and ushers of courts, all wear a gown with a square flap over the shoulders, while the junior bar wear a gown of

a different make. F. S. W. has omitted to notice

that the square-flapped gown is worn by the junior bar when they dine in the halls of their respective Inns of Court. This, perhaps, rather confirms the theory of F. S. W., that the court gown of the junior bar is an unauthorized introE. R. P. duction from the Universities.

New University Club.

A HORSE-DEALING PROVERB (6th S. v. 427).The above reminds me of one anent riding which ought to run with it. Once upon a time it was advertised that, on receipt of a certain pecuniary consideration, instructions would be forwarded whereby the most timid and inexperienced rider might learn how to become a perfect equestrian. A confiding individual seized the opportunity, and received for his money a slip of paper bearing the following lines:

"Your head and your heart keep boldly up:
Your hands and your heels keep down;
Your knees keep close to your horse's sides,
And your elbows close to your own."

W. F. MARSH JACKSON.

J. R. B.

Sysonby, a hamlet belonging to Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, will be found in the Transactions of the Leicestershire Architectural and Archæolo

gical Society, vol. iv. pp. 263-271. The meaning of the "three text R's" is not known; it has been suggested that they stand for "Regi, Regno, THOMAS NORTHI, F.S.A.

Rectioni."

Llanfairfechan.

The meaning of the text R's in the Pate arms, or from what that family derived them, I do not know, but where they occur in other shields they are often taken from a merchant's mark. Rashleigh of Cornwall bears Sa. a cross or and a Cornish chough, in the second quarter a text T, in the third and fourth a crescent. "The text R is borne in

AUTHORS OF QUOTATIONS WANTED (6th S. v. 469).

"Vain was the man, and false as vain,
Who said, were he ordained to run
His long career of life again

He would do all that he had done.
It is not thus the voice that dwells
In sober birthdays speaks to me.
Far otherwise; of time it tells
Lavished unwisely, carelessly," &c.
I quote from memory, but the " man was Fontenelle,
and the lines are from Thomas Moore's lines on his
birthday.
ESTE.

(6th S. v. 489.)

Eighteenth Century Essays. Selected and Annotated by Austin Dobson. (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.) 'Tis a thing past praying for, that we of "this so-called nineteenth century" should ever be as welcome to our descendants as the Seventeen Hundreds are to us. Time was, indeed-say fifty years ago, when we and our century were young-that we thought scorn of that pleasant Georgian land, and gave no credence to its measured modes of sober common sense. But now distress of nations, with perplexity, hath brought us to a better mind; and we see that Talleyrand, and Miss Berry, and the other survivors were right in saying that the days before '89 were the only days to live in. Ah, those days! Even yet, by making believe very much, we can gather flowers with Proserpina in the meads of Enna, and forget that fell Pluto is a-coming. And this is what Mr. Dobson has done, and has helped us to do, in the charming little book before us. The Tatler, the Spectator, the World, the Connoisseur, the Idler, the Citizen of the World, the Lounger-thirty-four of the best essays from these, and from such as these, ranging from Steele to Henry Mackenzie, from 1709 to 1786: that is the core of the volume. Its editor has added a light and graceful historical introduction and some thirty pages of illustrative notes, full of side-lights (so to speak), focussed with apt skill, from Prior, from Molière, from Rabelais, from fifty other suns and moons.

Perhaps, with our sympathy already enlisted, we are hardly fair critics of such a performance. Perhaps we ought to complain of Mr. Dobson for having chosen only

essays on life and manners, neglecting the weightier matters of metaphysics and the like, because (as he delicately puts it) they are "a little lengthy-a little wearisome," in eighteenth century guise. But we don't complain, for we quite agree with him. Perhaps, in order to show our own wide reading, we should accuse him of having omitted that admirable essay on hunting by the Rev. Abraham Adams in (let us say) the Adven turer. Perhaps, again, we should affirm that he has given us too many familiar favourites-too much of Sir Roger, and Will Wimble, and Beau Tibbs. But instead of that-nay, by reason of these very folk-we are minded to take his book (in fact, we have taken it for once with George Canning in what he said as to the already) as a companion sub tegmine fagi; disagreeing superior advantage of lying under a tree without a book. If the forty volumes of British Essayists do not henceforth rise in price it will not be Mr. Dobson's fault nor ours. And now that their placid charms have been again revealed, in rough paper and clear type, to this evil and vulturous generation, we would suggest that the Sixteen Hundreds, too, should have their turn. What a book might be made out of them-from Bacon to Cowley, with Dekker, with Hall, with Overbury in between! Yea, marry, and have not the Tudor times a claim, tooErasmus, and More, and Sidney, and many another whom we meet with, even now, in Mr. Arber? But this is a far cry as yet; and, meanwhile, we would not end without special praise of three other matters in Mr. Dobson's book: to wit, his dedication, full of old-world courtesy and well-deserved respect, to Thackeray's daughter; his dainty frontispiece-no, 'tis Mr. Caldecott's; who else could have drawn it?-of the Tory foxhunter; and his fly-leaf lines, wherein he is pleased to assert what he himself disproves, that no one nowadays can "afford to turn a phrase."

Calendar of State Papers. Domestic Series, 1655. Edite by M. A. Everett Green for the Master of the Rolls (Longmans & Co.)

THE papers calendared in this volume extend over the first ten months of the year 1655, which was a period of great anxiety to the Protector. He began the year by dismissing in anger the Parliament, which had rejected by a majority of two-thirds a motion to make the office of Protector hereditary in the Cromwell family. The dissolution of Parliament was quickly followed by the detection of a plot for the restoration of the monarchy, so widely spread that it was only crushed out by extending over England and Wales a network of military government. The whole country was divided into eleven districts, each of which was governed by a major-general with stringent powers to secure the peace of the Commonwealth; and the expense of this military organization was provided for by an income tax of ten per cent. which was imposed on all who were suspected of Royalist tendencies, whether they were engaged in this last conspiracy or not.

This volume abounds with proofs of the financial embarrassments of the Government, which had neither money nor credit to provide stores for the navy, and was prevented from reducing the standing army by the difficulty of finding funds to satisfy the arrears of pay due to the officers and soldiers. It is remarkable that in spite of this public impecuniosity no less a sum than 15,000l. was subscribed for the relief of the persecuted Waldenses, whose sufferings excited general indignation in England. The 14th day of June, 1655, was, by order of the Protector, solemnly observed as a day of humiliation and fasting, and his proclamation denounced in the strongest terms the cruelties practised on these subAlpine Protestants. The money subscribed was to be

paid at Geneva, and disposed according to the Lord Protector's directions; and a rumour was circulated by the Royalists that the money sent to Switzerland was diverted from its destined purpose, and was employed in hiring a Swiss life-guard of 3,000 men to protect Cromwell from the discontent of his own army, and that the idea of this Swiss guard was only laid aside when it was detected by some of his chief officers whom he dared not offend. Cromwell was more powerful at home than abroad, and his position was eventually strengthened by the success of his foreign policy. Jamaica was captured from the Spaniards in May of this year, and in October a treaty of alliance was concluded with France, which deprived Charles II. of all hopes of French assistance in his designs on England, for it contained an article that Charles II. and his brother should not be allowed to reside within the French king's dominions. This volume ends with the Lord Protector's Proclamation in Council, on October 31, 1655, justifying the proceedings he had taken for securing the peace of the Commonwealth. It is an admirable state paper, but it has been printed already at length in The Parliamentary History of England, and it was therefore scarcely necessary to repro. duce it again in extenso in this volume of calendars. Philosophical Classics.-Kant. By William Wallace, M.A., LL.D.-Fichte. By Robert Adamson, M.A. (Blackwood & Sons.) MESSRS, BLACKWOOD's "Philosophical Classics" will, we think, do a useful work. To many persons the names of great philosophers are often bugbears, associated with the wildest, most visionary, and most destructive theories respecting thought, religion, and society. Familiarity will at least remove the almost superstitious dread with which those who are not students of philosophy shrink from contact with a philosopher. A sketch of their lives shows that they possessed human interests, and a popular exposition of their works proves that they were not always responsible for the extreme views by which they have been discredited. Kant and Fichte, whose lives and works form the two most recent volumes of the series, present a remarkable contrast. Kant was nothing but a philosopher; in the field of philosophy all his triumphs were won, and it is as a thinker that he exercised his influence. He lived the ideal life of a philo. sopher. Contented with the simplest possible fare, diverted from his studies by no rival pursuits, abstracted from all political or social ambition, he lived and died in the town of Königsberg. Fichte, on the other hand, though his writings are voluminous, was distinguished as an orator and lay preacher, and is remembered not so much for his speculative thinking as for the practical part which he played in the regeneration of Prussia and the moral revival of the Prussian people. The biographical portions of these two volumes will prove of very general interest, while the résumé of the works both of Kant and Fichte gives, in a clear though neces sarily highly condensed form, the characteristic features of their respective theories.

Essays from "The Critic." (Boston, U.S., Osgood & Co.) It is not often that a literary journal in the first year of its existence can produce a volume of essays so well worthy of permanence as those which are here reprinted. The Critic has made itself known in America by the independence and ability of its utterances, and has happily found the success which ability, especially when coupled with independence, does not always succeed in securing. Those of its pages which are included in this volume fairly sample its achievements. Walt Whitman writes, in the peculiar form of eloquence which characterizes him, on the deaths of Longfellow and Carlyle, and Mr. John Burroughs (no one fitter) of Thoreau, some of

whose unpublished verses are given in another paper. Mr. R. H. Stoddard has a charmingly expressed article on Mrs. Hodgson Burnett; Mr. E. S. Stedman discourses of William Blake, and the late Sidney Lanier, known to us by the Boy's Froissart, but in his own land as a delicate poet, with ingenious theories of versification. Not the least valuable of the contributions is the frank estimate of Walt Whitman which concludes the collection.

THE Gloucestershire Notes and Queries (Kent & Co.) continues to be of interest to both sides of the strengthen the probability of the authenticity of what Atlantic. Not long since, we ourselves were able to purported to be an envelope bearing Confederate stamps and post-marks, by our recollection of some notes in our Gloucestershire origin, members of which are settled Gloucestershire contemporary respecting a family of in the Southern States. hear that the editor intends to bring his valuable We shall hope ere long to matter together in the permanent shape of a volume, in the unenviable position of not having a complete set. for many students of his pages must, like ourselves, be

THE Western Antiquary (Plymouth) has definitively entered on a new phase of its useful career by coming out in monthly instead of quarterly parts. We sincerely wish it long life under its new form. It has already proved of great value to Western men, and we feel no doubt they will one and all" continue their support to it. The Bonython pedigree, which formed the subject of long and interesting communications, is only one of the numerous connecting links between "N. & Q." and the Western Antiquary. The Borlase pedigree has already aroused a debate nearly as keen as that which has raged in our own columns over Mr. W. C. Borlase's Parochial Registers Preservation Bill.

MR. GOLDING, of Colchester, sends us a list (No. C. vi.) of some very interesting monastic and manorial records which he has on sale. It includes a Diploma of Aggregation into the Congregation of Vallombrosa, a grant by Elias, prior of St. John of Jerusalem (in Anglia), and several autographs of notable historical characters."

Notices to Correspondents.

We must call special attention to the following notice: ON all communications should be written the name and address of the sender, not necessarily for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith.

E. G. ("Not lost, but gone before") should consult the indexes to "N. & Q." passim. But frequently as the question has been asked, so frequently has it been given up in despair. For the latest that has been written on the subject, see "N. & Q.," 5th S. iv. 499, 527; v. 60; x. 162.

E. W. ("Rood Lofts").-A correspondent refers you to Parker's Glossary of Gothic Architecture, vol. i. (text). W. E. B. ("Amoris Effigies").-Have you seen the reply at 6th S. v. 499?

GEN. R. (Oxford).-We hope you heard from us.