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'How NOT TO DO IT" (12 S. i. 508).—I have a little book, "What to do, and How to do it; or, Morals and Manners taught by examples. By Peter Parley," London, no date A writing inside shows that it was given to me in 1851.

In a list of his books made by Samuel Griswold Goodrich ("Peter Parley ") himself, quoted in Allibone's Dictionary, the date of first publication is 1844, presumably in the United States.

Dickens began to write 'Little Dorrit' in September, 1855. It may be worth noting that in chap. x. of Book the First of 'Little Dorrit,' How to do it' occurs once, viz., p. 76 of the original edition, line 14 from foot, while "How not to do it" appears again and again.

It is at least possible that the above-named little book, with its title in plain letters on the cover, was on the Dickens nursery bookshelves in 1855 and earlier.

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ROBERT PIERPOINT.

FACT OR FANCY? (12 S. i. 509.)— 1. "That an Englishman's house is his castle."-See 'N.E.D.,' s.v. 'Castle,' e, phrase: [1567. Staunforde, 'Plees del Coron,' 14 b, Ma meason est a moy come mon castel hors de quel le ley ne moy arta a fuer.] 1588, Lambard, 'Eiren.' II. vii. 257, Our law calleth a man's house. his castle, meaning that he may defend himselfe therein. 1600-16, Coke, 5 Rep.' 91 b, The house of every man is to him as his Castle and Fortresse, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose. 1856, Emerson. Eng. Traits, Wealth,' Wks. (Bohn) ii. 73, The house is a castle which the King cannot enter."

Stephen's Blackstone,' vol. iv. p. 108, ed. 1880, says :

"No outward doors of a man's house can in general be broken open to execute any civil process; though in criminal cases the public safety supersedes the private."

London, he will find that the highest and the healthiest parts of London are on the ridges, northern and southern, of the clay basin of the Thames, such as Highgate, Hampstead, and Harrow on the north, and Richmond Hill, Sydenham Hill, and Forest Hill on the south. Gravel is always the soil found next or near the water course. I went very fully into this question in a paper which I had the honour of reading before the British Balneological and Climatological Society, entitled The Clay and Gravel Soils of London and the Relative Advantages of dwelling upon Them,' published in the Society's Journal for January, 1902. S. D. CLIPPINGDALE, M.D.

2. Gravel 2. clay. Before population became so thick, gravel was estimated a more healthy soil to live on than clay, because gravel assisted drainage. You dug a hole, and the loose nature of the soil did the rest for the drainage, whereas clay did not so help, and care had to be taken to lead the drainage away or to empty out cesspits or pools in a clay soil frequently. But now population is more dense, on a gravelly soil, unless care be taken, you may get your neighbour's drainage. it is not so cold to live on as clay. Another reason in favour of gravel is that HIC ET UBIQUE.

ENGLISH CARVINGS OF ST. PATRICK (12 S. i. 429, 478).-The following letter serves to explain why I thought the figure on the vaulting of Milton Abbey was St. Patrick, but does not tell us who he is :--

St. Peter's Vicarage, Portland, 14th June, 1916.

DEAR SIR-Sir Everard Hambro has sent me your letter of the 9th instant, and asked me to reply to it, as for some years I lived at Milton, and studied, and wrote on, every feature of the Abbey, including the bosses. I am afraid that the young man who took you round the church unintentionally misinformed you. There is no boss of St. Patrick in the vaulting. The only representation of the saint in Milton Abbey is on the monument which Sir Everard erected to the memory of his father, Baron Hambro.-Yours faithfully,

HERBERT PENTIN,

Hon. Secretary of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club.

The statement surprised me so much that I thought it deserved the query to which CANON FOWLER replied. If the foliage in question is not shamrock, Medicago lupulina, it is at least a trefoil of some kind; and there seems to be no doubt that it is work of the fourteenth century. Mr. Pentin, in his interesting article about those medallions in The Antiquary of 1908, pp. 10-14, admits

that that abbey was at first dedicated to two Keltic saints. The shamrock occurs on work of, I believe, the thirteenth century in the Cathedral of Raphoe. But my query referred to Great Britain, and not to Hibernia. E. S. DODGSON.

LOKE (12 S. i. 510).-In Halliwell's 'Dictionary of of Archaic and Provincial Words the second meaning of "loke is A private road or path. East."

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In The English Dialect Dictionary' it is also attributed to East Anglia :

"Also written loak Nrf. e Suf.; and in form look Nrf. [lok.] A lane, a short, narrow, blind lane, a 'cul-de-sac'; a grass road, a private lane or road." ROBERT PIERPOINT.

This is defined in the 'N.E.D.' as a short lane having no outlet; a cul-de-sac. The word occurs frequently in the earlier works of Mr. James Blyth, the present-day East Anglian novelist. W. B. H.

"THREE-A-PENNY COLONELS (12 S. i. 510).-This allusion is doubtless a variant on the playful references of Sir W. S. Gilbert's witty song for Don Alhambra in 'The Gondoliers,' beginning "There lived king." The well-known lines run thus:— Lord Chancellors were cheap as sprats, And Bishops in their shovel hats Were plentiful as tabby cats

In point of fact, too many,
Ambassadors cropped up like hay;
Prime Ministers, and such as they,
Grew like asparagus in May,

And Dukes were three a penny.
On every side Field-Marshals gleamed;
Small beer were Lords Lieutenant deemed ;
With Admirals the ocean teemed

All round his wide dominions......
WM. JAGGARD, Lieut.

a

HAMILTON MORE NISBETT. The New Club, Edinburgh.

Sir Walter Scott's biographer was married in 1820. His only daughter was his third born child, who married Mr. Hope. It is

therefore obvious that Lockhart could not possibly have been writing about his daughter's marriage in 1826. W. E. WILSON. Hawick.

WILLIAM MILDMAY, HARVARD COLLEGE, 1647 (12 S. i. 488).-As the Mildmay family were of Essex, I wrote to Mr. Frederic Chancellor of Bellefield, Chelmsford, our chral Monuments of Essex.' and he has antiquarian authority, the author of Sepulkindly searched and sends particulars, which I forward. He answers some of the questions asked by MR. ALBERT MATTHEWS of Boston.

"1. Sir Walter Mildmay of Apethorp had two sons, Anthony and Humphrey. Sir Henry of Wanstead was a son of Humphrey. Sir Henry had two sons, William and Henry. William was therefore a great-grandson of Sir Walter of Apethorp.

"There is a marble slab in the north aisle of Danbury Church with this inscription :

Esq (eldest son of S Henry Mildmay of Wanstead, "Here lyeth interred ye body of Willm Mildmay, Knt, and of Dame Anne his wife, one of the daughters and coheirs of Wm Holliday, Alderman

Bohemia drawn from 'The Winter's Tale.' No sort of attempt is made to eliminate the personal factor, to distinguish between commonplaces of French thought, and the individual whims, opinions, or designs of the different dramatists. In fact, as a piece of rather extended literary work, it is so sketchy, so uncritical, so lacking in grip, that it makes a sad impression of triviality. We venture to think that the more solid and better equipped

of American men of letters should turn their minds to criticizing and castigating the increasing output of studies of the kind before us-in which a sound idea, a good subject, is lighted on, but brought to mothing by the lack of genuine work upon it, by the triviality of the treatment.

We are beginning to think that some constitutional difference of ear, of taste for style in diction, renders an English lover of letters incapable of guessing the effect of American writing on American ears, and therefore-it may be-hardly a trustworthy judge of it. But the same disability does not exist in regard to clichés not of phrase, but of thought, or to outworn generalizations and mixed metaphors, and these-both in the book before us, and in some others we have recently looked into which came to us from America-we also venture to deprecate.

Sappho and the Sapphic Metre in English. With Bibliographical Notes by Edwin Marion Cox. (Chiswick Press, 1s. net.)

THE history of translations of Sappho into English does not offer any particulars of a specially exciting nature. The first attempt was that of John Hall, who in his translation of Longinus On the Sublime,' published in 1652, did into English the Ode embedded therein. Dr. Cox cites this in full, as he does the version of the same poem made by Pulteney in his rendering of Longinus from a French translation. There is obviously little to be said in favour of either; nor need we dissent from the slight measure of praise allotted to Ambrose Philips and those who immediately followed him. Yet some account must be taken of the value of words as words. A writer in The Atlantic Monthly for 1894 is quoted as making enthusiastic, but certainly well justified observations on the Greek language from this point of view; but neither he nor our author mentions a circumstance which must continually be borne in mind in estimating old translations and that is the continuous change in the poetical value of words, and still more of phrases. It is probable that the seventeenth-century lines which affect us with chill carried to seventeenth-century ears something of the force of restrained passion which we associate more readily with brief homely words. We are, it seems clear, much nearer the peculiar Greek sense for the value of words than our forefathers were; and, like the "Greeks, we tend in poetry to interpose layers of rich and subtle imagery, forming a language within a language, between the actual words and the centre of the thought. Bearing this in mind, and noting how strongly poetic tradition descends observing, too, what excellence in translation has here and there recently been attained-we hope that there will yet be a twentieth-century English version of the Hymn to Aphrodite, more excellent than any hitherto, and even worthy to stand beside the original.

Dr. Cox gives us two interesting examples of his own achievements in this line: we like both.

We wondered why so sensitive and exact a reader as he shows himself chose to add "silver word that counts a good deal usually-to Δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελλάνα, and also to ignore in this line the force of the idea of "setting" contained in the first word. The information put together in this brochure should prove welcome to students, for some of it, if wanted, might have to be sought with trouble. A tabular conspectus of the works referred to would not have taken up much space and would have been useful: and some of the paragraphs might with advantage have been divided up, in order to be easier of reference.

The Influence of Ancient Egyptian Civilization in the East and in America. By G. Elliot Smith, F.R.S. (Manchester, University Press.)

THE reader must not expect too much from the Dr. Elliot alluring title of this tractate of 32 pp. Smith, in a concise lecture, presents us with the merest outline of the conclusions at which he has arrived elsewhere. But the arguments and proofs which led to these conclusions must be sought in the larger works to which he makes reference. Our curiosity consequently is stimu lated rather than gratified.

The thesis which he seeks to establish is that the

essential elements of the ancient civilization of America, as well as those of India, Northern Asia, the Malay Archipelago, and Oceania, were brought to them about the eighth century B.C. by migrations of mariners from the Eastern Mediterranean, and that these early wanderers were Phoenicians in search of gold and pearls. There is, of course, nothing new in this suggestion. He refers, indeed, to the more recent researches of the late Terrien de la Couperie into the connexion between the Sumerian and ancient Chinese scripts, but he seems to have missed the valuable investigations of our Oxford scholar, Dr. C. J. Ball, on the same subject, with which he would do well to make himself acquainted.

HIDDEN RELATIONSHIPS CONTAINED IN WILLS. -MR. GERALD FOTHERGILL (11 Brussels Road, New Wandsworth, S.W.) writes:

"All genealogists know that wills are at present only indexed under the testator's surname. In the hope of throwing open these vast mines of information relating to families not of the testator's surname, I am indexing the legatees in the P.C.C. A start has been made with the years 1650, 1700, and 1770, and some seven thousand names have been extracted. It is intended after the war to print these lists."

The Athenæum now appearing monthly, arrangements have been made whereby advertisements of posts vacant and wanted, which it is desired to publish weekly, may appear in the intervening weeks in 'N. & Q.'

Notices to Correspondents.

MR. T. JESSON.-Forwarded.

MR. R. VAUGHAN GOWER ('R. Brereton, Artist'). -MR. ARCHIBALD SPARKE writes to say that Brereton exhibited twice at the Suffolk Street Galleries, the dates being 1835 and 1847.