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building of two stories (sometimes called a chantry); a stone pulpit at the north end of the screen, approached by stone steps from the chancel. The church, being cruciform, has a central tower, nave, and two transepts that had chantries. The nave has a north, south, and west door; and the south porch has an upper room (parvise) and an east room on the ground floor.

The Cistercian Abbey of Combermere, situated five miles from Nantwich, owned in and before the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries about onefourth of the town; and the 'Valor Ecclesiasticus' of 1535 and a rental of the abbey lands dated 1539 state that the Easter Roll, certain tithes, the oblations and obventions called the Rood Box, and the rectory and glebe of the chancel at Nantwich belonged then to Combermere Abbey. Does this imply that the chancel of the church was served by monks told off from Combermere from time to time, who had a temporary residence in the building on the north side of the chancel ? Nantwich being then included in the rural parish of Acton, the vicar of Acton supplied a chaplain to Nantwich as the parish priest, while wealthy residents provided for the chantry priests at the various altars in the transepts of the church, these priests ministering for the benefit of the townspeople, and one or more of them occupying the rooms connected with the south porch.

Dr. Jessopp, in The Coming of the Friars,' pp. 157-8, says he knows no instance of monks repairing or building parish churches, and implies that the monks, having no intimate connexion with town and village churches, only officiated in their own conventual churches. But were these things universally so?

Lindum House, Nantwich,

JAMES HALL.

POISONING BY ARSENIC.-Can any of your readers mention the principal cases of trials for poisoning by arsenic previous to the trial of Mrs. Maybrick? The principal cases which occur to me are those of Dr. Smethurst, who was convicted, but received a free pardon in consequence of a conflict of medical evidence similar to that in Mrs. Maybrick's case, and Miss Madeline Smith, in whose case the jury returned a verdict of "Not proven." Is there any case in which the poisoner was not a medical man, and in which the duration of illness was so long and the post mortem appearances so doubtful as in the Maybrick case?

J. W.

AUTHORS OF QUOTATIONS WANted.—
Indocti discant et ament meminisse periti.
J. C. J.
Without a name I am lost to every age;
Dust, ashes, and nought else lie within this grave;
Alive I was once, but now I am not,
Ask no more of me, 'tis all I am

And all that you shall be.

Even from that day misfortune dire,
As if for violated faith.

KNOWLER,

MAC ROBERT.

Beylies.

THE LETTERS OF JUNIUS.

(8th S. ii. 481; iii. 49, 111.)

A few hundred yards beyond Jack Straw's Castle, on the way to Hendon from Hampstead, we pass North End House on the left, now called Wild Wood House. Viewing the house from the main or carriage entrance, we may observe three windows in a row over a portico. The right-hand window lighted the closet or dressing-room in which the Earl of Chatham secluded himself for about eighteen months, 1767-8,

Nursing his wrath to keep it warm. In the thick wall of the room, facing the window, is an aperture something less than two feet square, lined with wood, and furnished with one door opening on the staircase outside, and another, which was padlocked, opening into the room. By could receive an article through this aperture taking proper precaution, the occupant of the room without exposing himself to view. A servant, having deposited the article within the recess, had simply to close the outer door and retire. In this way Lord Chatham received his meals and papers mysteriously. The middle and left-hand windows lighted the bedroom. Fifty years ago and of the late Sir Charles Parker Butt, I had frequent more, while the house was tenanted by the father opportunities of noticing the aperture, and it occurred to my youthful imagination that Chatham and Junius were one. Under either name the bearer had ingeniously shunned observation for a season. "It is not in the nature of things," wrote Junius to Woodfall, "[while I keep my door shut] that you, or anybody else, should know me, unless I make myself known"; and I could picture Sir Philip Francis, for one, standing blindfolded in a recess between Chatham and Woodfall. Sæpe ut constiterant, hinc Thisbe, Pyramus illinc; ......Tibi nos debere fatemur, Quòd datus est verbis ad amicas transitus aures. Turning from the aperture, I am old enough to remember when passages from Chatham's speech against the employment of savages in war were recited by schoolboys as commonly as "My name is Norval," and how familiar was the invocation, "I call upon the bishops to interpose the unsullied sanctity of their lawn; upon the judges to interpose the purity of their ermine"; and on reading Junius's first letter "to the Printer of the Public Advertiser" the words " a minister interposed his authority," and a judge "betrayed the sanctity of his office," struck me as affording a clue.

Chatham's reliance on the people obtained for him the name of "the Great Commoner." On resigning office in 1761 he held himself "accountable to the people who had called him to power." Junius dedicated his letters to the English nation :

imperviousness to vanity, is superhuman, unless to reveal himself meant to descend from a higher to a lower level-and Chatham worshipped fame. Junius was no meteor, to flash and disappear "right away." Though Francis might have contracted turns of expression, or shone with a borrowed light, he was not the sun to dazzle; nor could the sun remain ever under eclipse: he must have dazzled somewhere-before and after.

"Letters written by one of yourselves [the Great
Commoner], they would never have grown to
this size without your continued encouragement
and applause. To me they originally owe nothing
but a healthy (!) sanguine constitution. Under":
you they have thriven; to you they are indebted
for whatever strength or beauty they possess.
When kings and ministers are forgotten," in short,
this book will be read by posterity. Mark the
confident tone. Many such parallels might be
quoted; trivial they may be, but "mony smas
mak a muckle." "Terrific " was the epithet
applied to Chatham's invective and sarcasm, and,
if spoken by him, so would those of Junius have
been, as we may believe from Lord Brougham's
characteristic anecdote. Chatham began a speech
with, "Sugar, Mr. Speaker," and, observing that
the audience smiled, he paused, and, looking
fiercely around, his voice gradually swelling with
vehement rage, he thrice pronounced the word
"sugar," and having quelled the House and ex-
tinguished every appearance of levity, he turned
and disdainfully asked, " Who will laugh at 'sugar'
now?" Such sublime scorn and assurance might
credibly be attributed to Junius, but not to Sir
Philip Francis, who, trained from boyhood as a
Government subordinate, would habitually look
up to men in power, while Junius or Chatham
looked down from a rocky brow on men in nations,
with their kings, below, Guelph or Bourbon; all
were merely players on the world's stage, and he
an imperious manager. "I am sure," said he in
1757, "that I can save my country, and nobody
else can." "With one hand he smote the house
of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the demo-
cracy of England";* and "his name was men-
tioned with awe in every palace from Lisbon to
Moscow," for what monarch or minister would
lightly rouse the wrath of Chatham or Junius?

In the edition revised by himself Junius foot-
notes a passing attack on Chatham thus: "Yet
Junius has been called the partizan of Lord Chat-
ham." Though this, and many such like, had
disconcerted a raw youth, to experienced age they
are but the inky veil interposed by a retiring
cuttlefish, to be dissipated or precipitated soon
enough, perhaps, to allow a glimpse of the fish
again. If Junius was Poplicola he abused Lord
Chatham, and eulogized him in writing to Horne
Tooke. Junius was Philo-Junius, and, like Janus,
had two faces. Chatham was a consummate actor,
and was led, as Macaulay said, "to surround him-
self with mystery," and so with Junius.
"The
Great Unknown" drew around him the halo of
mystery to heighten his fame; but Scott gratified
the curiosity of the public in due time, while
Junius aroused a furor and declared that his secret
should perish with him. Such self-negation, such

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Over forty years ago I migrated to Cornwall, and was very intimate with the confidential steward of Lady Grenville at Dropmore, and of her nephew, the Hon. George Fortescue, at Boconnoc, where Chatham was born in 1708. Several times the steward had mentioned to me, at Boconnoc, that among the family papers carefully preserved at Dropmore was a sealed packet, containing the secret of Junius, not to be opened before a certain date, which I have forgotten; it might have been at the expiration of a century after the first publication of the letters (or Chatham's death?). However, within half-a-dozen years of either date I incidentally remarked to the steward that the time must be close at hand, and he informed me that it had elapsed, and that, after some deliberation, the family had decided to disclose nothing. Now Lady Grenville had herself said Junius was not Sir Philip Francis, and Mr. Pitt, Lord Chatham's son, admitted that he knew the author of the letters. If I remember rightly, the packet was opened after Lady Grenville's decease, when the late Mr. Fortescue had the controlling voice. Why should he have hesitated to gratify the public? I fancy we may eliminate the names of Sir Philip Francis, or any other except Lord Chatham, and conjecture that Mr. Fortescue, having arrived at the conclusion that the reputation of a literary name would add no brilliancy to the great statesman's renown, resolved to respect the wish of his deceased relative, as conveyed in the words of Junius, "I am the sole depository of my own secret, and it shall perish with me." To approach Lady Louisa Fortescue is out of the question, and probably we shall never know for certain more than that the author was not Sir Philip Francis. The pen might have been his or that of Lady Chatham; but to me the mind was the mind of "the Great Commoner."

H. H. DRAKE.

There was nothing very remarkable in the late
Dr. Vaughan's statement that William Gerard
Hamilton was Junius. The same statement is
January, 1787, p. 65.
positively made by the Political Magazine for
W. J. F.

Dublin.

SOPHY DAWS (7th S. vii. 248, 314, 432; 8th S. ii. 537; iii. 30).-The mysterious story of the death of the last of the Condés has always interested me greatly, for I long resided in Paris

Paris about 1840. The advisers of the Rohan family, which was seeking to set aside the will in favour of the Duc d'Aumale, had taken the very unusual, if not actually illegal course of publishing and spreading abroad all the documentary and other evidence which had been put before the courts at the criminal inquiry, their object being to prejudice Madame de Feuchères in the civil proceedings as to the validity of the will; and, on their side, the advisers of Madame de Feuchères replied to this unfair move by publishing and distributing gratis the volume to which I refer. It is entitled 'Examen de la Procédure Criminelle instruite à Saint-Leu à Pontoise......sur les causes et les circonstances de la Mort de S.A.R. le Duc de Bourbon, Prince de Condé,' and is a minute analysis of the evidence, and a consideration of all the facts, of course from the point of view of Madame de Feuchères. On seeing T. L. I.'s contribution, I looked over it once more, and it certainly appears to show that the hypothesis of murder can hardly be sustained in face of all the

living exclusively amongst French people-while the event was yet fresh in the minds of all, and political rancour was as virulent and as unscrupulous in mud-throwing then as it is now. The most bitter enemies of Louis Philippe-and he had plenty of these-did not hesitate to declare their belief that he was more or less directly or indirectly implicated in the tragedy at St. Leu, even before the act; while the most moderate of them were convinced that Madame de Feuchères, née Sophy Dawes, had caused the old Duc de Bourbon to be put out of the way, well knowing that the king would be only too glad to hear of a death by which a vast fortune was secured to his son, the Duc d'Aumale, as well as a splendid legacy to herself; and feeling sure that, whatever the king's suspicions might be, she might count on his not being very keen on the discovery of the truth. It is hard to believe that sixty years ago thousands of people were found to believe that the citizen king was actually guilty of a murder of the darkest and most vulgar type; but we must remember that scandal, like falsehood, is vastly more dan-difficulties which the assassins would have had to gerous when it contains a large admixture of truth; and it is not to be denied that this particular scandal as to Condé's death had at the back of it several awkward-looking circumstances, which to unfriendly eyes would justify the worst suspicions. It was well known that the influence of Madame de Feuchères had been employed to secure the nomination of the king's son, the Duc d'Aumale, as the Duc de Bourbon's heir; that the will had been made not many months before the revolution of July; that there were grounds for fearing that the old prince might revoke his bequest after the expulsion from France of the family to which he was naturally greatly attached; and that he had expressed the intention, or at any rate the wish, to leave France himself, when, of course, he would be entirely under influences necessarily extremely hostile to the Orleans family. To all these unfavourable circumstances was added the fact that Madame de Feuchères was received at the Tuileries after the death of the prince, and always enjoyed the countenance and favour of the king and his family. Here, surely, was more than enough to set wagging the tongues of people so prone to suspicion as the Parisians, and wag them they did without scruple. In truth, the business was a sad and unsavoury one; and whether the last Condé died by his own hand, or was foully done to death by his English mistress, either with or without the help of far more exalted personages, the whole story leaves a stain on a great name, and besmirches a stately inheritance.

T. L. I., if I am not mistaken, appears to lean to a belief that the prince did not die by his own hand; but perhaps he will come to a different conclusion if he reads carefully a curious book on the subject, a copy of which I bought on the Quai in

surmount, leaving out the improbability that such
a deed should have been done by Sophy Dawes,
either with or without the secret connivance of
other persons interested in the prince's will.
I have always understood that the prince first met
Sophy Dawes at Portsmouth, when he accompanied
the allied sovereigns to England in 1814, and that
she was the child of humble parents residing not
very far from Chichester. I think, too, I am right
in saying that a relative of hers, to whom she left
a good deal of Condé's money, was M. P. for the
Isle of Wight more than forty years ago. At any
rate, I remember well that the editor of a Hants
Liberal journal, for which I used occasionally to
write, refused an article of mine on this subject

which had, for some reason or another, cropped up-on the very proper ground that it might be painful to the gentleman in question. In short, the editor knew what I did not, that the M.P. was related to the notorious lady whose name he bore. E. M. S.

"OMERIFICAN" (8th S. iii. 127).-A few lines from a writer of the last century will explain this. Charles Butler, after speaking of the excellence of the printing of Robert Stephens, notices his Greek Testaments, as follows:

self in 1546, 1549, 1550, and 1551. His son published "There are four editions of them, published by hima sixth edition in 1569. The third of these is in folio. The two first are in 16mo., and of these the first (that in 1546) is the most correct. There is prefixed to it an address, by Robert Stephens to his readers, beginning, 'O mirificam regis nostri optimi et præstantissimi liberalitatem.' From this it has been generally termed the Mirificam edition."-Horæ Biblicæ,' Ox., 1799, pp. 135-6.

"Omerifican" is a misprint, if the query is a correct copy, in the issue of 1549, as is "pulres" for

plures (pref., p. i, line penult.), to which Hartwell
Horne's notice refers as such (On the Scriptures,'
vol. v. p. 19, 1846). But I think this can scarcely
be so, and that the query rather contains an error
of its own.
ED. MARSHALL.

The Greek Testament of 1549 about which MR.

FENTON inquires is the second "O Mirificam" edition, edited by Robert Stephens, the first edition having been published in 1546. They are so called among bibliographers on account of the editor's preface, beginning with the words "O Mirificam," &c., which a former possessor of the volume has thus through ignorance distorted into "omerifican.' Stephens's third edition (folio, 1550) was the basis of the so-called "Textus receptus" printed by the Elzevirs in 1624.

F. NORGATE.

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p. 323, where it is stated that a dog snapped up
suddenly and swallowed the "pix," which had
been dropped after consecration.
This "pix"
seems to be the origin of MR. COLEMAN'S "pax."
In either case the Yorkshire tyke must have had
a very capacious gullet. Dyer, in 'British Popular
Customs, quotes from Hampson, but he has
custom of whipping dogs "within these few years"
changed "pix" into host. Hampson says that the
existed at Manchester on the first day of Acres
Fair, held about St. Luke's Day.

F. C. BIRKBECK TERRY.

“IT FAIR SHEDS" (8th S. ii. 429 ; iii. 15).—Mr. EDWARD LORD says that sheds is "from an AngloSaxon word which means to distinguish, or beat the record." The A.-S. word to which he refers is sceadan, which means to separate, divide, bound, distinguish (see Bosworth). I am not aware that it ever means to "beat the record." Shed is still used in the North Riding of Yorkshire in the sense of separate. To shed the wool on a sheep's back is to part it. The word is used also for parting the hair of the head.

F. C. BIRKBECK TERRY.

AMBROSE GWINETT (8th S. ii. 447, 535; iii. 56, 116).-A story almost as strange as that of Gwinett is told of one Carrighan, father of a friend of Dr. Gordon Hake :

REFERENCE IN POPE (8th S. iii. 109).-No such words as "Let us while away this life" appear in Prendergast's excellent (but rare) Concordance' to Milton's works. The nearest to any such phrase is "Merely to drive away the time he sickened," which is indexed as "Miscellanies, Line 15, Page 201, Volume 6"; but unfortunately Mr. Prendergast has not recorded what edition. "Carrighan [Dr. Hake's friend] was a student and The line, however, is in the verses "On the Uni-Fellow of St. John's, under the name of Gosli-a name adapted by his father as a Sligo man, he reversing the versity Carrier, who sickened in the Time of his syllables. The history of this singular proceeding is Vacancy; being forbid to go to London, by reason associated with a duel in which Mr. Carrighan, the of the Plague" (Old Hobson), and line 33, and not father, was led to believe he had killed his opponent. line 15. Will Mr. Editor say Odi Profanum if I He thereupon changed his name, and in an unhappy venture to mention (in answer to J. T. M.'s "If state of mind wandered over the Continent for twenty years more or less; when, one day, he met the very man so, where?"), and so near the majestic Milton, the who he supposed had received a death-blow at his following lines— hands. On this important discovery he restored his true name to his family."-Memoirs of Eighty Years,' by Gordon Hake, Physician, 1892, p. 163.

Thus would he while his lonely hours away, Dissatisfied, nor knowing what he wanted, &c., from Byron's 'Don Juan,' canto i. stanza xcvi. ? ESTE.

It may be worth mention that Thackeray used the phrase "to while away":

"And so he went on riding with her......and playing chess with her submissively; for it is with these simple amusements that some officers in India are accustomed to while away their leisure moments."-Dixon's 'Dict. of Idiomatic English Phrases,' J. F. MANSERGH.

Liverpool.

No such expression as "while away" appears in Dr. Charles Dexter Cleveland's 'Concordance of the Poetical Works of John Milton.'

EVERARD HOME COLEMAN.

71, Brecknock Road. "WHIP-DOG DAY" (8th S. ii. 388, 438, 512).Hampson, in his 'Medii Ævi Kalendarium,' vol. i. p. 360, quotes from Bourne's 'Pop. Antiq.,' vol. ii.

Glasgow.

WILLIAM GEORGE BLACK.

Douglas Jerrold's drama, founded on the above, was produced at the Coburg Theatre, October 15, 1828, Cobham appearing as Ambrose, and Davidge as Grayling the prison smith. It was very successful, and was frequently revived, notably at the Victoria in 1854, with W. H. Pitt as Ambrose, J. H. Rickard as Grayling, and Bradshaw as Mad George. The play was printed in Cumberland's "Minor Drama," and may now be obtained as one of Dicks's "Standard Plays " (No. 637).

W. E. LANE.

2, Bournemouth Road, Peckham, S.E.

COL. CHARTERS (8th S. ii. 428; iii. 34, 117).— At the last-mentioned reference it is said, on the authority of Caulfield's 'Remarkable Persons,' that Col. Francis Charteris married a daughter of " Mr. Pencaitland, one of the judges of the Court of

Session."

The trefoil is surrounded by an inscription in
ancient characters, now almost obliterated, which
is said to have been "Icy git le coeur de Maudde."
The practice of burying the heart apart from the
body was common at one time in England, as it
is still, I believe, common in some parts of the
Continent-in Austria, for instance-among the
higher nobility.
L. L. K.

CHAPEL (8th S. ii. 446, 518).—Your kindly
correspondent suggests that the poem by Walter
Thornbury of which I am in chase is to be found
in Once a Week. Living as I do in a bookless
land, I have no means of searching for it. Should
he ever by any chance come upon it, I shall be
glad if he will send me the reference.
EDWARD PEACOCK.

There was no such person; but James Hamilton of Pencaitland, younger brother of John, second Lord Belhaven, was appointed a judge of the Court of Session by the title of Lord Pencaitland, November 8, 1712, and died 1729. He had five daughters, of whom the two eldest and the two youngest were married, as stated in Wood's 'Douglas's Peerage,' i. 203. The third daughter, Agnes, was born November 12, 1697, and may have married Col. Charteris; but she cannot have been mother of Janet Charteris, who married the Earl of Wemyss in 1720. Sir Robert Douglas says Col. Charteris married Helen, daughter of Alexander Swinton, of Mersington, another judge of the Court of Session, and that she was mother of the countess ('Baronage,' 153). It is there said of him, "He was a man of good parts and great sagacity, and by his particular skill and knowledge of men and manners of the time he lived in acquired a vast estate." But Omond ('Lives of the Lord THE LAST OF THE PLANTAGENETS (8th S. iii. Advocates,' i. 357) says of him, "He was the Col. 166).-This heading of my note in your last issue Francis Charteris of Stony hill whose name was will allow me to explain that I affixed it under the open to such just criticism, that I am sure you long a bye-word in Scotland for all that was vicious and profane." Patten, in his account impression that I had recently seen a previous note of the rebellion of 1715, mentions that Col. in N. & Q.' under the same title. I thought the Charteris had purchased Hornby Hall, near Lan- fact I mentioned an interesting one; but I had no caster. Col. Oxburgh sent a party of horse there, ment as I shall be taken to have made about the intention of committing myself to any such stateand gave a note to the man in charge for the pay-friend to whose memory I was anxious to pay a ment of their expenses :tribute. For "Plantagenet I should have written "Plantagenet arms," in the body of the note. D. C. T.

"On the other hand, if the Scots had been allowed to pay their countrymen's house a visit they would not have scrupled to have set it on fire, so well is he respected of them, and that on account of his personal character, which is known not to have been very acceptable to those who are acquainted with him."

Col. Charteris died in 1732, when his daughter, the Countess of Wemyss, put up an escutcheon of the arms of Charteris of Kinfauns, instead of those to which her father was entitled. Mr. Stodart ('Scottish Arms,' ii. 70) mentions that the

countess was fined on that occasion, and the escutcheon pulled down.

SIGMA.

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JUDGES' ROBES COUNSELS' Gowns (8th S. iii. 127). According to Fortescue, the ancient costume of a judge or serjeant-at-law consisted of

"a long robe, not unlike the sacerdotal habit, with and a hood over it, with two lapels or tippets, such as the furred cape, capicium penulatum, about his shoulders, Doctors of Laws use in some universities, with a coif.”

all the judges at the courts of Westminster, directOn June 24, 1635, a solemn decree was made by ing that uniformity of habit should thenceforth be observed by all His Majesty's Justices, and the particular kind to be worn at different times was pointed out :

"The Judges in term-time are to sit at Westminster in the Courts, in their black or violet gowne, whether they will; and a hood of the same colour put over their heads, and their mantles above all, the end of the hood hanging over behind, wearing their velvet caps and coifs of lawn and cornered caps. The facing of their gowns, boods, and mantles, is with changeable taffeta, which they must begin to wear upon Ascension-day, being the last Thursday in Easter term, and continue those robes until the feast of Simon and Jude; and upon Simon and Jude's day the Judges begin to wear their robes faced with white furs of miniver, and so continue that facing till Ascension-day again. Upon all holy days which fall in term, and are hall-days, the judges sit in scarlet faced furs or miniver, when furs or miniver are to be worn. with taffeta, when taffeta facing is to be worn; and with Upon the day when the Lord Mayor of London comes to Westminster to take his oath, that day the Judges come

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