Notes and Queries, Number 40, August 3, 1850 | Page 8

her father; but his son by her, the gallant
John of Invorscaddel, a son of Maclean of Ardgour, celebrated in the
history of the Isles, was held to be an illegitimate offspring by virtue of
the "handfast ceremony."
Another instance is recorded of a Macneil of Borra having for several
years enjoyed the society of a lady of the name of Maclean on the same
principle; but his offspring by her were deprived {152} of their
inheritance by the issue of his subsequent marriage with a lady of the
Clanrannald family.
These decisions no doubt tended to the abolition of a custom or
principle so subversive of marriage and of the legitimacy of offspring.
J.M.G.
Worcester, July 19.
Russian Language.--A friend of mine, about to go to Russia, wrote to
me some time since, to ask if he could get a _Russian grammar in
English, or any English books bearing on the language_. I told him I
did not think there were any; but would make inquiry. Dr. Bowring, in
his _Russian Anthology_, states as a remarkable fact, that the first
Russian grammar ever published was published in England. It was
entitled _H.W. Ludolfi Grammatica Russica quæ continet et
Manuductionem quandum ad Grammaticam Slavonicam_. Oxon. 1696.
The Russian grammar next to this, but published in its own language,
was written by the great Lomonosov, the father of Russian poetry, and
the renovator of his mother tongue: I know not the year, but it was
about the middle of the last century. I have a German translation of this
grammar "Von Johann Lorenz Stuvenhagen: St. Petersburgh, 1764."
Grotsch, Jappe, Adelung, &c., have written on the Russian language.
Jappe's grammar, Dr. Bowring says, is the best he ever met with. I must
make a query here with regard to Dr. Bowring's delightful and highly
interesting Anthologies. I have his Russian, Dutch, and Spanish
_Anthologies_: _Did he ever publish any others_? I have not met with

them. I know he contemplated writing translations from Polish, Servian,
Hungarian, Finnish, Lithonian, and other poets.
Jarltzberg.
Pistol and Bardolph.--I am glad to be able to transfer to your pages a
Shakspearian note, which I met with in a periodical now defunct. It
appears from an old MS. in the British Museum, that amongst
canoniers serving in Normandy in 1436, were "Wm. Pistail--R.
Bardolf." Query, Were these common English names, or did these
identical canoniers transmit a traditional fame, good or bad, to the time
of Shakspeare, in song or story?
If this is a well-known Query, I should be glad to be referred to a
solution of it, if not, I leave it for inquiry.
G.H.B.
EPIGRAM FROM BUCHANAN.
Doletus writes verses and wonders--ahem--When there's nothing in
_him_, that there's nothing in them.
J.O.W.H.
* * * * *
QUERIES.
CALVIN AND SERVETUS.
The fate of Servetus has always excited the deepest commiseration. His
death was a judicial crime, the rank offence of religious pride, personal
hatred, and religious fanaticism. It borrowed from superstition its worst
features, and offered necessity the tyrant's plea for its excuse. Every
detail of such events is of great interest. For by that immortality of
mind which exists for ever as History, or through the agency of those
successive causes which still link us to it by their effects, we are never
separated from the Past. There is also an eloquence in immaterial things

which appeals to the heart through all ages. Is there a man who would
enter unmoved the room in which Shakspeare was born, in which
Dante dwelt, or see with indifference the desk at which Luther wrote,
the porch beneath which Milton sat, or Sir Isaac Newton's study? So
also the possession of a book once their own, still more of the MS. of a
work by which great men won enduring fame, written in a great cause,
for which they struggled and for which they suffered, seems to efface
the lapse of centuries. We feel present before them. They are before us
as living witnesses. Thus we see Servetus as, alone and on foot, he
arrived at Geneva in 1553; the lake and the little inn, the "Auberge de
la Rose," at which he stopped, reappear pictured by the influence of
local memory and imagination. From his confinement in the old prison
near St. Peter's, to the court where he was accused, during the long and
cruel trial, until the fatal eminence of Champel, every event arises
before us, and the air is peopled with thick coming visions of the actors
and sufferer in the dreadful scene. Who that has read the account of his
death has not heard, or seemed to hear, that shriek, so high, so wild,
alike for mercy and of dread despair, which when the fire was kindled
burst above through smoke and flame,--"that