Notes and Queries, Number 47, September 21, 1850 | Page 7

vi. p. 481.) has the following note:--
"The giants of Guildhall, thank heaven, yet defend their charge: it only remains to wish that the citizens may take example by the fate of Holmeby, and not expose them to an attack to which they will assuredly be found unequal. It is not altogether owing to their wisdom that this has not already taken place. For twenty years they were chained to the car of a profligate buffoon, who dragged them through every species of ignominy to the verge of rebellion; and their hall is even yet disgraced with the statue of a worthless negro-monger, in the act of insulting their sovereign with a speech of which (factious and brutal as he was) he never uttered one syllable." ... "By my troth, captain, these are very bitter words."
But Gifford was generally correct in his assertions; and twenty-two years after his note, I made the following one:--
"It is a curious fact, but a true one, that Beckford did not utter one syllable of this speech. It was penned by Horne Tooke, and by his art put on the records of the city and on Beckford's statue, as he told me, Mr. Braithwaite, Mr. Seyers, &c., at the Athenian Club.
"ISAAC REED.
"See the Times Of July 23. 1838, p. 6."
The worshipful Company of Ironmongers have relegated their statue from their hall to a lower position: but it still disgraces the Guildhall, and will continue to do so, as long as any factious demagogue is permitted to have a place among its members.
L.S.
_The Frozen Horn._--Perhaps it is not generally known that the writer of _Munchausen's Travels_ borrowed this amusing incident from Heylin's {263} Mikrokosmos. In the section treating of Muscovy, he says:--
"This excesse of cold in the ayre, gave occasion to _Castilian_, in his _Aulicus_, wittily and not incongruously to faine that if two men being smewhat distant, talke together in the winter, their words will be so frozen that they cannot be heard: but if the parties in the spring returne to the same place, their words will melt in the same order that they were frozen and _spoken_, and be plainly understood."
J.S.
Salisbury.
_Inscription from Roma Subterranea._--If you deem the translation of this inscription, quoted in Lord Lindsay's fanciful but admirable _Sketches of the History of Christian Art_, worth a place among your Notes, it is very heartily at your service.
"Sisto viator Tot ibi troph?a, quot ossa Quot martyres, tot triumphi. Antra qu? subis, multa qu? cernis marmora, Vel dum silent, Palam Rom? gloriam loquuntur. Audi quid Echo resonet Subterrane? Rom?! Obscura licet Urbis Coemetria Totius patens Orbis Theatrium! Supplex Loci Sanetitatem venerare, Et post hac sub luto aurum Coelum sub coeno Sub Roma Romam qu?rito!"
_Roma Subterranea_, 1651, tom. i. p. 625.
(Inscription abridged.)
Stay, wayfarer--behold In ev'ry mould'ring bone a trophy here. In all these hosts of martyrs, So many triumphs. These vaults--these countless tombs, E'en in their very silence Proclaim aloud Rome's glory: The echo'd fame Of subterranean Rome Rings on the ear. The city's sepulchres, albeit hidden, Present a spectacle To the wide world patent. In lowly rev'rence hail this hallow'd spot, And henceforth learn Gold beneath dross Heav'n below earth, Rome under Rome to find!
F.T.J.B.
Brookthorpe.
_Parallel Passages._--
"_There is an acre sown with royal seed_, the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked, from cieled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men."--Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Dying_, chap. i. sect. 1. p. 272. ed. Edin.
"_Here's an acre sown_ indeed With the richest _royalest seeds_, That the earth did e'er suck in, Since the first man dyed for sin: Here the bones of birth have cried, Though _gods they were, as men they died_." F. BEAUMONT
M.W. Oxon.
_A Note on George Herbert's Poems._--In the notes by Coleridge attached to Pickering's edition of George Herbert's _Poems_, on the line--
"My flesh beg_u_n unto my soul in pain,"
Coleridge says--
"Either a misprint, or noticeable idiom of the word _began_: Yes! and a very beautiful idiom it is: the first colloquy or address of the flesh."
The idiom is still in use in Scotland. "You had better not begin to me," is the first address or colloquy of the school-boy half-angry half-frightened at the bullying of a companion. The idiom was once English, though now obsolete. Several instances of it are given in the last edition of Foxe's _Martyrs_, vol. vi. p. 627. It has not been noticed, however, that the same idiom occurs in one of the best known passages of Shakspeare; in Clarence's dream, _Richard III._, Act i. Sc. 4.:
"O, then began the tempest to my soul."
Herbert's Poems will afford another illustration to Shakspeare, _Hamlet_, Act iv. Sc. 7.:--
"And then this should is like a spendthrift sigh, That hurts by easing."
Coleridge, in the _Literary Remains_, vol. i. p. 233., says--
"In a stitch in the side, every one must