Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 | Page 3

Ph?do, § 77. (p. 85., Steph.):
"Men, because they fear death themselves, slander the swans, and say that they sing from pain lamenting their death, and do not consider that no bird sings when hungry, or cold, or suffering any other pain; no, not even the nightingale, and the swallow, and the hoopoe, which you know are said to sing for grief," &c.
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Hooker, E. P. I. c.5. § 2.:
"All things therefore coveting as much as may be to be like unto God in being ever, that which cannot hereunto attain personally doth seek to continue itself another way, that is, by offspring and propagation."
Clem. Alex. Strom. II. 23. § 138. (p. 181. Sylb.)
Sir J. Davies. Immortality of the Soul, sect 7.:
"And though the soul could cast spiritual seed, Yet would she not, because she never dies; For mortal things desire their like to breed, That so they may their kind immortalise."
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Plato Sympos. §32. (p. 207. D. Steph.):
"Mortal natures seek to attain, suffer as they can, to immortality; but they can attain to it by this generation only; for thus they ever leave a new behind them to supply the place of the old." Compare § 31. "Generation immortalises the mortal, so for as it can be immortalised."--Plato Leg. iv. (p. 721. G.), vi. § 17. (p. 773. E.); Ocell. Lucan. iv. § 2.
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Butler, Serm. I. on Human Nature (p. 12. Oxford, 1844):
"Which [external goods], according to a very ancient observation, the most abandoned would choose to obtain by innocent means, if they there as easy, and as effectual to their end."
Dr. Whewell has not, I think, in his edition, pointed out the passage alluded to, Cic. de Fin. III., c. 11. § 36.:
"Quis est enim, aut quis unquam fuit aut avaritia tam ardenti, aut tam effrenatis cupiditatibus, ut eamdem illam rem, quam adipisci scelere quovis velit, non multis partibus malit ad sese, etiam omni impunitate proposita, sine facinore, quam illo modo pervenire?"
J. E. B. MAYOR.
Marlborough College.
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SHAKSPEARE AND THE OLD ENGLISH ACTORS IN GERMANY.
My studies on the first appearance of Shakspeare on the German stage, by means of the so-called "English Comedians" who from the end of the sixteenth to the middle of the seventeenth century visited Germany and the Netherlands, led me to the following passage of a Dutch author:
"In the Voyages of Vincent le Blanc through England, I met with a description of the representation of a most absurd tragedy, which I recognised to be the Titus Andronicus of Shakspeare."
I have examined the Voyages of Vincent le Blanc without having been able to discover the passage alluded to; and as the Dutch author says that some time had elapsed between his first reading those Voyages and the composition of his treatise, and as he seems to quote only from memory, I am led to believe his having confounded Vincent le Blanc with some other traveller of the same period.
Undoubtedly one of your numerous readers can furnish me with the title of the work in which such a description occurs, or with the name of some other foreign traveller who may have visited England at the period alluded to, and in whose works I may find the description mentioned above.
ALBERT COHN.
Berlin, Nov. 19. 1850.
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TEN CHILDREN AT A BIRTH.
The following circumstance, although perhaps hardly coming within the ordinary scope of the "NOTES AND QUERIES," appears to me too curious to allow a slight doubt to prevent the attempt to place it on permanent and accessible record. Chancing, the other day, to overhear an ancient gossip say that there was living in her neighbourhood a woman who was one of ten children born at the same time, I laughed at her for her credulity,--as well I might! As, however, she mentioned a name and place where I might satisfy myself, I called the next day at a small greengrocer's shop in this town, the mistress of which, a good-looking, respectable woman, aged seventy, at once assured me that her mother, whose name was Birch, and came from Derby, had been delivered of ten children; my informant having been the only one that lived, "the other nine," she added, "being in bottle in the Museum in London!" On mentioning the matter to a respectable professional gentleman of this place, he said "he had a recollection of the existence of a glass jar, which was alleged to contain some such preparation, in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, as mentioned when he was a pupil in London." Of the question, or the fact, of so marvellous a gestation and survivorship in the history of human nature should strike the editor of "NOTES AND QUERIES" as forcibly as his correspondent, the former, should he publish this article, may