to the line
in question, by the poet himself, expressly stating that the passage is "an
imitation of the quotation from Dante" thus brought forward.
I could furnish you with various notes on Gray, pointing out
remarkable coincidences of sentiment and expression between himself
and other writers; but I cannot allow Gray to be a plagiary, any more
than I can allow Burns to be so designated, in the following instances:--
At the end of the poem called The Vision, we find--
"And like a passing thought she fled."
In Hesiod we have--
"[Greek: ho d' eptato hôste noêma.]"--Scut. Herc. 222.
Again, few persons are unacquainted with Burns's lines--
"Her 'prentice han' she tried on man, An' then she made," &c.
In an old play, Cupid's Whirligig (4to. 1607), we read--
"Man was made when Nature was but an apprentice, but woman when
she was a skilful mistress of her art."
Pliny, in his Natural History, has the pretty notion that
"Nature, in learning to form a lily, turned out a convolvulus."
VARRO.
Richard III., Traditional Notice of.--I have an aunt, now eighty-nine
years of age, who in early life knew one who was in the habit of saying:
"I knew a man, who knew a man, who knew a man who danced at court
in the days of Richard III."
Thus there have been but three links between one who knew Richard
III. and one now alive.
My aunt's acquaintance could name his three predecessors, who were
members of his own family: {207} their names have been forgotten,
but his name was Harrison, and he was a member of an old Yorkshire
family, and late in life settled in Bedfordshire.
Richard died in 1484, and thus five persons have sufficed to chronicle
an incident which occurred nearly 370 years since.
Mr. Harrison further stated that there was nothing remarkable about
Richard, that he was not the hunchback "lump of foul deformity" so
generally believed until of late years.
The foregoing anecdote may be of interest as showing that traditions
may come down from remote periods by few links, and thus be but
little differing from the actual occurrences.
H. J. B.
66. Hamilton Terrace, St. John's Wood, March 5. 1851.
Oliver Cromwell.--Echard says that his highness sold himself to the
devil, and that he had seen the solemn compact. Anthony à Wood, who
doubtless credited this account of a furious brother loyalist, in his
Journal says:
"Aug. 30, 1658. Monday, a terrible raging wind happened, which did
much damage. Dennis Bond, a great Oliverian and anti-monarchist,
died on that day, and then the devil took bond for Oliver's appearance."
Clarendon, assigning the Protector to eternal perdition, not liking to
lose the portent, boldly says the remarkable hurricane occurred on
September 3, the day of Oliver's death. Oliver's admirers, on the other
hand, represent this wind as ushering him into the other world, but for a
very different reason.
Heath, in his Flagellum (I have the 4th edit.), says:
It pleased God to usher in his end with a great whale some three months
before, June 2, that came up as far as Greenwich, and there was killed;
and more immediately by a terrible storm of wind: the prognosticks
that the great Leviathan of men, that tempest and overthrow of
government, was now going to his own place!"
I have several works concerning Cromwell, but in no other do I find
this story very like a whale. Would some reader of better opportunities
favour us with a record of these two matters of natural history, not as
connected with the death of this remarkable man, but as mere events?
Your well-read readers will remember some similar tales relative to the
death of Cardinal Mazarine. These exuberances of vulgar minds may
partly be attributed to the credulity of the age, but more probably to the
same want of philosophy which caused the ancients to deal in
exaggeration.
B. B.
Snail-eating.--The practice of eating, if not of talking to, snails, seems
not to be so unknown in this country as some of your readers might
imagine. I was just now interrogating a village child in reference to the
addresses to snails quoted under the head of "FOLK LORE," Vol. iii.,
pp. 132. and 179., when she acquainted me with the not very appetising
fact, that she and her brothers and sisters had been in the constant habit
of indulging this horrible Limacotrophy.
"We hooks them out of the wall (she says) with a stick, in winter time,
and not in summer time (so it seems they have their seasons); and we
roasts them, and, when they've done spitting, they be a-done; and we
takes them out with a fork, and eats them. Sometimes we has a jug
heaped up, pretty near my pinafore-full. I loves
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