102 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[2n<i S. No 84., Aug. 8. '57. 



fesses also to bold them so cheaply (cannot have 

 them if it would, and would not if it could *), has 

 yet pounced upon nearly four-fifths of the above- 

 specified eijihty- three, including some half dozen 

 which Mr. Southey has woven into the memoir 

 itself. What fruits might recompense the search 

 through the remaining twelve years of corre- 

 spondence remains to be seen. How much better, 

 then, gentle reader, is the editor than his word, 

 much as he makes us wonder ; and why, we needs 

 must ask, why give himself out as barbarously 

 garbling his author, only to the prejudice of his 

 own editorial credit ? 



The association of subject brings to mind that 

 some thirty years ago a Philadelphia bookseller, 

 of note in his day, sent forth in compact (8vo.) 

 reprints several of the most popular English 

 writers. "When their respective bulk admitted 

 or even recommended such conjunction, two 

 authors, occasionally indeed three, were brought 

 within the same covers — at times sadly ill-assorted, 

 — as for example, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats; 

 Cowper and Thomson were in this way combined. 

 But they were always vauntingly styled coMriiETE ; 

 a regular stereotyped part of the title-page. Over- 

 sights there were, little to the credit of any pub- 

 lishing house, in the minor poetry of the former ; 

 but of the Johnson collection of letters not a shred 

 or vestige icas to be found. The world must re- 

 main in the dark for ever whether John Grigg 

 only proclaimed herein his consummate ignorance ; 

 or whether so competent a critic thus scornfully 

 led the way, in which Mr. Southey was not too 

 proud to follow. At any rate, one of the two- 

 American impressions, and then hardly three 

 years old perhaps, had been issued from the very 

 city of the bibliopole just named. 



In conclusion, a word with Mr. Bohn himself. 

 He calls his edition a complete and bona fide re- 

 print of that of 1837. We ask him then to point 

 out to us (what we have sought for in vain) Mr. 

 Southey's advertisement, four pages in length, 

 which opens the fifteenth volume. It distributes 

 his acknowledgements, refers to some things which 

 had been dropped from his original scheme, ad- 

 verts to the number of letters now first given to 

 the world, and finally exhibits in full the brief 

 will of Cowper, whom both Hayley and Grim- 

 shawe had represented as dying intestate. Did 

 Mr. Bohn count these four pages as nothing ? As 

 to those hitherto unpublished letters, the present 



* Mr. Bohn (the copyright having by this time ex- 

 pired, one infers) graciously gives them refuge only be- 

 cause " they could not well be omitted in a complete 

 edition": strictly speaking, he thus admits them, witli 

 the proviso, "so far as they are of value!" What he 

 means by " supplementai_v volume " is an utter puzzle. 

 Tliat is the position in the edition of 1837 of the large 

 number, before named, as detected by nie. There is no 

 .such volume in Mr. Bohn's edition, -where the whole are 

 found in their chronological order. 



writer, by the nicest calculation he can make, 

 supposes them to be about an hundred and thirty. 

 This, however, he learns only by counting the 

 total result as found in Mr. Bohn's edition, and 

 subtracting therefrom the aggregate number 

 which Hayley and Johnson had already severally 

 published. Some forty are to be allowed for 

 which are sprinkled through the memoir, and not 

 again repeated. Why has neither Mr. Southey 

 nor the recent publisher seen fit to designate, by 

 asterisk or otherwise, these new letters, now only 

 to be derived by a tedious collating with the vo- 

 lumes of his predecessors ? Hakvardiensis. 



BICHAED IIX. AT LEICESTER. 



The following anecdote is probably familiar to most of 

 the readers of " N. & Q.," but I do not remember to have 

 ever seen it so circumstantially detailed and attested as 

 it is in the following extract from one of Sir Roger Twj's- 

 den's Common-Place Books. We have here a satisfactory 

 confirmation of the story from the lips of a living witness, 

 for whose credibility Sir Roger vouches '; and, in this new 

 and more interesting form, it will, I hope, be acceptable 

 to your readers. Lajirert B. Larking. 



" I have beene informed by S' Basil Brooke, a 

 very honest gentleman, and by ]\I" Cumber, a 

 Citizen of London, who was bread up at Lecester, 

 that Richard y® third, beefore he fought at Bos- 

 worth, lay in an house that was then, or after- 

 wards, an inne, and called the blue boar, in which 

 house, after hys defeat at Bosworth, 1485, there 

 remayned a great cumbersom woodden beadstead, 

 in which hymself lay beefore y^ fight, guilded, and 

 with planks or boords at y" bottom, — not, as y* 

 use now is, with courds, which beadstead, after y® 

 battle, — the bedding and what else of worth bee- 

 ing taken away, — remayned, as a neglected peece, 

 to y* Inne, in which dwelt on M"" Clark, in her 

 tyme, from whom I had y" relation, — whose wife 

 going one day to make up a bed they had placed 

 in it, — in styrring of it, found a peece of gold to 

 drop from it, — and then, upon search, perceived 

 the Beadstead to have a double bottom, all which 

 space betweene y'' two bottoms was fylled with 

 gold and treasure, all coyned beefore Richard y'' 

 3'*' tyme, or by hym, — from whense this Clark 

 reaped an incredyble masse of wealth (but had 

 wit enough not to discover y^ same) but beecame 

 of a poore man very ritch, was Mayor, — and this, 

 in y" end, was by hys servants discovered. — The 

 sayd Clark in y" end dying left hys wife very 

 ritch, who styll kept on y'' Inne at y^ blue bore in 

 Leicester, tyll, in the end, some guests coming to 

 lodge with her, she was by them robd, who car- 

 ryed away seven hors load of treasure, and yet 

 left great storre scatterd about the howse of gold 

 and silver, M" Cleark herself beeing in this action 

 made away by a mayd servant, who stopt her 

 breath by thrusting her finger into her throat, she 



