100 



NOTES AND QUEKIES. 



[No. 249. 



Theatre Royall, being the second day of its being opened. 

 The house is made with extraordinary good convenience," 

 &c. 



The natural inference therefore 13, that the 

 house had been opened for the first time on the 

 previous evening (Thursday, May 7), as it is 

 hardly conceivable that there would have been an 

 interval of any length between the first and second 

 nights of performance. Moreover, on April 22, 

 Pepys had been to the playhouse in Vere Street, 

 which, on June 1st, he tells us, was abandoned by 

 the players when the " royal one " (Drury Lane) 

 was opened. _ The " cast " given in Mr. Bindley's 

 bill, too, is evidently incorrect, for we are specially 

 informed by Pepys on May 8 th, that, by the king's 

 command, Lucy acted the part which had formerly 

 belonged to Clun, 



Downes gives April 8, 1663, as the date of the 

 opening of the new theatre ; but his information as 

 to the king's company was, according to his own 

 showing, second-hand, and cannot always be de- 

 pended upon. 



Your insertion of this letter may perhaps in- 

 terest some of the dramatic readers of " N. & Q." 



F.L. 



Bloomsbury Place. 



Swift and " The Ta^Zer."— I do not think it has 

 been yet observed that the germ of Swift's 

 •'Polite Conversation" is to be found in The 

 Tatler, No. 31., June 21, 1709, which was no 

 doubt written by Swift himself, who was just 

 then in London, and was, we know, a contributor 

 to The Tatler, 



I take this occasion to observe what I suspect 

 to be a mistake, and a very serious one, in the 

 history of that branch of literature, in Mr. Alex- 

 ander Chalmers' valuable introduction to the great 

 edition of the British Essayists. 



Steele, in his preface to The Tatler, after ac- 

 knowledging in the most ample manner, but only 

 in general terms, his obligation to Addison, begins 

 a new sentence with these words : " The same 

 hand writ the distinguishing characters of men and 

 women under the names of ' Musical Instruments ' 

 (No. 153.), ' The Distress of the News-writers ' 

 (No. 18.), 'The Inventory of the Play-house' 

 (No. 42.), and ' The Description of the Thermo- 

 meter ' (No. 214.), which I cannot but look upon 

 as the greatest embellishment of this work." 



Mr. Chalmers seems to understand the same 

 hand to mean that last mentioned, viz. Addison's ; 

 whereas I am confident that it meant that these 

 four pieces were by one hand, and that not Addi- 

 son's. Nor is Mr. Chalmers consistent in his in- 

 terpretation ; for in his Index he assigns two of 

 the four to Addison, and leaves two anonymous. 

 The four papers are all good, and would not dis- 



parage the name of Addison ; but I think it ia 

 clear that they are not his, but were supplied by 

 some one who probably contributed nothing else. 



C. 



Epitaph on a Priest. — The following strange 

 sepulchral inscription, which I send as a contri- 

 bution to your other stores of like matter, existed 

 in the chapel of the convent of the " Murate " in 

 this city. The convent was, with many others, 

 suppressed at the time of the French rule in 

 Florence, and its ancient chapel is now a printing- 

 office. _ All the documents, papers, and memo- 

 randa in the possession of the nuns at the period 

 of the dissolution, were taken possession of by 

 the state, and preserved in the public archives. 

 Among them is a MS. account of their chapel, 

 with copies of all the inscriptions that were to be 

 found in it. And of these the following struck 

 me as sufficiently remarkable to deserve noting : 



" Laurentius Bandinius Sacerdotali munere insignitus 

 tanquam Passer in quotidiano sacrificio adipe frumenti 

 saturatus in hoc Tumulo invenit sibi domum, et ad 

 instar Turturis etiam posteris suis nidum preparavit. 



Anno salus mdcliii." 

 "Posteris suis?" Of course we must not do 

 such injury to the memory of this ornithological 

 divine, as to suppose that his turtle-dove pro- 

 pensities extended to other points of similarity 

 besides that mentioned in the text. And the 

 posteri intended must therefore be taken to be 

 nephews and nieces and their descendants. But 

 is this a proper and authorised use of the term ? 

 And could a man's nephews and nieces be cor- 

 rectly termed his " posterity " in our language ? 



T. A. T. 



Florence. 



" While" and ^^wile." — An error in our ortho- 

 graphy has lately become widely prevalent, and it 

 is to be feared that, unless some timely check be 

 put upon it, it will firmly establish itself in our 

 language. The expression I allude to is to " while 

 away the time;" which ought to be written "zt)i7e 

 away the time." The dliference between the two 

 words need not detain us long. While is a noun, 

 signifying " time," and nothing else : and so we 

 have it In the expressions, " a long while" " it is 

 not worth my while." Wile, on the contrary, is 

 both noun and verb : as a noun it means " guile," 

 and as a verb it means " to beguile;" being, in 

 fact, only another form of the word guile, as Wil- 

 liam is of Guillaume, warden of guardian. The 

 result of the whole is, that to "wile away the 

 time " signifies, to beguile the time : to " while 

 away the time " means nothing, but is sheer non- 

 sense. X. Y. Z. 



P. S. — I may remark that the word while, used 

 as a conjunction, has the same signification, that 

 of time : thus, " I was at Dover ichile you were 



