94 



NOTES AND QUEKIES. 



[No. 248. 



not often, too severe. His praise is never unde- 

 served : and, whether bestowed on Reynolds in 

 hia greatness, Wilson in his obscurity, or Law- 

 rence at his beginning, has been confirmed by 

 posterity. Many other examples will be found by 

 those who look for them. H. B. C. 



U. U. Club. 



Mother of forty Children (Vol. ix,, pp. 419. 

 472. 522.). — I attended once the chiystening of a 

 baby, which was affirmed at the time to be the 

 fortieth child of the then twice married mother, 

 and I well recollect the sympathetic admiration 

 manifested and expressed by the rather consider- 

 able number of lady-gossips present at the festivity. 

 The grandmother, as she seemed to be, had had 

 several times twins, and once a triplet, as was 

 said ; but, unlike the instance already quoted in 

 •' N. & Q.," very few survived, and her eyes were 

 finally closed, at about the age of seventy-two years, 

 by her only two remaining children, one a daughter 

 of the first, the other a son of the second marriage. 

 Of course, I cannot attest the number of forty as 

 of my own knowledge, but only its affirmal and 

 undisputed acceptation on an occasion when, if 

 it had not been true, and had perchance been 

 asserted, its inaccuracy could have been, and I 

 presume would have been, promptly ascertained. 



I. H. A. 



The Cambridge Chronicle of June 17, 1854, has 

 — "The wife of Jervase Wilkinson, labourer, of 

 WoUaton, Notts, was, a few days ago, delivered 

 of her twenty-fifth child." P. J. F. Gantillon. 



'■^ Booh of Almanacs" (Vol. ix., p. 561.). — It 

 may be interesting to Professor De Morgan to be 

 informed that Perpetual Calendars have been con- 

 stantly in use by our compilers of Almanacs for 

 each successive year. The Kalendarium per- 

 petuum, of which he speaks, was for the peculiar 

 service of the order of preachers, or Dominicans, 

 and adapted to the festivals of that order. Ga- 

 vantus, in his Thesaurus Sacrorum Rituum, gives 

 a complete set of tables, which, no doubt, have 

 been used by most compilers of Catholic Calendars 

 for centuries. The title is Ordo perpetuus Officii 

 divini, etc. After some explanatory directions 

 comes a Tabella Computi perpetua, then a Tabella 

 Temporaria from the year 1631 to the year 2000, 

 followed by the usual Calendar of Feasts through- 

 out the year in the Roman Breviary. Then we 

 have thirty-six tables or almanacs, which together 

 furnish a perpetual calendar or Book of Almanacs 

 to the end of the present century. F. C. H. 



'^Forgive, blest shade" (Vol. ix., p. 542.). — 

 The lines commencing "Forgive, blest shade," 

 were, I have always heard, written by General 

 Burgoyne, on the death of his wife Lady Charlotte 

 (daughter of Edward, eleventh Earl of Derby), in 



1776. They are to be found in many places used 

 as a monumental inscription, and have been set 

 to music. C. DE D. 



LativL^ Versions of Gray^s Elegy (Vol. i., p. 101 ,). 

 — In addition to those mentioned, I have a copy 

 of one by H. S. Dickinson, M.A., Ipswich, 1849, 

 the first line of which is — 



" Nola sonans obitum pulso notat sere diei." 



P. J. F. Gantillon. 



Russian Emperors (Vol. ix., p. 222.). — An 

 old merchant-captain, long in the Baltic trade, 

 assured me that it was a general belief among 

 those of his own class, that by the laws of Russia 

 the Emperor was for the first twenty-five years of 

 his reign subject to a certain degree of control 

 from his nobles, but that at the end of that time 

 all control ceased, and the government became an 

 unmitigated despotism, to avoid which the nobles 

 generally managed quietly to remove the occupant 

 of the throne before the time had expired. The 

 death of Alexander just as he was about to com- 

 plete the fated period was one of the instances he 

 adduced in support of this notion. I must leave 

 it to others better versed in the matter to say 

 whether there is, or ever has been, any found- 

 ation for the above belief. J. S. Warden. 



Napoleon's Spelling (Vol. ix., p. 203.). — Mr. 

 Breen's theory, that Napoleon's bad spelling was 

 affected, is one of those that neither admit of nor 

 require a serious refutation. I shall only observe 

 upon it that Sir William Herschel, a well-qualified 

 judge, observed that Napoleon seemed desirous to 

 be thought to know more in astronomy, as well as 

 in other sciences, than he actually did know ; and 

 is it to be supposed that a person so inclined 

 would have shammed ignorance of the very rudi- 

 ments of education ? It would be more to his 

 advantage to suppose that the haste and agitation 

 in which he frequently wrote, caused him now and 

 then to put in a letter too many or too few, or to 

 substitute a wrong one, as a glance at the manu- 

 scripts of Byron, Scott, and many others, would 

 show to have been the case with people of much 

 better education than his. J. S. Warden. 



Medal on the Peace of Utrecht (Vol. ix., p. 

 399.). — It is stated that a family of the name of 

 Swift of that place possesses a silver medal granted 

 to Joseph Swift by the University of Oxford or of 

 Cambridge. I think this will be found incorrect 

 when the description of the medal is given, and 

 the cause of its being struck stated. 



Bust of Queen Ann crowned with laurel: legend, 

 "d. g. mag. bri. fr. et hib." Rev. Ships sailing 

 on a calm sea ; on the shore two labourers cultivat- 

 ing the earth ; Great Britain under the figure of 

 Pallas holding a lance and an olive branch : legend, 



