186 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 253. 



Alitor ^xxcxiti tutft ^nitoerff. 



BeringtoTLS Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani. — 

 Me. Denton (Vol. x., p. 131.) has quoted a work 

 by the Rev. Joseph Berington, which is rather 

 hard upon that very remarkaljle man, Robert 

 Parsons (who, by the way, was born at Stogursey, 

 near Bridgwater). I wish to call attention to this 

 book. It came out in 1793, and is called Memoirs 

 of Gregorio Panzani, giving an Account of his 

 Agency in England, 1634-36, translated from the 

 Italian original, with a supplement, by the Rev. 

 Joseph Berington. But there are copies with the 

 following title : 



" The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman 

 Catholic Religion in England, during a period of two 

 hundred and forty years from the Reign of Elizabeth to 

 the present Time; including the Memoirs of Gregorio 

 Panzani, Envov from Rome to the English Court in 1643, 

 1644, and 1645"," &c. 



Now Berington was a Roman Catholic priest, 

 and he would not have written a book of this 

 kind. The alteration in the years is a remarkable 

 fact ; who did it, and why was the title re-con- 

 structed so as to falsify the contents of the book ? 

 Has not Hallam, in the early editions of his Con- 

 stitutional History, been misled by these titles, and 

 quoted them as distinct works ? Ignoto. 



[This is one and the same work, re-issued with a 

 different title-page, and the omission of the Dedication, 

 and is certainly a literary curiosity in its way. Most 

 probably the stock had found its way into the second- 

 hand market, and to turn it to a profitable account, the 

 following title-page was concocted : " The History of the 

 Decline and Fall of the Roman Catholic Religion in Eng- 

 land, during a Period of Two Hundred and Forty Years 

 from the Reign of Elizabeth to the Present Time ; in- 

 cluding the Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani, Envoy from 

 Rome to the English Court, in 1643, 1644, and 1645, with 

 many interesting particulars relative to the Court of 

 Charles the First, and the Causes of the Civil War. Trans- 

 lated from the Italian Original. By the Rev. Joseph 

 Berington. London : printed bv H. Teape, Tower Hill ; 

 for G. Otfor, Postern Row, 1813."] 



St. Walburge. — A church dedicated to the 

 above-named saint has been lately opened at 

 Preston in Lancashire. In the sermon preached 

 on the occasion by a Rev. R. Lythgoe, he stated 

 the origin of the church was, as many of his 

 hearers might be aware, owing to the application 

 of the oil of St. Walburge, by which a young 

 woman, whose recovery was considered hopeless, 

 was instantly cured. 



My Queries are. Who was St. Walburge ? and 

 what is his or her oil, and where it is kept ? 



C. DE D. 



[St. Walburge was daughter of St. Richard, and was 

 one of those holy virgins sent for out of England by her 

 cousin, St. Boniface, to teach his German converts of the 

 female sex the institutes of a religious life. In Germany 

 she was made abbess of a nunnery at Heidenheim, and 

 died on the 24th February, 779. Eighty j'ears after her 

 death her relics were translated to Eychstadt, where "a 



certain liquor is said to distil from them, which has been 

 found a sovereign remedy for all diseases; and to this 

 day," says Philip, Bishop of Eychstadt, who wrote five 

 hundred years after her death, "there flows from her 

 chaste relics a precious oil, the wonderful virtue whereof 

 I myself have experienced ; for being brought down by a 

 violent disease, which was of proof against all art of 

 physic, I commanded some of that sacred oil to be 

 brought to me, which, with earnest prayers to God, and 

 begging her intercession, I drank ; which was no sooner 

 done, but, to the admiration of all, I presently recovered 

 my perfect health." See Britannia Sancta, or Lives of 

 Celebrated British Saints, 4to., 1745 ; and Butler's Lives 

 of the Saints, Feb. 25.] 



" Telliamedr — 



" Telliamed ; or Discourses between an Indian Philo- 

 sopher and a French Missionary, on the Diminution of 

 the Sea, the Formation of the Earth, the Origin of Men 

 and Animals, and other Curious Subjects relating to 

 Natural History and Philosophy. Being a Translation 

 from the French Original of Mr. Maillet, Author of the 

 Description of Egypt. London : printed for T. Osborne, 

 in Gray's Inn Lane, 1750." 



Can any of your subscribers inform me as to 

 the authorship of the above work ; and if the very 

 curious theory it propounds received much atten- 

 tion at the time ? R. H. B. 



[Benedict de Maillet, the author of this singular system 

 of cosmogony, was born in 1656, of a noble family at St. 

 Mihiel, in Lorraine. At the age of thirty-three he was 

 appointed Consul-General of Egypt. In 1715 he was 

 commissioned to visit and inspect the factories of Barbary 

 and the Levant, and afterwards retired on a pension to 

 Marseilles, where he died in 1738. The work noticed by 

 our correspondent was published after his death by the 

 Abbe Le Mascrier, under the feigned name of Telliamed, 

 which is an anagram of the name De Maillet. The philo- 

 sopher maintained that all the land of this earth, and its 

 vegetable and animal inhabitants, rose from the bosom of 

 the sea; that men had originally been tritons with tails; 

 and that they, as well as other animals, had lost their 

 marine, and acquired terrestrial, forms by their agitation 

 when left on dry ground. This whimsical theory occa- 

 sioned a keen controversy for a time among the literati of 

 France, noticed in the Biographie Universelle, art. Mail- 

 let.] 



Prester John. — Can any of your readers give 

 any information of a definite character relative to 

 Prester John ; and likewise the reason of his ap- 

 pearance on the arms of the diocese of Chichester ? 



B. Hartfield. 



[Dallawa)', in his Western Sussex, vol. i. p. 36., has the 

 following curious remarks on these arms: "The most an- 

 cient seal of Chichester cathedral appended to deeds ex- 

 hibits a rude representation of a church, and was probably 

 continued from the Saxon bishops of Selsey. About the 

 time of Seffrid the Second, a seal was adopted, upon 

 which was engraven the figure of Christ (^Salvator Mundi) 

 sitting upon a throne or bench, with the right arm ele- 

 vated, and the two fore-fingers and thumb held up, as in 

 the act of benediction : the book usually placed in the 

 other hand is omitted. The head is surrounded by a 

 nimbus, or glory, and the mouth holds a sword by the 

 hilt, the blade of which points to the left. On either side 

 are placed 'Alpha and Omega,' in Greek characters. 

 This device has been capriciously changed into a figure 



