July 24. 1852.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



81 



the state of Dr. Marshall on leaving the public- 

 house : 



" Not a sou was left, not a guinea or note, 

 And he look'd exceedingly flurried, 

 As he bolted away without paying the shot, 

 And the landlady after him hurried." 



His friends found him : 



" As he lay like a farrier with drink oppress'd, 

 With his Marshall cloak around him." 



The wits of that age indulged in hoaxes. One of 

 the ablest was a letter from Dr. Chaffey, the 

 master of Sidney, to The Times, followed by ano- 

 ther declaring it to be a forgery Avhich could 

 hardly require denial, as " everybody must be 

 aware that the ChafTys of Lincolnshire spell their 

 name without the e." Notwithstanding this ex- 

 quisite piece of internal evidence, the second letter 

 was as fictitious as the first. H. B. C. 



U. U. Club. 



The claim of Dr. Marshall to the authorship of 

 this poem was not allowed to pass without notice, 

 as the following clever parody will prove. I copied 

 it several years since, from some defunct periodical 

 whose name 1 do not remember. 



" Parody on ' The Burial of Sir John Moore.' 

 " Not a sous had he got — not a guinea or note ; 

 And he look'd most confoundedly flurried, 

 As he bolted away without paying his shot, 

 And the landlady after him hurried. 



* We saw him again at dead of night. 



When home from the club returning ; 

 We twigg'd the Doctor beneath the light 

 Of the gas-lamps brilliantly burning. 



* All bare and exposed to the midnight dews, 



Ileclin'd in the gutter we found him ; 

 And he look'd like a gentleman taking a snooze. 

 With his Marshall* cloak around him. 



" ' The Doctor was drunk as the devil,' we said, 

 And we managed a shutter to borrow ; 

 We rais'd him, and sigh'd at the thought that his 

 head 

 Would consumedly ache on the morrow. 

 *' We bore him home, and we put him to bed. 

 And we told his wife and his daughter 

 To give him next morning a couple of red — 

 Herrings and soda-water. 



" Loudly they talk of his money that's gone, 

 And his lady began to upbraid him ; 

 But little he reck'd, so they let him snore on, 

 'Neath the counterpane just as we laid him. 

 *' We tuck'd him in, and had hardly done, 

 When under the window calling, 

 We heard the rough voice of a son of a gun 

 Of a watchman ' one o'clock ' bawling. 



* A letter, genuine or fictitious, which appeared in 

 the newspapers, signed by a Dr. Marshall, claimed for 

 him the authorship of the original stanzas. 



" Slowly and sadly we all walked down 



Fr<>m his room in the uppermost story ; 

 A rush-light we placed on the cold hearth-stotte, 

 And we left him alone in his glory." 



T. H. Keesley, B.A. 



WAY OF INDICATING TIME IN MUSIC. 



(Vol. v., p. 507.) 



Your correspondent upon this subject is, I pre- 

 sume, no musician, or he would not have written 

 the article inserted in " N. & Q." 



The symbols of ancient music which he brings 

 forward relate to three things — Mode, Time, and 

 Prolation. But as the matter is difficult to explain 

 in a brief communication like the present, I beg 

 leave to introduce it by the following very familiar 

 figure, extracted from the 2nd volume of Sir John 

 Hawkins' History of Music (p. 156.) : 



" A cantus of four parts may be resembled to a tree, 

 and the similitude will hold if we suppose the funda- 

 mental, or bass part, to answer to the root, or rather 

 the bole or stem ; the tenor to the branches ; the contra- 

 tenor to the lesser ramifications ; and the altus to the 

 leaves. We must further suppose the bass part to con- 

 sist of the greater simple measures, which are those 

 called longs, the tenor of breves, the contra-tenor of 

 semibreves, and the altus of minims. In this situation 

 of the parts, the first admeasurement, viz. that which is 

 made by the breaking of the longs into breves, acquires 

 the name of Mode ; the second, in which the breves are 

 measured by semibreves, is called Time; and the third, 

 in which the semibreves are broken into minims, is 

 termed Prolation, of which it seems there were two 

 kinds, the greater and the lesser. In the former the 

 division into minims was by three, in the latter by two; 

 answering to perfection and imperfection in the greater 

 measures of the long, the breve, and the semibreve." 



As to the Modes themselves, they were of two 

 kinds, the greater and the lesser ; in the one the 

 large was measured by longs, in the other the long 

 was measured by breves. The characters invented 

 for distinguishing the modes, such as the circle, the 

 semicircle, &c., are so well explained by old Thomas 

 Morley, that I need not apologise for the following 

 extract from his valuable Plaine and Easie Intro- 

 duction to Practicall Musiche, folio, Peter Short, 

 1597 (Annotations on Book I.) : — 



" The auncient Musytians did commonlie sette downe 

 a particular signe for every degree of musycke in the 

 songe ; so that they having no more degrees than three, 

 that is, the two modes and time (prolation not being 

 yet invented), set down three signes for them : so that, 

 if the great mode were perfect, it was signified by a 

 whole circle, which is a perfect figure ; if it were 

 imperfect, it was marked with a halfe circle. There- 

 fore, wheresoever these signes O S3 were set before any 

 songe, there was the great mode perfect signified by the 

 circle, the small mode perfect signified by the first 

 figure of three, and time perfect signified by the last 

 figure of three. If the songe were marked thus, C 33, 



