Dec. 11. 1852.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



553 



right in thinking the term maudlin comes from 

 Palestine. It means, as you of course know (I 

 don't mean anything personal), tearfully tipsy, the 

 quality of being crying drunk. Magdalene (in 

 the Anglo-Norman, and in the popular pronunci- 

 ation, Maudeline) was mostly represented with a 

 weeping, eploree countenance ; hence a maudlin 

 face was understood to mean one of tearful emo- 

 tion—pathetically slobbered. What do your 

 merry men say ? 



Again, can you confirm me in the belief that 

 Sappho, who lives in song, died only in metaphor 

 at Leucadia? It was an old Greek custom to 

 propitiate Apollo and other divinities by throw- 

 ing people headlong from precipices. Leucadia 

 go't a great name for such ferocious piety. Ste- 

 sichorus has a story, somewhere, of a Greek girl- 

 not Sappho — who threw herself from Leucadia 

 for a youth who did not return her passion ; the 

 savage old hatchet-armed Eros of the earlier 

 mythologies having apparently demanded such 

 homage, as well as the rest. Anacreon, in " He- 

 phajstion," I believe, has the following : " Again, 

 casting myself from the Leucadian rock, I plunged 

 into the sea, drunk with love." Some critics who 

 cannot believe the Sappho of "Oh Hesperus ! thou 

 bringest all good things," could be so dementit, say 

 it was another Sappho of Lesbos — a courtesan — 

 who "plunged the steep" in that distressing manner. 

 I know a somewhat parallel case of metaphoric 

 expression, which you might not have heard of. 

 It is called, " Going to Skellig," in the south of 

 Ireland ; and before it dies away, you may be dis- 

 posed to preserve it in your amber. On the day 

 preceding Lent (a season in which no marriages 

 are made in the Catholic Church) it is humorously 

 fabled that the unmarried folks of both sexes "go 

 to Skellig" in pairs. Kegular rhymed lists, with 

 their names, are published and_ sold by hawkers 

 a gorge deploy ee, — a pleasant piece of Saturnalia 

 to all but those who find themselves hitched into 

 a satirical or abusive rhyme. The young people 

 are supposed to go to do penance — the penance 

 «f delay for forty days. Can any one explain this? 

 Formerly there Avere austere hermitages on the 

 Skellig Rocks, where the ruins are still visible, a 

 short distance from the south-west coast of Ireland. 

 There the most devout monks of the mainland 

 were In the habit of resorting, to enjoy a sharper 

 amount of maceration and general discomfort, 

 during Lent. The proverb of " going to do 

 penance at Skellig" became a general one, and 

 the apt humour of the people applied it as above. 

 Ask " the Nestor of the critic generation," Syl- 

 vanus Urban's erudite J. R., about this. It is, I 

 think, a somewhat local bizan-erie. W. Dowe. 



Chelsea, Mass. 



"genealogies of the mordaunt family, by 

 the earl of peterborough. 



In Miss Agnes Strickland's amusing " Life 

 of Mary of Modena " (whose name should be 

 pronounced Modena and not Modeena), she 

 makes frequent reference to the Genealogies of 

 the Mordaunt Family, written, as she tells us, 

 by Henry Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, "a 

 book of which four-and-twenty copies only were 

 printed for private use." (^Queens of England^ 

 vol. vi. p. 16. ed. 1852.) As this lady writes po- 

 pularly, for the benefit of the ignorant, it might 

 have been as well if she had added, that the Earl 

 in this work assumed the pseudonyme of Robert 

 lialstead; that he was assisted in its compilation 

 by his chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Rans, Rector of 

 Turvey; and that It was printed in 1685. All 

 these points, although necessary to enable any one 

 who never saw the book to make some inquiry 

 about it, are omitted as of no moment, and we are 

 told instead, that out of the four-and-twenty 

 copies printed, the only one that she (the emphatic 

 / Is used) had been able to trace, was in the He- 

 ralds' College. Now, without expecting too much 

 bibliographical information from a popular writer, 

 it is really mischievous to mislead by a paragraph 

 of this kind, for there are many persons who put 

 such faith in Miss Strickland's pretensions to re- 

 search, that they would take it for granted only 

 one copy of the aforesaid work was in existence ! 

 Had Miss Strickland consulted such well-known 

 books as Moule's Bibliotheca Heraldica, printed in. 

 1822, or Martin's Catalogue of Books privately 

 printed, published in 1834, she would have learnt 

 that, instead of one, no less than fourteen copies 

 are extant, four of which are deposited in such 

 very inaccessible^ libraries as the British Museum, 

 (namely, the Royal and Grenville copies), the 

 Bodleian, and the University Library, Cambridge. 

 Earl Spencer's copy is described at length by Dr. 

 DIbdIn in his JEdes Althorpiance, vol. i. p. 186., 

 from a manuscript note in which it would appear, 

 that the Earl of Peterborough printed only twenty, 

 and not twenty-four copies. B. 



The Westminster Play: curious Coincidences. — 

 Perhaps it may be worth a Note to remark, that in 

 the present year, 1852, arrives the turn for the 

 representation, by the scholars of Westminster, of 

 Terence's play of the " Adelphi." This play, as is 

 well known, was originally produced at the funeral 

 games of the Roman general Paulus iEmilius. One 

 of its turns for representation at Westminster also 

 fell out just after the death of General Wolfe at 

 Quebec, in the year 1759, to whose memory there 

 are in the Westminster prologue of that year some 

 beautiful tributary lines, written by Mr. Lloyd. 



