2»'> S. No 111., Feb. 13. '58.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



126 



that the relationship was very slight, while the ac- 

 knowledgment so warmly expressed strengthens 

 the supposition that Bradshaw had exerted himself 

 to obtain for Milton his appointment of Latin Se- 

 cretary to the Council. 



As Mrs. Foster has been proved to be correct 

 in one instance, it becomes a more interesting 

 question whether she can be relied upon in her 

 statement, that Milton refused to have his daugh- 

 ters taught to write. This she professed to have 

 derived from her mother, the poet's youngest 

 daughter, Deborah, who, of course, could not be 

 ignorant of the fact. That Deborah Milton could 

 write in 1675 is proved from her signature of that 

 date to her receipt for the lOOZ. received from her 

 stepmother, the poet's widow, but she may have 

 learned whatever penmanship she possessed with- 

 out her father's consent, or after quitting his house, 

 which she did four or five years before his death. 

 Mr. Keightley, the latest and beat biographer of 

 Milton, has already informed the readers of "N. 

 & Q." (Aug. 25, 1855) of the signatures of Mil- 

 ton's daughters. The eldest, Anne, could not 

 write even her name ; the second, Mary, misspelt 

 it (" Million "), but Deborah's handwriting, he 

 says, is good. Perhaps tolerable would be more 

 correct ; and Deborah seems to have misspelt her 

 wedded name Clarke — " Clarkk," though it is cor- 

 rected in the receipt, no doubt to make it corre- 

 spond with the signature on the same paper of 

 her husband, Abraham Clarke, who wrote a good 

 hand. Now, could Deborah Milton have been her 

 father's amanuensis ? Aubrey says she acted in 

 that capacity, but no other contemporary that I am 

 aware of — Philips, Elwood, or Poland — mentions 

 the circumstance, and it is one worthy of investiga- 

 tion by Mr. Masson. Mr. Marsh of Warrington 

 (who possesses the signatures of Milton's daugh- 

 ters, and has had fac-similes of them engraved) had 

 satisfied Mr. Keightley that Deborah was not one 

 of the writers in the Cambridge MSS. Indeed 

 the whole of those MSS., with the exception of 

 three pages, are in the handwriting of the poet, 

 and Deborah, as Mr. Keightley remarks, was not 

 six years old when the last poem in the Qollection, 

 the sonnet on the death of his second wife, was 

 composed. Paradise Lost, we know, was com- 

 pleted in 1665, when Deborah was only thirteen 

 years of age, and we may safely assume that she 

 had no hand in the prima cura of the great epic. 

 There remains still the MS. of the Treatise on 

 Christian Doctrine. The first part of this MS. is 

 proved to be in the handwriting of Daniel Skin- 

 ner : — 



" And in the subsequent and far greater part of the 

 MS.," says Todd, " the hand of one of Milton's female 

 amanuenses, always believed to be that of his daughter 

 Deborah, is so obvious, in copying sentences, as to have 

 readily occasioned the willing admission of many, Mr. 

 Lemon has informed me, who have compared the sonnet 

 of Milton which is in Trinity College, Cambridge [the 



sonnet on the death of his second wife], with the present 

 Treatise, that the writer of these sentences is certainly 

 one and the same person. With the recollection of this 

 handwriting, when I was first favoured with a sight of 

 the Treatise, I could not but consider the appearance of it 

 as an attestation to the authenticity of the theological 

 system." 



I can only say that my own impression was de- 

 cidedly the reverse. The sonnet is in an upright, 

 formal, Italian hand; the MS. of the Treatise much 

 less exact or pretentious ; and certainly no two spe- 

 cimens of penmanship can be more dissimilar than 

 that of the sonnet and the signature of " Deborah 

 Clarkk." The latter was not engraved when Todd 

 wrote, and it will be the duty of Mr. Masson to' 

 compare it, like Peter's shoulder-knot in the Tale 

 of a Tub, tofidem Uteris, with the "sentences" in 

 the Christian Treatise. There are two or three 

 hands in this work — interlineations, corrections, 

 and small slips of writing pasted in the margin ; 

 and if any one of these can be identified with the 

 handwriting of Deborah Milton, the fact cannot 

 be considered an uninteresting item in the biogra- 

 phy of the immortal poet. It is. obvious also that, 

 in the list of Milton's friends and associates, there 

 is room for illustration on the part of the new bio- 

 grapher, to whom we must all wish cordial suc- 

 cess. 



I take this opportunity, in reply to T. (" N. & 

 Q.," Dec. 26, 1857), to state that Pope's last letter 

 to Swift, dated March 22, 1 740, will be found in 

 Scott's Swift (ed. 1824), vol. xlx. p. 246. 



R. Cabbuthers. 



Inverness. 



OBIGIN OF THE WORD SUPEBSTITION. 



How comes it that this most interesting and re- 

 markable word has been so much neglected ? 

 Even Dean Trench carefully passes it over. 



The word is, of course, ultimately referrible to 

 supersto, the various meanings of which may be 

 reduced to two, — that of surviving, and that of 

 bei7ig in excess, being over-scrupulous, over-exact. 



The derivation universally received is con- 

 nected with the latter sense, and is thus embodied 

 in the words of Voss : Quando in cultu ultra modum 

 legitimum aliquid superest, sive quando cultus modum 

 rectum superstat, atque excedit.* 



The obviousness and simplicity of this deriva- 

 tion have been its recommendation, and have 

 served to make it so popular : besides, it is not to 

 be denied, even though we do not accept this as 

 the origin of the word Supebstition, that this 

 secondary sense did, from an early period, colour 

 and inform the word, till at length it superseded 

 the primary sense, and was received as the true 



* This etymology has the; preference of St. Isidore of 

 Seville, who gives two besides, one being that of Lucre- 

 tius, and the other a yet more trivial one ; but he makes 

 no mention of Cicero's. 



