Feb. 26. 1853.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



211 



kept in the aisle to the left, as you enter the Grotte 

 Vecchie ; and was the pedestal of the statue till it 

 was removed from the crypt by Paul V., as Mel- 

 chiorrl informs us. The old base was left in situ, 

 and a new one made, Avhich is the chair of white 

 marble, with the wliole surface wrought in ara- 

 besque bas-relief, upon a jiedestal of light coloured 

 alabaster, with a central tablet of granite, called 

 "granito verde." 



3. Was this statue cast from the metal of the 

 Capitoline Jove ? Melchiorri almost favours the 

 opinion that it was ; but the evidence of Martial, 

 already quoted, seems fatal to this supposition. It 

 occurs to me that the idea of this statue being a 

 Jupiter converted, either by melting down or 

 partial alteration, may have arisen from confound- 

 ing this statue with another statue of St. Peter, 

 now ke})t in the crypt of the church under the 

 dome, and in the chapel of the Madonna della 

 Bocciata or del Portico. This is also a seated 

 statue of St. Peter, and stood in the atrium of the 

 ancient basilica. It seems to have been a Pagan 

 Jigm^e convei-ted: — 



" There is reason to believe that this statue of St. 

 Peter had been originally erected to some Gentile ; 

 and that the head, arms, and hands wore changed in 

 order to metamorphose it into a St. Peter. In the old 

 church it was usual to vest it pontifical ly on the feast 

 of St. Peter, as is now the case with the bronze statue 

 above. The Isaurian iconoclast threatened St. Gre- 

 gory II. with the demolition of this statue : but the 

 impotent menace cost him the duchy of Rome, and 

 placed the temporal power in the hands of the Popes." 

 — Rome, Ancient and Modern, vol. i. p. 574. 



Possibly enough, the fact of this figure of St. 

 Peter having been converted, may have led to the 

 idea that it was the other and better known statue. 

 It may be well to add, that in St. Peter's there are 

 forty metal statues, in addition to one hundred and 

 five in marble, one hundred and sixty-one in 

 travertine, and ninety in stucco. Ceyeep. 



X.OED CLAKENDON AND THE TUBWOMAN. 



(Vol. vii., p. 133.) 



The newspaper paragraph in question is quoted, 

 m a MS. note in my possession, from the Salis- 

 bury Journal of August 29, 1828. From what 

 source it was derived does not appear : the whole 

 story is, however, fabulous. Edward Hyde, first 

 Earl of Clarendon, was twice married. His first 

 wife was the daughter of Sir George Ayliffe, 

 of Eoxley, in the county of Wilts. He married 

 her in 1628, when he was only twenty years old, 

 'and she died of the small-pox six months after- 

 wards, before any child was born. In 1632 he 

 married_ Frances, daughter of Sir Thomas and 

 Lady Ailesbury, by whom he had four sons and 

 two daughters. Anne, the eldest daughter, be- 



came, as is well known, the wife of the Duke of 

 York, and the mother of Queen Mary and Queen 

 Anne. Sir Thomas Ailesbury, the father of Lord 

 Clarendon's second wife, was a person of some 

 distinction, both social and intellectual ; of his 

 wife, Lady Ailesbury, Pepys mentions in Lis 

 Diary, November 13, 1661, that the Duke of 

 York is in mourning for his wife's grandmother, 

 " which (he however adds) is thought a piece of 

 fondness." In the collection of pictures at the 

 Grove, the seat of the present Earl of Clarendon, 

 there are portraits by Vandyke of Sir Thomas 

 and Lady Ailesbury, and also a portrait, by an 

 unknown artist, of Frances, the second wife of the 

 Lord Chancellor Clarendon. (See Lady Theresa 

 Lewis's Lives of the Friends of Lord Chancellor 

 Clarendon, vol. iii. pp.355, 356. 361.) 



Mr. Hyde's two marriages are fully described 

 by himself in his Life, vol. i. pp. 12. 15, ed. 8vo. 

 1761. 



The story of the tubwoman, the grandmother of 

 queens, seems to have been a legend invented for 

 the purpose of exhibiting a contrast between the 

 exalted rank of the descendants and the plebeian 

 origin of the ancestor. Historical fiction and 

 popular fancy delight in such contrasts. The 

 story of date obolum Belisario, and Pope's account 

 of the death of the second Duke of Buckingham, 

 are more celebrated, but not more veracious, than 

 the story of the marriage of Lord Chancellor 

 Clarendon with the tubwoman. L. 



DISCOVERY or PLANETS. 



(Vol. vii., p. 84.) 



Leonoka says, " supposing that the recently- 

 discovered planets obey the same laws as the larger 

 ones, they must be at all times apparently moving 

 within the zodiac ;" and she asks lor an explanation 

 of the fact of their not having been discovered 

 before. 



Ancient astronomers having observed that the 

 moon, and the planets visible to them, were never 

 seen at more than a small angular distance north 

 or south from the plane of the earth's orbit, they 

 drew two circles parallel to the ecliptic, at the dis- 

 tance which experience had shown them to be suf- 

 ficient for comprehending the apparent places of 

 those heavenly bodies at all times ; and to the 

 intervening space they gave the name of zodiac. 

 But there is no law of matter, or, in other words, 

 it is no necessary consequence of gravitation or 

 planetary action, which confines the planets' orbits 

 within the zodiac. The fact can only be ascribed 

 to the will of Him who first projected them into 

 their intended paths ; though that will had doubt- 

 less some wise and calculated end in view. 



It was further observed, in the last century, that 

 the increasing distance of each successive planet 



