30 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 193. 



appeared still many volumes of posthumous), he 

 had received the above sum. I can assert on 

 good authority, that Gothe, foreseeing his increas- 

 ing popularity even long after his death, stipulated 

 with M. Cotta to pay his heirs a certain sum for 

 every new edition of either his complete or single 

 works. One of the recipients of these yet current 

 accounts is Baron Wolfgang von Gothe, Attache 

 of the Prussian Legation at Rome. 



A Foreign Surgeon. 



Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury Square. 



Parallel Passages. — 



" The Father of the gods his glory shrouds, 

 Involved in tempests and a night of clouds." 



Dryden's Virgil. 



" Mars, hovering o'er his Troy, his terror shrouds 

 In gloomy tempests and a night of clouds." 



Pope's Homer's Iliad, book xx. line^69, 70. 



Uneda. 



Unpublished Epitaphs. — I copied the following 

 two epitaphs from monuments in the churchyard 

 of Llangerrig, Montgomeryshire, last autumn. 

 They perhaps deserve printing from the slight re- 

 semblance they bear to that in Melrose Church- 

 yard, quoted in Vol. vii., pp. 676, 677. : 



" O earth, O earth ! observe this well — 

 That earth to earth shall come to dwell: 

 Then earth in earth shall close remain 

 Till earth from earth shall rise again." 



" From earth my body first arose ; 

 But here to earth again it goes. 

 I never desire to have it more, 

 To plague me as it did before." 



P. H. Fisher. 



The Colour of Ink in Writings. — My attention 

 was called to this subject some years ago by an 

 attempt made in a judicial proceeding to prove 

 that part of a paper produced was written at a 

 different time than the rest, because part differed 

 from the rest in the shade of the ink. The follow- 

 ing conclusions have been the result of my ob- 

 servations upon the subject : 



1. That if the ink of part of a writing is of a 

 different shade, though of the same colour, from 

 that of the other parts, we cannot infer from that 

 circumstance alone that the writing was done at 

 different times. Ink taken from the top of an 

 inkstand will be lighter than that from the bottom, 

 where the dregs are ; the deeper the pen is dipped 

 into the ink, the darker the writing will be. 



2. Writing performed with a pen that has been 

 used before, will be darker than that with a new 

 pen ; for the dry residuum of the old ink that is 

 encrusted on the used pen will mix with the new 



ink, and make it darker. And for the same 

 reason — 



3. Writing with a pen previously used will be- 

 darker at first than it is after the old deposit^ 

 having been mixed up with the new ink, is used 

 up. M. E. 



Philadelphia. 



Literary Parallels. — Has it ever been noticed 

 that the well-known epitaph, sometimes assigned 

 to Robin of Doncaster, sometimes to Edward 

 Courtenay, third Earl of Devon, and I believe to- 

 others besides : " What I gave, that I have," &c.^ 

 has been anticipated by, if not imitated frora^ 

 Martial, book v. epigr. 42., of which the last two- 

 lines ai-e : 



" Extra fortunam est, quicquid donatur amlcis ; 

 Quas dederis, solas semper habebis opes." 



The English is so much more terse and senten- 

 tious, besides involving a much higher moral sig- 

 nification, that it may well be an original itself f 

 but in that case, the verbal coincidence is striking 

 enough. J. S. Wardex. 



Latin Verses prefixed to Parish Registers. — On 

 a fly-leaf in one of the registers of the parish of 

 Hawsted, Suffolk, is the following note in the 

 handwriting of the Rev. Sir John CuUum, the- 

 rector and historian of the parish : 



" Many old register books begin with some Latint 

 lines, expressive of their design. The two following^ 

 in that of St. Saviour's at Norwich, are as good as any 

 I have met with : 



' Janua, Baptismus ; medio stat Tceda jugalis 

 Utroque es felix, mors pia si sequitur'.' " 



Can any of your correspondents contribute other 

 examples ? Buriensis. 



Napoleon's Bees (Yol. vii., p. 535.). — N"o one^ 

 I believe, having addressed you farther on the 

 subject of the Napoleon Bees, the models of" 

 which are stated to have been found in the toml> 

 of Chllderic when opened in 1653, " of the purest 

 gold, their wings being inlaid with a red stone^ 

 like a cornelian," I beg to mention that the small 

 ornaments resembling bees found in the tomb of 

 Chllderic, were only what in French are called 

 fieurons (supposed to have been attached to thfr 

 harness of his war-horse). Handfuls of them 

 were found when the tomb was opened at Tour- 

 nay, and sent to Louis XIV. They were de» 

 posited on a green ground at Versailles. 



Napoleon wishing to have some regal emblem 

 more ancient than the fleur-de-lys, adopted the 

 fieurons as bees, and the green ground as the 

 original Merovingian colour. 



This fact was related to me as unquestionable 

 by Augustin Thierry, the celebrated historian, 

 when I was last in Paris. Wm. Ewart- 



University CluU 



