Mar. 11. 1854.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



227 



Commons. The following account is from Mal- 

 colm's Anecdotes of London, 4to., 1808, p. 282. : 



" The 3rd of December was appointed for this silly 

 ceremony, which took, place before the Royal Ex- 

 change, amidst the hisses and execrations of the mob, 

 not directed at the obnoxious paper, but at Alderman 

 Harley, the sheriffs, and constables, the latter of whom 

 were compelled to fight furiously through the whole 

 business. The instant the hangman held the work to 

 a lighted link it was beat to the ground, and the po- 

 pulace, seizing the faggots prepared to complete its 

 destruction, fell upon the peace-officers and fairly 

 threshed them from the field ; nor did the alderman 

 escape without a contusion on the head, inflicted by a 

 bullet thrown through the glass of his coach ; and se- 

 veral other persons bad reason to repent the attempt 

 to burn that publicly which the sovereign people deter- 

 mined to approve, who afterwards exhibited a large 

 jack-boot at Temple Bar, and burnt it in triumph, un- 

 molested, as a species of retaliation." 



I am not aware that what Mr. Malcolm terms a 

 "silly ceremony " has been repeated since 1763. 



C. H. Cooper. 

 Cambridge. 



I know not whether you have noticed the fol- 

 lowing : 



" Droit le Roy ; or, A Digest of the Rights and 

 Prerogatives of the Imperial Crown of Great Britain. 

 By a Member of the Society of Lincoln's Inn. ' Dieu 

 et Mon Droit.' [Royal Arms, with G. It.] London : 

 printed and sold by W. Griffin, in Fetter Lane, 



MDCCLXIV." 



Lord Mahon {History of England, vol. v. 

 p. 175.) says: 



" It was also observed, and condemned as a shallow 

 artifice, that the House of Lords, to counterbalance 

 their condemnation of Wilkes's violent democracy, took 

 similar measures against a book of exactly opposite 

 principles. This was a treatise or collection of pre- 

 cedents lately published under the title of Droit le Roy, 

 to uphold the prerogative of the crown against the 

 rights of the people. The Peers, on the motion of 

 Lord Lyttleton, seconded by the Duke of Grafton, 

 voted this book ' a false, malicious, and traitorous libel, 

 inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution to 

 which we owe the present happy establishment;' they 

 ordered that it should be burned by the hands of the 

 common hangman, and that the author should be taken 

 into custody. The latter part of the sentence, however, 

 no one took any pains to execute. The author was 

 one Timothy Brecknock, a hack scribbler, who, twenty 

 years afterwards, was hanged for being accessary to an 

 atrocious murder in Ireland." 



A copy _ of the book (an octavo of xii. and 95 

 pages) is in my possession. It was apparently a 

 presentation copy, and formerly belonged to Dr. 

 Disney; at whose sale it was purchased by the 

 late Richard Heber, as his MS. note testifies. 

 Against the political views which this book advo- 



cates, I say not one word ; as a legal treatise it is 

 simply despicable. H. Gough. 



Lincoln's Inn. 



The following extract is at the service of Bal- 

 lioeensis : 



" In the seventh year of King James I., Dr. Cowel's 

 Interpreter was censured by the two Houses, as asserting 

 several points to the overthrow and destruction of 

 Parliaments, and of the fundamental laws and govern- 

 ment of the kingdom. And one of the articles charged 

 upon him to this purpose by the Commons, in their 

 complaint to the Lords, was, as Mr. Petyt says, out of 

 the Journal, this that follows : 



" * 4thly. The Doctor draws bis arguments from 

 the imperial laws of the Roman Emperors, an argu- 

 ment which may be urged with as great reason, and 

 with as great authority, for the reduction of the state 

 and the clergy of England to the polity and laws in 

 the time of those Emperors ; as also to make the laws 

 and customs of Rome and Constantinople to be binding 

 and obligatory in the cities of London and York.* 



" The issue of which complaint was, that the author, 

 for these his outlandish politics, was taken into custody, 

 and his book condemned to the flames : nor could the 

 dedication of it to his then grace of Canterbury save 

 it." — Atterbury's Rights, Powers, and Privileges of 

 Convocation, p. 7. of Preface. 



Wm. Frasee, B.C.Li 



Tor-Mohun. 



I possess a copy of The Case of Ireland being 

 bound by Acts of Parliament in England stated, by 

 William Molyneux of Dublin, Esq., which appears 

 to have been literally " plucked as brand from the 

 burning," as a considerable portion of it is con- 

 sumed by fire. I have cut the following from a 

 sale catalogue just sent to me from Dublin : 



" Smith's (Matthew) Memoirs of Secret Service, 

 Lond. 1696. Written by Charles, Earl of Peterbo- 

 rough, and is very scarce, being burnt by the hangman. 

 MS. note." 



James Graves. 



Kilkenny. 



A decree of the University of Oxford, made 

 July 21, 1683, condemning George Buchanan's, 

 treatise De jure regni apud Scotos, and certain 

 other books, the names of which I do not know, 

 was on March 25, 1710, ordered by the House of 

 Lords to be burned by the hangman. This was 

 shortly after the trial of Dr. Sacheverel. 



W. P. Storek. 



Olney, Bucks. 



different productions of different carcases. 



(Vol. vi., p. 263.) 



Up to a very recent period, it was held, even 

 by philosophers, that each of the four elements, 

 as well as every living plant and animal, both 



