496 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 239. 



May, 1800, ten persons died in this parish whose 

 ages, as recorded on their tombs in the order of 

 their departure, were 74, 84, 37, 70, 84, 70, 72, 

 62, 80, 90. This year must have been a fatal one 

 to old people. Can any of the correspondents of 

 " N. & Q." tell anything about the season ? 



W.J. 

 Bootle. 



[The beginning of the year 1800 was unusually 

 severe ; in February, ice covered the ground so com- 

 pletely, that people skaited through the streets and 

 roads; and in March, easterly winds prevailed with 

 extraordinary violence. For the verification of these 

 facts, consult the Meteorological diaries in the Gentle- 

 man's Magazine of the above period.] 



Athens. — What is the origin of the term 

 " violet- crowned city," as applied to Athens ? 

 Macaulay uses the expression in his History of 

 England, but does not state how it was acquired. 



E. A. T. 



[The ancient Greeks and Romans, at their festive 

 entertainments, wore garlands of flowers, and the violet 

 was the favourite of the Athenians, than whom no 

 people were more devoted to mirth, conviviality, and 

 sensual pleasure. Hence the epithet was also given to 

 Venus, Kvirpis loareipavos, as in some versus recorded 

 by Plutarch, in his Life of Solon. Aristophanes twice 

 applies the word to his sybarite countrymen : Equites, 

 v. 1323., and Acarn. i. 637.] 



James Miller. — Who was Miller, mentioned by 

 Warburton as a writer of farces about 1735 ? 



I. R. R. 



[James Miller, a political and dramatic writer, was 

 born in Dorsetshire in 1703. He received his educa- 

 tion at Wadham College, Oxford ; and while at the 

 university, wrote a satiric piece called The Humours of 

 Oxford, which created him many enemies, and hindered 

 his preferment. He also published several political 

 pamphlets against Sir Robert Walpole ; and also the 

 tragedy of Mahomet, and other plays. He died in 

 1744.] 



^*gIttS. 



(Vol. ix., pp. 138. 255. 305. 432.) 



Traveller having honoured me by alluding to 

 a little work of mine, written thirty-five years ago, 

 I may perhaps be permitted to correct a few 

 errors (trifling, because personal) in his notice. 

 My affinity was that of a cousin, not uncle, to the 

 late lord my predecessor. I never had the mili- 

 tary rank assigned to me, but was at the time like 

 Traveller himself, a " youngster" freshly eman- 

 cipated from Oxford to the Continent: and had 

 little more pretension in printing the extracts 

 from my Journal, than to comply with the kind 

 wishes of many friends and relatives. 



But to pass to what is more important, the 

 character of Brydone, at the time I speak of there 

 were no useful handbooks in existence ; and tour- 

 ists took for the purpose such volumes of travels 

 as they could carry. Brydone, for this, was unfit. 

 The French criticism (quoted Vol. ix., p. 306.) 

 rightly says, that he sacrificed truth to piquancy 

 in his narrations. Still it is a heavy charge to 

 suspect so gross a deviation, as that of inventing 

 the description of an ascent which he never ac- 

 complished ; especially when the ascent is a feat 

 not at all difficult. The evidence for this disbelief 

 must be derived from a series of errors in the 

 account, which I do not remember to have ob- 

 served while reading him on the spot. The 

 charitable supposition of Mr. Macray, that he 

 mistook the summit, is hardly compatible with so 

 defined a cone as that of Etna ; but all must agree 

 with his just estimate of that description, and 

 which the Biographie Universelle itself terms 

 " chef d'ceuvre de narration." Brydone, no doubt, 

 is as unsafe for the road as he is amusing for the 

 study, and perhaps from that very reason. 



Monsok. 



Gatton Park. 



COLERIDGE S UNPUBLISHED MSS. 



(Vol. iv., p. 411.; Vol. vi., p. 533.; Vol. viii., 

 p. 43.) 



When I sent you my Note on this subject at 

 the last of the above references, I had not read 

 Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. 

 Coleridge, Moxon, 1836. The subjoined ex- 

 tracts from that work confirm that note, vol. i. 

 pp. 104. 156. 162. 



August 8, 1820. Coleridge : 



" I at least am as well as I ever am, and my regular 

 employment, in which Mr. Green is weekly my 

 amanuensis, [is] the work on the books of the Old 

 and New Testaments, introduced by the assumptions 

 and postulates required as the preconditions of a fair 

 examination of Christianity as a scheme of doctrines, 

 precepts, and histories, drawn or at least deducible from 

 these books." 



January, 1821. Coleridge': 



" In addition to these of my great work, to 



the preparation of which more than twenty years of my 

 life have been devoted, and on which my hopes of ex- 

 tensive and permanent utility, of fame, in the noblest 

 sense of the word, mainly rest, &c. Of this work, &c, 

 the result must finally be revolution of all that has been 

 called Philosophy or Metaphysics in England and 

 France since the era of the commencing predominance 

 of the mechanical system at the restoration of our 

 second Charles, and with the present fashionable views, 

 not only of religion, morals, and politics, but even of 

 the modern physics and physiology. . . . Of this 

 work, something more than a volume has been die- 





