142 



NOTES AND QUEKIES. 



[No. 39. 



editions of Boswell, under tlie date of 30tli March, 

 ]783. C. 



Dies JrcB (Vol. ii., p. 72. 105.). — Will you 

 allow me to enter my protest against the terms 

 "extremely beautiful and magnificent," applied by 

 your respectable correspondents to the Dies IrcE, 

 which, I confess, I think not deserving any such 

 praise either for its poetry or its piety. The first 

 triplet is the best, though I am not sine that even 

 the merit of that be not its jingle, in wliich King 

 David and tlie Sybil are strangely enough 

 brought together to testify of the day of judgment. 

 Some of the triplets appear to me very poor, and 

 hardly above macaronic Latin. C. 



Fuhulous Accotmt of the Lion. — Many thanks to 

 J.Eastwood (Vol. i., p. 472.) for his pertinent reply 

 to my Query. The anecdote he refers to is men- 

 tioned in the ArcJiaological Jounuil, vol. i. 1845, 

 p. 174., in a review of the French work Vitraux 

 Pcints de S. Etienne de Bourges, &c. No refer- 

 ence is given there ; but I should fancy Philippe 

 de Thauu gives the fable. Jabltzbekg. 



Carton's Printing-office (Vol. ii., p. 122.). — Tlie 

 abbot of Westminster who allowed William Caxton 

 to set up liis press in the almonry within the abbey 

 of Westminster, was probably jolin E.<teney, who 

 became abbot in the year 1475, and died in 1498. 

 If the date mentioned hj Stow for the introduc- 

 tion of printing into England by Caxton, viz. 1471, 

 could be shown to be tliat in wliicli he commenced 

 his printing at AVestminster, Abbot ^Willing (who 

 resigned the abbacy for tlie bishopric of Hereford 

 in 1475) would claim the honour of having been 

 his first patron : but the earliest ascertained date 

 for his printing at Westminster is 1477. In the 

 Gentleman s Magazine for April, 1846, I made this 

 remark : 



" There can, we think, be no doubt that the device 

 used by Caxton, and afterwards by Wynkyn de Worde, 



(W. 4.1 C.) 

 was intended for the figures 14, (tliough Dibdin, p. 

 cxxvii., seems incredulous in tl.e matter), and that its 

 allusion was to the year 1474, wliich may very pro- 

 bably have been that in which his press was set up in 

 Westminster." 



Will the Editor of "Notes and Queries" nov^ 

 allow me to modify this suggestion ? The figures 

 "4" and "7" are interlaced, it is true; but the 

 " 4 " decidedly precedes the other figure, and is 

 followed by a point (.). I think it not improbable 

 that this cypher, therefore, is so far enigmatic, 

 that the figure " 4 " may stand for fourteen hun- 

 dred (the century), and that the " 7 " is intended 

 to read doubled, as seventy-seven. In that case, 

 the device, and such historical evidence as we pos- 

 sess, combine in assigning the year 1477 for the 

 time of the erection of Caxton's press at West- 

 minster, in the time of Abbot Esteney, If The 



Game and Play of the Chesse was printed at West- 

 minster, it would still be 1474. In the paragraph 

 quoted by Arun (Vol. ii., p. 122.) from Mr. C. 

 Knight's Life of Caxton, Stow is surely incor- 

 rectly charged with naming Abbot Islip in this 

 matter. Islip's name has been introduced by the 

 error of some subsequent writer ; and this is perhaps 

 atti-ibutable to the extraordinary inadvertence of 

 Dart, the historian of the abbey, who in his Lives 

 of the Abbots of Westminster has altogether omitted 

 Esteney, — a circumstance which may have misled 

 any one hastily consulting his book. 



John Gough Nichols 



iiltsccnaiiratt^. 



NOTES ON BOOKS, SALES, CATALOGUES, ETC. 



The Faiches's nf York in the Sixteenth Cevtury, in- 

 cluding Notices of the Early History of Gvye Fawkes, the 

 Gunpowder Plot Conspirator, is the title of a small 

 volume written, it is understood, by a well-known and 

 accomplished antiquary resident in that city. The 

 author has brought together his facts in an agreeable 

 manner, and deserves the rare credit of being content 

 to produce a work commensurate with the extent and 

 interest of his subject. 



We learn from our able and well-informed con- 

 temporary, The Athenaum, that " one curious fact has 

 already arisen out of the proposal for the restora- 

 tion of Cliaucer's Monument, — which invests with a 

 deeper interest the present undertaking. One of the 

 objections formerly urged against taking steps to re- 

 store the perishing memorial of the Father of English 

 Poetry in Poets' Corner was, that it was not really his 

 tomb, but a monument erected to do honour to his 

 memory a century and a half after his death. An ex- 

 amination, however, of the tomb itself by competent 

 authorities has proved this objection to be unfounded : 

 — inasmuch as there can exist no doubt, we hear, from 

 the difference of workmanship, material, &c., that the 

 altar tomb is the original tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer, — 

 and that instead of Nicholas Brigham having erected 

 an entirely new monument, he only added to that 

 which then existed the overhanging canopy, &c. So 

 that the sympathy of Chaucer's admirers is now invited 

 to tlie restoration of what till now was really not known 

 to exist — the original tomb of the Poet, — as well as to 

 the additions made to it by the aff'ectionate remem- 

 brance of Nicholas Brigham." 



Messrs. Ward and Co., of Belfast, announce the 

 publication, to subscribers only, of a new| work in 

 Chromo-Lithography, containing five elaborately tinted 

 plates printed in gold, silver, and colours, being exact 

 fac-similes of an Ancient Irish Ecclesiastical Bell, 

 which is supposed to have belonged to Saint Patrick, 

 and the four sides of the jewelled shrine in which it is 

 preserved, accompanied by a historical and descriptive 

 Essay by the Rev. William Peeves, D.D., M.R.I. A. 

 By an' Irish inscription en the back of the case or 

 shrine of the bell, which Doctor Reeves has translated, 

 he clearly proves that t^ie case or shrine was made in 

 the end of the eleventh century, and that the bell itself 

 is several hundred years older ; and also that it has 



