Dec. 29. 1849.] 
NOTES AND QUERIES. 
135 
DR. BURNEY’S MUSICAL WORKS. 
Mr. Editor,— On pp. 63. and 78. of your 
columns inquiry is made for Burney’s Treatise on 
Music (not his History). Before correspondents 
trouble you with their wants, I think they should 
be certain that the books they inquire for have 
existence. Dr. Burney never published, or wrote, 
a Treatise on Music. His only works on the sub- 
ject (the General History of Music excepted) are 
the following : — 
“ The Present State of Music in France and Italy. 
8vo. 1771. 
“The Present State of Music in Germany, the 
Netherlands, and United Provinces. 2 vols. 8vo. 
1775. 
« An Account of the Musical Performances in West- 
minster Abbey, and the Pantheon, &c. in Commemo- 
ration of Handel. 4to. 1785. 
« A Plan for the Formation of a Musical Academy, 
8yo. n. d.” 
As your “ Norrs anp Queries” will become a 
standard book of reference, strict accuracy on all 
points is the grand desideratum. 
Enpw. F. Rimpavtr. 
P. S. I might, perhaps, have included in the 
above list the Life of Metastasio, which, although 
not generally classed among musical works, forms 
an admirable supplement to the General History 
of Music. Hh. FLR. 
ANCIENT INSCRIBED DISHES. 
Judging from the various notices in your 
Nos. 3, 5, and 6, the dishes and inscriptions men- 
tioned therein by Crericus, L.S.B., &c., pp. 44. 73. 
87., are likely to cause as much speculation here as 
they have some time experienced on the continent. 
They were there principally figured and discussed 
in the Curiositéien, a miscellaneous periodical, 
conducted from about 1818 to 1825, by Vulpius, 
brother-in-law of Gothe, librarian to the Grand 
Duke of Saxe Weimar. Herr y. Strombeck, Judge 
of the Supreme Court of Appeal at Wolfenbiittel, 
first noticed them from a specimen belonging to 
the church of a suppressed convent at Sterterheim 
near Brunswick, and they were subsequently 
ounced upon by Joseph vy. Hammer (now y. 
urgstall), the learned Orientalist of Vienna, as 
one of the principal proofs which he adduced in 
his Mysterim Baphometis Revelatum in one of 
the numbers of the Fundgruben (Mines) des 
Orients, for the monstrous impiecties and impurities 
which he, Nicolai, and others, falsely attributed to 
the Templars. Comments upon these dishes occur 
in other works of a recent period, but having left 
my portfolio, concerning them, with other papers, 
on the continent, I give these hasty notices en- 
tirely from memory. ‘They are by no means 
uncommon now in England, as the notices of your 
correspondents prove. <A paper on three varieties 
of them at Hull was read in 1829, to the Hull 
Literary and Philosophical Society. In Nash’s 
Worcestershire one is depicted full size, and a 
reduced copy given about this period in the Gen- 
tleman’s Magazine, and Nash first calls them 
“¢ Offertory Dishes.” The Germans call them Tauf- 
becken, or baptismal basins; but I believe the 
English denomination more correct, as I have a 
distinct recollection of seeing, in a Catholic convent 
at Danzig, a similar one placed on Good Friday 
before the tomb of the interred image of the 
Saviour, for the oblations for which it was not too 
large. Another of them is kept upon the altar of 
Boroughbridge Church (N. Riding of Yorkshire), 
but sadly worn down by scrubbing to keep it 
bright, and the attempt at a copy of the Inscription 
in a Harrowgate Guide is felicitously ludicrous: it 
is there taken as a relic of the Roman Isurium on 
the same spot. Three others were observed some 
years ago in a neglected nook of the sacristy of 
York Cathedral. At the last meeting of the 
Institute at Salisbury, a number of these were 
exhivited in St. John’s House there, but I believe 
without any notice taken of them in its Proceedings ; 
and another was shown to the Archeological So- 
ciety, at their last Chester Congress, by Colonel 
Biddulph, at Chirk Castle; when more were men- 
tioned by the visitors as in their possession, anxious 
as your correspondents to know the import of the 
inscriptions. ‘They are sometimes seen exposed in 
the shops of Wardour Street, and in other curiosity 
shops of the metropolis. 
On their sunken centres all have religious types : 
the most common is the temptation of Eve; the 
next in frequency, the Annunciation; the Spies 
sent by Joshua returning with an immense bunch 
of grapes suspended betwixt them, is not unfre- 
quent ; but non-scriptural subjects, as the Mar- 
tyrdom of St. Sebastian, mentioned by L. 8S. B., is 
a variety I have not before observed. 
The inscriptions vary, and are sometimes double 
in two concentral rings. The most usual is that 
alluded to by your correspondents, and though ob- 
viously German, neither old nor obsolete ; having 
been viewed even by native decipherers, through 
the mist of a preconceived hypothesis, have never 
yet been by them satisfactorily accounted for. It is 
always repeated four times, evidently from the 
same slightly curved die; when, however, the en- 
larged circumference of the circle required more 
than this fourfold repetition to go round it, the 
die was set on again for as much of a fifth im- 
pression as was necessary: this was seldom more 
than four or five letters, which, as pleonastic or 
intercalary, are to be carefully rejected in reading 
the rest; their introduction has confused many 
expositors. 
The readings of some of your correspondents 
who understand German is pretty near the truth. 
