482 
NOTES AND QUERIES. 
[ No. 30. 
him. He was borne in London in the yeare 1510, and 
died in the yeare 1596.” 
Beneath are these lines :— 
* Such is the tombe the Noble Essex gave 
Great Spenser's learned reliques, such his grave: 
Howe’er ill-treated in his life he were, 
His sacred bones rest honourably here.” 
How are these two epitaphs, with their differing 
dates, to be reconciled ? Can he have been born 
in 1510, as the first one says “ obiit immaturd 
morte?” Now eighty-five is not very immature ; 
and I believe he entered at Pembroke College, 
Cambridge, in 1569, at which time he would be 
fifty-nine, and that at a period when college edu- 
cation commenced at an earlier age than now. 
Vertue’s portrait, engraved 1727, takes as a motto 
the last two lines of the first epitaph—“ Anglica 
te vivo,” &e. E. N. W. 
Southwark, April 29. 1850, 
BORROWED THOUGHTS. 
Crenius wrote a dissertation De Furibus Libra- 
riis, and J. Conrad Schwartz another De Plagio 
Literario, in which some curious appropriations 
are pointed out; your pages have already con- 
tained some additional recent instances. The 
writers thus pillaged might exclaim, “ Pereant iste 
qui post nos nostra dixerunt.” Two or three in- 
stances have occurred to me which, I think, have 
not been noticed. Goldsmith’s Madame Blaize is 
known to be a free version of La fameuse La Ga- 
lisse. His well-known epigram, — 
** Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed,” 
is borrowed from the following by the Chevalier 
de Cailly (or d’Aceilly, as he writes himself) 
entitled, — 
“ La Mort du Sieur Etienne. 
“ Tl est au bout de ses travaux, 
Il a passé le Sieur Etienne; 
En ce monde il eut tant des maux, 
Qu’on ne croit pas qu’il revienne.” 
Another well-known epigram, — 
“T do not like thee, Doetor Fell,” 
is merely a version of the 33d epigram of the first 
book of those by the witty Roger de Bussy, Comte 
de Rabutin : — 
“ Je ne vous aime pas, Hylas, 
Je n’en saurois dire la cause, 
Je sais seulement une chose ; 
Cest que je ne vous aime pas.” 
Lastly, Prior’s epitaph on himself has its proto- 
type in one long previously written by or for one 
John Carnegie :— 
« Johnnie Carnegie lais heer, 
Descendit of Adam and Eve, 
Gif ony con gang hieher, 
I’se willing gie him leve.” 
S. W. Srncer. 
FOLK LORE. 
faster Eggs (No. 25. p.397.).—The custom 
recorded by Brande as being in use in the North 
of England in his time, still continues in Rich- 
mondshize. 
A Cure for Warts is practised with the utmost 
faith in East Sussex. The nails are cut, the cut- 
tings carefully wrapped in paper, and placed in 
the hollow of a pollard ash, concealed from the 
birds; when the paper decays, the warts disap- 
pear. Jor this I can vouch: in my own ease the 
paper did decay, and the warts did all disappear, 
and, of course, the effect was produced by the 
cause. Does the practice exist elsewhere ? 
Charm for Wounds. —Boys, in his History of 
Sandwich, gives (p. 690.) the following from the 
Corporation Records, 1568: a woman examined 
touching her power to charm wounds, who — 
“ Sayeth that she can charme for fyer and skalding, 
in forme as oulde women do, sayeng ‘ Owt fyer in 
frost, in the name of the Father, the Sonne, and the 
Holly Ghost ;* and she hath used when the skyn of 
children do cleve fast, to advise the mother to annoynt 
them with the mother’s milk and oyle olyfe; and for 
skalding, to take oyle olyfe only.” 
W. Durrant Coornr. 
Fifth Son.—What is the superstition relating 
to a fifth son? I should be glad of any illustra- 
tions of it. There certainly are instances in which 
the fifth son has been the most distinguished scion 
of the family. Visi. Gre 
Cun Wybir, or Cun Annwn— Curlews (No. 19. 
p. 294.).—The late ingenious and well-informed 
Mr. William Weston Young, then residing in Gla- 
morgan, gave me the following exposition of these 
mysterious Dogs of the Sky, or Dogs of the Abyss, 
whose aérial cries at first perplexed as well as 
startled him. He was in the habit of traversing 
wild tracts of country, in his profession of land 
surveyor, and often rode by night. One intensely 
dark night he was crossing a desolate range of 
hills, when he heard a most diabolical yelping and 
shrieking in the air, horrible enough in such a 
region, and at black midnight. He was not, how- 
ever, a superstitious man, and, being an observant 
naturalist, had paid great attention to the notes of 
birds, and to the remarkable variations between 
the day and night notes of the same species. He 
suspected these strange unearthly sounds to be 
made by some gregarious birds on the wing; but 
1 Mi ah a ee fF 
