nd §, Nol. JAN. 5. 756] 
NOTES AND QUERIES. 9 
Why not keep, my tender fair, 
In the warm place where now you are? 
“ BABY. 
O, dear mammy! all'the loves, 
All the graces, pigs and doves ; 
All my husbands, all my eats, 
Gr. y's; y’s woodys’ batts, 
(Doom’d ere I begun to be, 
‘To the care of careful me) 
And the owl too, and miss gin — 
Beg I’d stay no longer in. 
* MAMMY. 
Nay, if Pallas sends her owl, 
Get thee out, impatient soul! 
By the bed see Musick stand, 
Ready to take thee by the hand ; 
All the sister arts have sent 
On this errand, master Kent, 
Who must lose (if we’re not hasty) 
His present cake and future pasty. 
Jumper too will have it so— 
What a fuss is here w’ye? —Go, 
Get you out then—Oh—I see 
That mimic face will copy me; 
And what most wou’d vex a mother, 
Thou wilt make just such another.” 
I waive the question of authorship, and of the 
circumstances under which the verses were ex- 
temporised ; and shall only add, that George Col- 
man, Bonnell Thornton, Robert Lloyd, William 
Falconer, and other writers of note, were contri- 
butors to the miscellany whence they are tran- 
scribed. Bouton Corney. 
The Terrace, Barnes. 
RUNNING FOOTMEN, 
The following description of this now extinct 
elass of retainers is extracted from a volume of 
MS. Notes on Old Plays, in the handwriting of the 
Rev. George Ashby, Rector of Borrow in Suffolk, 
and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, which I 
lately purchased. The notes seem to have been 
written shortly after the publication of Reed’s 
edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays in 1780. His ac- 
count of running footmen, their use, pedestrian 
powers, and costume, seem to me so characteristic 
of a bygone state of society, as to deserve a corner 
in “N. & Q.”: 
“The running footmen drank white wine and eggs. 
One told me, fifty years ago, that they carried some white 
wine in the large silver ball of their tall cane or pole, 
which unscrews; that they could easily keep a-head of 
the coach and six in uphill and down countries (N.B. bad 
roads), but that in the plain they were glad to sign to 
the coachman with the pole to pull in, as they could not 
hold out. I have often wondered how he came to tell us 
little schoolboys at Croydon thus much. Since the roads 
have been made good, the carriages and cattle lightened, 
we have little of them; yet I remember he told us of vast 
erformances, threescore miles a day, and seven miles an 
our. They would probably now go further ina day than 
‘a gentleman and his own horses, but perhaps take a 
| 
| little more time. 
‘soon, 
The last exploit of one of them that I 
recollect was, the late Duke of Marlborough drove his 
phaethon and four for a wager from London to Windsor, 
against one, and just beat him, but the poor fellow died 
No carriage could have done Powell’s York 
journey. ‘They wore no breeches, but a short silk petti- 
coat, kept down by a deep gold fringe.” 
In these long poles of the running footmen wwe 
have, I presume, the origin of the long silver- 
headed canes carried by the footmen of many 
families at the present day. 
‘T have been told that the late Duke of Queen- 
bury was the last nobleman who kept running 
footmen ; that he was in the habit, before engag- 
ing them, of trying their paces, by seeing how 
they could run up and down Piccadilly, he watch- 
ing and timing them from lis balcony. They put 
on his livery before the trial. On one occasion 
a candidate presented himself, dressed, and ran. 
At the conclusion of his performance he stood 
before the balcony. ‘! You'll do very well for 
me,” said the duke; “Your livery will do very 
well for me,” replied the man, and gave the duke 
a last proof of his ability as a runner by then run- 
ning away with it. Wirxi1am J. Tuoms. 
inor Gairs. 
Neology. —Some unknown friend has sent me 
a Kentucky newspaper, the Georgetown Herald, 
probably on account of a defence which it contains 
of some reputed Americanisms of which the writer 
shows two or three, out of half-a-dozen, to be es- 
sentially English. This essay, which occupies a 
couple of columns, and appears as borrowed from 
another publication, is written in good taste and 
very pure English, but in other parts of the 
newspaper there are some neologisms which have 
amused me. For instance, information by the 
electric telegraph is happily headed “ News by 
Lightning.” Ina kind of feud now existing be- 
tween American-born and foreign-born citizens, 
the former are said to profess Nativism; a vaga- 
bond coming into a certain neighbourhood is de- 
scribed as being now “in our midst ;” and an 
editor who appreciates the value of his contri- 
butors is called ‘‘appreciative.” This may be 
very well, but Lam rather startled at seeing a 
popular candidate for Congress accused of “ De- 
magoguery;” nor can I agree that a corpulent 
person, describing himself as very iJ of such a 
disease as the dropsy, would be speaking “very 
correct and classical English,” if he pronounced 
himself “ very slim.” Cc. 
The Ladies’ Law of Leap-year. —It may per- 
haps be interesting to all young ladies who are 
not already aware of the important fact, that 
leap-year empowers them to do something more 
than “pop the question.” I {am informed, by a 
