a-"" S. VI. 148., Oct. 30. '58.] 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



343 



the immortal Boz will inform us to which of them 

 he is indebted for his saying of Mr. Mantilini that 

 " life was one demnition grind." 



Of plagiarists it has been said by Jovius : — 



" Castrant alios, ut libros suos pergraciles alieno adipe ' 

 suflfarciant.'' [ 



It is very descriptive of the practice of would- 

 be authors. But there is much difference between 

 a similarity and a plagiarism : the one may be ac- 

 cidental, the other cannot be. As an illustration 

 of the accidental, I subjoin the following : — 



Sterne, in Tristram Shandy (a book made up of 

 plagiarised passages, though it is more than pro- 

 bable he was innocent in the following case,) in 

 describing the death of Le Fevre, said : 



" ' He shall not die, by G— d,' cried my Uncle Toby. 

 The accusing spirit, which flew up to Heaven's chancery 

 with the oath, blushed as he gave it in ; and the record- 

 ing angel, as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon the 

 word, and blotted it out for ever." 



(By the by, I have the copy of a letter from 

 Laurence Sterne to Mr. Pitt, forwarding him a 

 copy of his dedication of this work. It was 

 written by a friend of mine on the fly-leaf of my 

 edition (the 5th) in 7 vols, of 1780.) 



Moore, in his Paradise and the Peri (1817) has : 

 " Black as the damning drops that fall 

 From the denouncing AngeTs pen. 

 Ere Mercy weeps them out again." 



I do not say that Moore copied Sterne, though 

 the idea may have taken hold of his mind. 



In an article on Dante (vide Selections from the 

 Edinburgh Review, in 4 vols., vol. i. p. 67.), the 

 writer mentions that there was a vision of a monk 

 of Monte-Cassino, by name Alberic, and born in 

 1100; from the 18th section of whose MS. the 

 following is given : — 



" A demon holds a book, in which are written the sins 

 of a particular man ; and an Angel drops on it, from a 

 phial, a tear which the sinner had shed in doing a good 

 action, and his sins are washed out." 



Sterne, Dr. Ferrier proved, was an undoubted 

 plagiarist, but he may never have heard of this 

 MS. ; if he had, from what we know of his pilfer- 

 ing habits, we may be sure he copied his descrip- 

 tion, doing as was his wont ; and in so doing, 

 beautifying the original. T. C. Anderson, 



12th Regiment, Bengal Army. 



^tnor fiatti. 



Memorial of Battle. — Three gigantic stones rise 

 in a fir coppice at Manse, near llothesay, Bute, 

 marking the scene of some ancient battle, where 

 the chins or tribes of the island met in a life- 

 struggle. To commemorate their victory, the suc- 

 cessful party raised these columnar rocks, which 

 stand in various stages of decay to this day. And, 

 Q8 if tliey possessed some crude ideas of geological 

 formations, each stone was hewn from a different 



material : the first sandstone, the second trap, the 

 third conglomerate. T. H. P. 



Picht-up Proverbs. — I send you a few pi'overbs, 

 which I have picked up. I fancy they are all of 

 the coinage of this century. Some I have seen 

 in print, others I have only heard ; but I think 

 they are worth preserving in " N. & Q." : — 



" Fierce foes make firm friends." 

 " Half the glory crowns we see are only gilded crowns 

 of thorn." 



" Trust not always to the brightest ; 

 Know the winter moon's the lightest." 



" God sometimes cuts his flowers with a very rough 



knife." 



" A first-class youth brings a third-class age." 



" The wild oats of youth change into the briers of 



manhood." 



" Life is company. Death is solitude." 



" Popularitj' is not love." 



" The heart is often better than the head." 



" Admiration without love is sunshine without rain." 



" Grey hairs are the frostwork of age." 



" The skies won't go into mourning for our sorrows." 



" The sad-coloured cloali of silence often covers the 



spotted clothes of ignorance." 

 " Pleasant lies, once sown, come up prickles." 



Hubert Bowek. 



Colonel Mountain, C.B. — In the Memoirs and 

 Letters of the late Colonel Armine S. H. Mountain, 

 C.B. (2nd edition, London, 1858), there is an in- 

 accuracy, which, as the book has a wide circula- 

 tion and is particularly interesting, it may be well 

 to rectify : — 



In p. 8. are the following words : — 



" In November [1815] he joined his regiment in Ire- 

 land, where he made many friends; amongst whom may 

 be mentioned the family of the Bishop of Meath (O'Beirne), 

 through whose kindness he became acquainted with 

 Maria Edgeworth." 



And in p. 145. : — 



" In June, 1837, Major Mountain married Jane O'Beirne, 

 a grand-daughter of the Bishop of Meath, from whose 

 family he had received much kindness when quartered in 

 Ireland ; and with her [who died within a few months] 

 he sailed for Calcutta in October." 



Unless I am greatly mistaken, he married a 

 grand-daughter, not of Bishop O'Beirne, but of 

 Nathaniel Alexander, D.D. (a member of the Ca- 

 ledon family), who succeeded O'Beirne in the 

 bishopric of Meath in 1823. Abuba. 



"Passing." — It is very probable many have 

 come to the same conclusion respecting the mean- 

 ing of the word pa-mng in the oft-quoted lines : 



" A man he was to all the country' dear. 

 And passing rich on forty pounds a year." 



And understand it to mean in this passage " sur- 

 passing rich," and not, as often interpreted, "pass- 

 ing for a rich man": the former rendering being 

 borne out by the familiar expressions, '■'■passing 

 fair," "passing strange," and the benediction from 



