394 



NOTES AND QUEKIES. 



[2-4 S. IX. May 19. '60. 



lated upon in poetry and prose and at the fireside 

 — and moreover the value which is placed on 

 snuff-boxes, punch-spoons, toddy-ladles, and other 

 kinds of relics made from its fragments, all con- 

 secrated in the esteem of their possessors, it would 

 now be a species of cruelty in anyone to endeavour 

 to dissipate the charm, and particularly ungracious 

 in me, who almost since the days of boyhood has 

 preserved a little box of the wood, presented to 

 me by a respected old lady as the most precious 

 gift she could devise for a memorial. G. N. 



Maids of Honour (2 nd S. ix. 345.)— W. D. 

 has charged me with saying, that " in those days 

 respectable coachmen would not have allowed their 

 daughters to associate with the Maids of Honour." 

 I do not remember having ever made such an asser- 

 tion. Once, when referring to those young ladies 

 who waited on the wife of Frederick, Prince of 

 Wales, I remarked that his royal highness' s head- 

 coachman had such a peculiar opinion of them 

 that, on bequeathing to his son a certain handsome 

 legacy, he annexed to it the stipulation that the 

 son should never marry a Maid of Honour. This 

 prohibition was made at a time when livery-ser- 

 vants were " looking-up," when their mistresses 

 took them to the play, and when they sometimes 

 married them. Probably, it was in a spirit of 

 pride that the aristocratic coachman forbade the 

 banns between his heir and what Swift calls " a 

 silly true maid of honour." It was not the first 

 time that obstacles were thrown in their way. In 

 Queen Anne's time, for instance, her majesty's 

 well-known maid, Jenny Kingdom, passed away 

 into maturity without getting married. There- 

 upon that rakish, humorous, honest, Colonel Disney 

 gravely suggested that since Jenny was unable to 

 procure a husband, the Queen should give her a 

 brevet to act as a married woman. I do not know 

 how matches went off between maids and valets at 

 the French court, but I do know that their oppor- 

 tunity must sometimes have favoured them : for 

 the valets de garderobe could claim the privilege 

 of lacing the queen's stays — the files d'honneur 

 standing by ! J. Doran. 



Walpole, writing to Sir Horace Mann under 

 date of May 12, 1743, says : — 



"There has happened a comical circumstance at Leicester 

 House [then the residence of Frederick, Prince of Wales]. 

 One of the Prince's coachmen, who used to drive the 

 Maids of Honour, was so sick of them, that he has left 

 his son three hundred pounds, upon condition that he 

 never marries a Maid of Honour ! " — Walpole's Letters 

 (ed. by Cunningham), i. 246. 



R. F. Sketciley. 



Pamela (2 nd S. ix. 305.) — The Pa-me-la of 

 Pope in his Epistle IV. to Miss Blount with the 

 works of Voiture in 1717 (v. 49 — 56.) is a cha- 

 racter totally distinct from the Pam-e-la of Rich- 

 ardson, a work which he began on the 10th Nov. 

 1739, and which first appeared in 1740. This 



novel speedily attained extraordinary popularity. 

 Voltaire's Nanine in French, and Goldoni's 

 Pamela in Italian, were both founded on the 

 novel, and the latter was translated into English 

 in 1756. Horace Walpole, writing the 2d June, 

 1759, says: — 



" Loo is mounted to its zenith ; the parties last till one 

 and two in the morning. We played at Lady Hertford's 

 last week, the last night of her lying-in, till deep into 

 Sunday morning, after she and her lord were retired. It 

 is now adjourned to Mis. Fitzroy's, whose child the town 

 calls Pam-ela." 



Now if the pronunciation had been Pa-me-la, 

 the point of the joke would have missed, for it 

 alludes to the knave card termed Pam in the 

 game Of Loo. Fielding's Pam'-e-la in Joseph 

 Andreivs is intended as a parody on Richardson's 

 heroine. I have never heard her name pro- 

 nounced as Pope's Pa-me-la. Both words are 

 significant in Greek ; Pope's means all cheeks and 

 breasts, and Richardson's tuneful. T. J. Buckton. 



Lichfield. 



"Ride" v. "Drive" (2 ud S. ix. 326.)— The 

 former is unquestionably an incorrect word for 

 locomotion on wheels, and is decidedly a vulgarism 

 when so used. 



Such was the opinion of a very competent au- 

 thority to whom I referred the question. 



True there is a story about a tobacconist who, 

 having amassed a fortune, emblazoned his armo- 

 rial bearings on his carriage, with the motto, 

 " Quid Rides," underneath. 



Though your Derbyshire correspondent will 

 probably not be inclined to look for the norma 

 loquendi at this side of the Channel, I may inform 

 him that the expression is almost unknown in 

 Ireland. Indeed, were a person here to speak of 

 " riding in a carriage," he would be stared at as a 

 prodigy ; and incredulity would perhaps be ex- 

 pressed as to the possibility of such a' feat being 

 accomplished ! May we infer from this idiom not 

 having yet "obtained" here, that it is of modern 

 origin ? 



What would be the Latin for "drive" in the 

 sense of travelling in a carriage ? 



John Ribton Gabstin. 



Dublin. 



Boleed (2 nd S. ix. 28. 251. 309. 349.) — There 

 can be no doubt that bollen, at least, has the sense 

 of tumefactus, but I wish to show that in Exod. ix. 

 31. boiled may signify habens eidmum. Ains worth 

 and his predecessors, in their English-Latin dic- 

 tionaries, agree in explaining "a boll of flax" by 

 lint culmus; and "boiled" by habens culmum. 

 Several old English and French dfctionaries ren- 

 der " boll " by tige, to which more modern ones 

 add capstde. The interpretation of Bailey has 

 been given, and others need not be quoted ; cer- 

 tainly not modern ones. I have looked just now 

 at ten old Hebrew lexicons, every one of which 



