a

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standard English-not an impossible But they did not: they kept their temper. everywhere phonetic English without If there was all this trouble with a few branding the latter idea as one broached alterations, what would it be with many? only for the purpose of misleading and making mischief.” So far as I know, I am the only person I will not believe that who has dared to publish an English educaany one would write in N. & Q.' with that tional book with any simplified spellings. intent or in that humour; and did I think But then I had not to earn my living. I am the imputation personal, I should repel it glad to see PROF. SKEAT'S admirable notes with a positive denial. Further, I think that, on spelling reform, for I fear that very few although these pages are devoted to the scholars whose opinions one would like to literary and studious, not many of these hear will speak. At all events, I observe would represent the motive of the great that those who have advocated reforms majority of their practical and intelligent take good care that they follow the old countrymen-who, though their abilities spellings in their books. have not been directed to the academic study of their language, have nevertheless to be impossible. Any sudden, wholesale change I believe a clear judgment as to the impracticability by degrees. Similar improvements have But much might be done of the proposed spelling change-as crass ignorance of an obstinate and indocile objected to and fought step by step. Wilson "the been made in music, but each has been public. May not their vision be the clearer in A new dictionary of music as unaffected by the enthusiasm begotten says: (p. 264) of study? Every innovation tending to imsedition, and infidelity." provement was stigmatised as immorality, position taken up by most of our present This is much the scholars, schoolmasters, and such-like interested in education. will emanate, any more than national reforms From them no reforms emanate from rulers.

MR. STREET has ably and temperately demonstrated the obstacles against the establishment of a standard; and as the strenuous and worthy American President appears to have deferred to public opinion, it seems likely that the standard will not be set up either at New York or London, but that the old language-occasionally emended and enriched as heretofore-will be suffered to pursue its rugged course, and that we may still enjoy its analysis.

W. L. RUTTON.

I have great sympathy with the simplification of spelling, and particularly with the artistic appearance of print. I have given practical effect to some of the ideas I have on this subject in the course of the five hundred pages of my 'Swimming' bibliography. Dire was the prospect of lashings from the press which printers, publishers, and friends held out to me. But the press never took any notice of the spelling. reviewed the book most favourably from It an easy standpoint, but not from graphical, educational, scholarly, or scientific a bibliopoint of view, as I had hoped.

To get into the very simple alterations in spelling I made took my printers a very long time, during which period I had to fight them day by day. I insisted on the spelling being altered to mine, notwithstanding that I had to pay for all their mistakes. Often I made such marginal comments that I fully expected them to say, Mr. Thomas, we are not accustomed to being spoken to in this manner, and we must request you to find another printer."

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modern tendency seems to take a backward Instead of simplification or reform, the step, as, endings we do not pronounce, or leaving for example, putting French out letters instead of keeping words in their original form, as typist (which should be pronounced typ ist") instead of typeist." I have always known the word wasteful," but lately I have seen the word e that for some time I did not know what waste" so altered by the omission of the was meant by 66 wastrel." PROF. SKEAT English word, it may easily happen that its says (vi. 450): "If a German meets a new spelling affords no clue to the sound." Wastrel" is an instance of an Englishman finding a word which affords no clue to the sound. I do not know whether to pro"wasteful." nounce it wastrel " (like mass ") or like

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ever, is preferable to the tyranny of coercion. To go on with the present muddle, howTo be dictated to by an be the worst thing that could happen for Academy" would the language. Such a body would probably begin by insisting on disfiguring our letters with accents-a brainless and practically useless expedient. These accents have been enforced in France, and, worse Spain, where, contrary to the opinions of still, in scholars, a sort of Inquisition compels all the printers to adopt some new accents the

W. Wood's Tales and Traditions of the High-Fully explained in Nares's Glossary.' Peak, Derbyshire.'

The meaning of the phrase "to set up one's rest -now obsolete, but fairly common in the seventeenth century-is (1) to make up one's mind, to commit oneself J. Scoffern's 'Stray Leaves of Science and unreservedly to a course; (2) to pause for

The phrase is used in a different sense describes the sun, at the close of day, disfrom the above in the lines from Prior, and continuing for a time the labour of shining. is there employed in its literal sense, I fancy that this sense of "rest" is not quite that is to say, to pause for rest or to halt. obsolete. T. M. W. has probably heard it (It will be remembered that Shakespeare said of an actor, temporarily out of an uses it in a somewhat similar manner in engagement, that he was resting," and the King Lear,' I. i. 125-6: "I....thought term is constantly in use of other workers to set my rest On her kind nursery," and temporarily out of employment. in Romeo and Juliet,' V. iii. 109-10.) This F. A. RUSSELL. view seems to be borne out in the subsequent lines in A Better Answer' :

The phrase is Shakespeare's. Romeo says:
O, here

Will I set up my everlasting rest.
And surely he means that he will take his
rest for ever, otherwise die. This inter-
pretation is confirmed by the passages
quoted from Pepys and Prior, for in them
the phrase must mean "take my (or his)
rest." Steevens says that it means to
be determined to any purpose"; and no
doubt it does mean this in Act IV. of
Romeo and Juliet' :-

The County Paris hath set up his rest
That you shall rest but little.

to me.

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E. YARDLEY.

As the perusal of Pepys's' Diary' is to me a constantly renewed recreation, and I do not remember ever stumbling at the use of this phrase, I presume-perhaps ignorantly -its meaning has been sufficiently obvious In the instance first quoted by T. M. W. does not the diarist record his intention to discontinue for a time going to plays? Again, in the second quotation, Pepys infers that the entertainment provided by his host was so bountiful that he is not likely to renew it for some little time

to come.

So Prior, with the usual poetic licence,

4, Nelgarde Road, Catford, S. E.

THREE-CANDLE FOLK-LORE (10 S. vi. 508). In the old days of candles as the ordinary way of lighting up a room it was considered to be unlucky for any one to bring a lighted candle into a room where two were already alight, and some one was sure to blow one of them out, just in the same way as a dash would be made at a table when a knife and fork lay crossed. When I was a boy folks used to see many things freets" such strange gave them happenings as three candles moving about, death signs, beckoning fingers, and ghosts at certain corners standing with their heads under their arms-all sure an' sartin tokens o' summat gooin' ter happen." I knew of several Derbyshire villagers who 'gifted" in the way of reading "signs," and finding in commonplace things" omens for good or bad. THOS. RATCLIFFE. Worksop.

which

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were

name

or found dead with his coat turned. He evidently thought that the fairies had misled him. Keightley's own book shows abundantly that there existed quite up to his time the belief in fairies amongst the lower orders. I do not think that it ever reached much higher. Shakspeare and Milton, though they wrote about fairies, did not believe in them. E. YARDLEY.

or pronunciation of German Jarman was discussed. From its Latin form, Germanus became, with the French, Germain, with the feminine Germaine, and is identical with Jermyn, which became in England a surname-written Germyn in The Paston Letters,' i. 160. Can any correspondent suggest the reason for its first use as a name in the family of Pole of Radbourne ?

German de la Pole-b. 1482 (?), d. 1552/3 -of Radbourne, Esq. (great-grandfather of the aforesaid knight), was the first so named, and one of his daughters, Jane, married her father's fourth cousin German Pole, of Wakebridge, co. Derby, Esq., who died in 1588, aged seventy-five, without surviving issue.

R. E. E. CHAMBERS.

Pill House, Bishop's Tawton, Barnstaple. FAIRY-HAUNTED KENSINGTON: TICKELL AND THE DROOPING LILY (10 S. vii. 1).— A notice of Tickell's poetry without reference to his ballad of 'Colin and Lucy' is incomplete. In it are well-known lines :

I hear a voice you cannot hear

Which says I must not stay:

I see a form you cannot see
Which beckons me away.

:

In it also are the following lines
Oh! have you seen a lily pale
When beating rains descend?
So drooped the slow-consuming maid,
Her life now near the end.

This is obviously the original of Lady Anne
Lindsay's verse :-

6

She drooped like a lily beat down by the hail. But there are similar thoughts in classical and English poetry: 'Iliad,' book viii. 11. 306-8; Eneid,' book ix. ll. 435-7 ; "Metamorphoses,' book x. ll. 190–95. Ovid seems to have been the first to mention the lily as the drooping flower. I subjoin a few English parallel passages :—

I hang the head
As flowers with frost, or grass beat down with
Titus Andronicus.'

storms.

Like a fair flower, surcharged with dew, she weeps.
Milton, Samson Agonistes."
As lilies, overcharged with rain, they bend
"Their beauteous heads.

Waller, 'To my Lord Admiral.' Keightley in his Fairy Mythology' makes, I think, a somewhat foolish remark: "With the 'Kensington Gardens' of Tickell our fairy-poetry may be said to have terminated. Some attempts to revive it have been made in the present century. But vain are such efforts. The belief is gone. And, divested of it, such poetry can produce no effect."

The belief is not gone. A few years ago an
Irish peasant who had lost his way was

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BELL INSCRIPTIONS AT SIRESA (10 S. vi.
465).—MR. DODGSON's first inscription re-
calls the inscription on the Vatican Obelisk:
Ecce Crux Domini-Fugite partes ad-
versæ-Vicit Leo de tribu Juda," the last
clause of which is a quotation from the
Apocalypse (v. 5). This obelisk was ori-
ginally brought from Heliopolis by Caligula,
who set it up
66 inter duas metas " (i.e., in
the Vatican, which he built, and Nero
the middle of the spina) of the circus on
finished. Near this obelisk St. Peter was
in situ till it was removed by Sixtus V. to
martyred about 67 A.D. It remained
its present position. The inscription dates
from this removal in 1586, on which occa-
sion the round ball at the top-which in the
Middle Ages was, without any historical
foundation, supposed to contain the ashes
of Julius Cæsar-was replaced by the pre-
sent cross, in which a relic of the True Cross
is enclosed. JOHN B. WAINEWRIGHT.

S. vi. 507). These letters have not been
MACAULAY'S LETTERS TO RANDALL (10
added to any of the English editions of Sir
Macaulay.'
G. O. Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Lord
W. H. PEET.

39, Paternoster Row, E.C.