452
NOTES AND QUERIES. [io* s. v. JUNE 9,
commander of the Royal Artillery, and sub-
sequently Lieut.-General. George William-
son, who was father of Lieut. - General Sir
Adam Williamson, K.C.B., Colonel 72nd
Highlanders, of Avebury House, Wilts.
The officers of the 2nd Battalion 15th Foot possess a key to the picture.
G. H. JOHNSTON, Lieut.-Col.
I copy the following from some family papers. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the statements :
'* John Gawler was in business in Quebec when he married E. Buckley, the intimate friend of Mrs. Chapone. He was present (probably as a volunteer) at Wolfe's attack, and on his return to England furnished Benjamin West with some of the details for his famous picture of the death of Wolfe. By way of acknowledgment of the service thus rendered the artist put him into the picture. He is shown on the right of the officer who bears the colours."
H. H.
" PLANE "= SYCAMORE (10 th S. v. 407). The quotation is from * Clyde : a Poem,' canto i. 1. 565. The author was John Wilson (1720-89), who was born at Lanark, and, after having been for a time parish schoolmaster of Lesmahagow in his native country, con- ducted Greenock Grammar School from 1767 till within two years of his death. The latter appointment was given him on the understanding that he was to avoid " the profane and unprofitable art of poem- making," a thing, writes Scott in 1803, "now as unlikely to happen in Greenock as in London " (* Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1 ii. 176, note). Wilson's 'Clyde ' appeared in 1764, and Leyden, editing from an enlarged and imperfectly amended copy, included it in his | Scottish Descriptive Poems,' 1803. The editor justifiably considers Wilson's work "the first Scottish loco-descriptive poem of any merit." THOMAS BAYNE.
TAEOT CARDS (10 th S. v. 407). The cards referred to by MR. PLATT are 96 of the 97 cards of a pack for the game of minchiate of Florence. Such packs are Nps. I. 256 and 257 of the collection in the British Museum (Willshire, Supplement, pp. 3-6), and Nos. 44-63 of Lady Charlotte Schreiber's collection.
An account of the game of minchiate by Kobert Smith is to be found in Archoeologia, vol. xy. p. 140. Shorter notices of the game are given in the works on playing-cards by Singer, Merlin, and D'Allemagne. The principal Italian treatises on the game are
- Regole generali del nobilissimo gioco delli
Minchiate,' Roma, 1728 (by Luigi Bernardi) ;
- Regole generali del giuoco delle Minchiate,'
Firenze, 1781, &c. ; * II giuoco delle Minchiate
capitolo,' Livorno, 1752 ; and * Giuochi delle
Minchiate, Ombre, &c.,' Roma, 1747 (by
Brunetti). The last work is the one most
frequently quoted by modern writers, but as
it is the only one of the four that I possess,
I cannot saj r if it is the best. F. JESSEL.
The pack a minchiate or germimi pack is incomplete. It should contain 97 cards : four suits of 14, the matto, 35 numbered atouts, and 5 unnumbered Stella, luna, sole, il mondo, and fama volans. A full list is to found in Archceologia (1900), Ivii. 185 ; a description in Journal of the Society of Arts-, vol. xlix. (1901), p. 317 ; illustrations in Merlin, * Origine des Cartes' (1869), plates 13-19. ROBERT LEWIS STEELE.
This pack is apparently an incomplete set of that described by Papus (* The Tarot of the Bohemians,' trans. Morton, 1892) as the minchiate of Florence, which consists of the 56 cards of the four suits and of 40 major arcana, besides the "fool," which is numbered 0, making 97 in all. Mantegna's pack mentioned in the same book had 50 " clefs," as Eliphaz Levi called them. MR. PLATT may consult the works of the latter, either in the original or in Waite's 'Mysteries of Magic' (Redway, 1886). I would refer him also to Westcott's ' Magical Ritual of the Sanctum Regnum' (Redway, 1896) and Mathers's 'The Tarot' (Redway, 1888).
E. E. STREET. [MB. J. S. McTEAB also thanked for reply.]
MR. BRADLEY'S 'HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN SOUTH WALES' (10 th S. v. 143, 209). I shall say no more to disturb Mr. Bradley's confidence in the superiority of his knowledge of Welsh to Miss Braddon's, beyond con- fronting that lady's "Lochwithian " with his own " Glencothi." But when he accuses me of being wrong about the Welsh name for the Bridge of the Blessed Ford, he is not playing the game, for I said nothing about the ending -aid, which does not appear in his book, but criticized -aiad, which does. I have said that these mistakes can be easily corrected in a second edition, for more often than not they vary the meaning of the words rather than make nonsense of them. Mr. Bradley's
- Pontrhydfen-digaiad " is capable of bearing
the meaning "Bridge of Unenclosed Ben's Ford."
Mr. Bradley's readers should be cautioned that their guide's statement, 4 'In the Welsh- speaking districts, whether north or south, if you have once mastered the alphabet arid a few leading rules of accent, you can scarcely go far wrong in a place-name" (p. 79), is not
