160
NOTES AND QUERIES. tn s. i. FEB. 19, 1910.
We should be much surprised if Mr. Heath coulc
substantiate his statement that there is an Arabi<
shamrakh equivalent to the Irish " shamrock '
and that " the leaf was held sacred in Iran as
symbolical of the Persian Triads " (p. 192). Th
Egyptian crux ansata (ankh) was the symbol no1
of strength or wisdom (p. 104), but of life. Therr
is no verb dubo, to dip or dive, in Gothic (p. 78
from which the " Dove " can be derived there is
daupjan, to dip and even if there were, this
derivation would not make the bird the pro-
per symbol of baptism (p. 78), which is due to the
Gospel history. These mistakes, and a number of
misprints (e.g., pp. 51, 55, 59, 114, 135), make
the book hardly a safe one for beginners.
The Edinburgh Review for January is excellent and varied. The opening article deals with ' Industry and Employment,' noticing three Important books of last year : ' Industrial Efficiency,' by Dr. Shadwell ; ' The Industrial System,' by Mr. J. A. Hobson ; and ' Unemploy- ment,' by Mr. W. H. Beveridge. The last is rightly described as an admirable monograph. Many results and facts will be found here briefly stated. Mr. Beveridge, for instance, shows that there is an irreducible minimum of unemployment, and rejects the possibility of curing it by State aid, advocating the setting-up of Labour Exchanges and insurance. ' Lorenzo de Medici ' is at once an able and, we believe, a fair summary of a great man. ' Pitt and the Triple Alliance, 1788- 1791,' does not interest us so much as the account of ' Governor Pitt,' a fighter and administrator of note who is little known to the ordinary reader. The article on ' Moliere ' considers the typical excellence of the French as a race and its literary results. The writer sensibly emphasizes a point often forgotten by those who canonize the great dramatists of the world that Moliere composed his plays not for posterity, but with an eye to the actors, the playhouse, and the audience he had to use or satisfy. Maternal love and mothers are almost unknown in his comedies, " because there was no ' old woman' in the company." ' Edgar Allan Poe ' is an article which strikes us as essen- tially fair to that disordered genius, and judicious in its verdict as to his best work. His worst work, we may add, is so bad that no one who has not read it can realize its feebleness. The long article on vol. xiv. of ' L' Empire Liberal,' by the veteran statesman Emile Ollivier, deals with the War of 1870, which has been the subject of much dispute among historians, and is not yet wholly cleared up. The analysis of the motives and ideas of Napo- leon III. is well done.
The Edinburgh ends with an article on .' The Lords' Debate on the Finance Bill,' also .subject of the last article in The Quarterly, which includes under the heading ' The Appeal to the Nation,' ' The People's Budget,' by Mr. Lloyd George. The Quarterly, a venerable institution, has long yielded to the popular taste for signed articles, and eight of thirteen in the present number bear the names of their authors. Mr. Stephen Reynolds in ' What the Poor Want ' seems to us to lack the philosophic and economic knowledge necessary to discuss a very difficult problem. On the other hand, ' Before and After i-he Descent from Elba,' by Sir Charles Dilke, shows a wide and unusual command of the scattered writings, the gradual realization of
which is leading us to modify received history.
The main result of inquiry is that Napoleon's
return from- Elba did not come as a thunderclap
to the Powers, and that Lord William Bentinck
has not been given the credit he deserved for his
services. Mr. Roger Fry, writing on ' Oriental
Art,' swells the chorus of praise of methods till
recently little understood in the West. Indeed,
when we have once appreciated the full value of the
masterpieces of the East, we if we may include
ourselves in " the cultivated public " are to have
nothing more to say to the vast mass of modern
Western painting. Our artists are to purify their
style by returning to the essential principles
revealed to us by the East.
Mr. Percy Lubbock has an able article on ' George Meredith,' though perhaps it is not sufficiently extended to consider Meredith's philosophy. Mr. Horace Hutchinson is one of the earliest, and certainly one of the best, of writers on the game of Westward Ho and St. Andrews, and his ' Thirty Years of Golf ' deals well with the astonishing advance of the game. There are several other articles of value which deserve notice, but we content ourselves with saying that, in these days of pretentious and perfunctory writing, to neglect The Quarterly is to miss a great deal of sound comment soundly expressed. It is rather odd, by the by, that the article on ' Jacopone da Todi : the Poet of the " Stabat Mater," ' is not signed, for the writer begins on a personal note, talks of sharing a friend's carriage, and visiting six years earlier all the Franciscan shrines within reach.
in
We must call special attention to the folloiving
notices :
ON all communications must be written the name and address of the sender, not necessarily for pub- lication, but as a guarantee of good faith.
EDITORIAL communications should be addressed to "The Editor of 'Notes and Queries ' "Adver- tisements and Business Letters to "The Pub- lishers "at the Office, Bream's Buildings, Chancery Lane, E.C.
To secure insertion of communications corre- spondents must observe the following rules. Let each note, query, or reply be written on a separate slip of paper, with the signature of the writer and such address as he wishes to appear. When answer- ing queries, or making notes with regard to previous entries in the paper, contributors are requested to put in parentheses, immediately after the exact leading, the series, volume, and page or pages to which they refer. Correspondents who repeat queries are requested to head the second com- munication " Duplicate."
E. R. MARSHALL ("What the dickens"). The N.E.D.,' s.v. f dickens, says: "Apparently substi- tuted for 'devil,' as having the same initial sound." The earliest quotations are from ' The Merry Wives of Windsor ' (1598) and T. Heywood's ' 1 Edward IV.' loLKJ).
D. B. Outside our scope.
J. WILLCOCK. Forwarded.
