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NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. vi. APRIL 24, 1920
greatest part are good, and some of the pieces
capital. I have made a list of nearly the whole
omitting only a few which were inferior to the
rest."
At the end of his catalogue Sir Thomas Gage
has written :
" Note 1818. The Grand Duke has bought the five best pictures of the Gerini Gallery : the rest are for sale but few are disposed of. The prices asked are absurd and the pictures worth very little."
The Italian nota gives only the sale numbers and artists' names, so it is difficult to identify them in Gage's list. At the British Institution of 1855, nos. 71 and i Lord Caledon exhibited two portraits as by Bronzino, a man and a lady, and these are doubtless nos. 276 and 313 in the nota, where the nephew and the uncle are differentiated. The portrait of the man (perhaps Gage's "man in a red cap, head too small") is described by Waagen ( ' Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain,' 1857, p. 151) as of " a young man of noble features, a letter in his right hand, his left placed on his hip ; of spirited conception and careful execution in somewhat gray tone."
Lord Caledon had two pictures by Bassano, both of which were at the Old Masters, Burlington House, in 1882, nos. 143, 148, ' The Departure of the Israelites ' and ' Dives and Lazarus/ both 45 in. by 64 in. The former only was mentioned by Waagen (p. 148), who was not quite sure about the subject of the picture, which may be identical with Gage's " Peasants and Cattle, excellent."
The Palazzo Gerini still contained some pictures when Mariana Starke published the ninth edition of her ' Travels in Europe,' 1836, " though the finest part of this collection has been sold." W. ROBERTS.
18 King's Avenue, S.W.4.
SHAKESPEARIAN A.
SONNET 125, 'THE CANOPY.' Sonnet 125 begins :
Were't aught to me I bore the canopy,
With my extern the outward honouring
The late Dean Beeching in his edition of the Sonnets has the following note on the last three words of the first line : " A symbol of outward honour, canopies being carried over royal persons in processions."
Mr. J. Thomas Looney in his ' Shakespeare Identified ' remarks that : "If this passage can be shown to have any direct connexion with the functions of Lord Great Chamber- lain, it will be a very valuable direct proof of
our thesis." His thesis is that Edward De
Vere, Earl of Oxford, who had the office of
Lord Great Chamberlain, wrote Shake-
speare's works. But surely, if looking after
the canopy was his business, he would not
have actually carried it, or helped to carry
it, himself. That would be the duty of
persons of less rank whom he would appoint
for the business. Mr. Looney refers to the
coronation of James I., which is a suitable
date for the sonnet, and I have always con-
nected the expression " bore the canopy "
with the aforesaid coronation. Now in old
Hastings Church several memorials attached
to the walls speak of persons who carried the
canopy at various coronations. So I take
this duty to have been a privilege of the
Cinque Ports. Had Shakespeare any con-
nexion with them ? Or does the line mean
that Shakespeare was maliciously foiled in
an attempt to be included among the
bearers, as Samuel Butler suggests ? It
is possible that at the last moment some
Cinque Ports person appeared, and, claiming
his right, turned Shakespeare out of the
position he hoped to occupy.
Of course, there were other occasions on which the canopy was used, e.g., in Queen Elizabeth's progress to St. Paul's after the news of the defeat of the Armada in 1588. There is nothing on the subject in the ' Court ' section of the generally encyclo- paedic ' Shakespeare's England.'
HIPPOCLIDES.
A FAMILIAR MISQUOTATION. Ir ' 2 Henry IV.,' Act V., sc. iii., when Pistol brought the news of the accession of Henry V., he was in no hurry to explain definitely what had happened, and Falstaff exclaimed : " For God's sake, talk like a man of this world." That at least is what the world in general thinks he said ; but the reader who knows that Falstaff is the speaker will seek for the line in vain in Bartlett's 'Familiar Quotations,' though Pistol's reply in the very next line is included. The fact is that Pistol spoke of :~-
tidings lucky joys,
And golden times and happy news of price,
and Falstaff naturally replied :
'. pray thee now, deliver them like a man of this world. V. iii, 101.
The "them " without the previous lines is unintelligible ; so the reply has been altered nto a form which is clear by itself, with a stronger appeal for the facts at the beginning of it. When this was first done I do not
