66
NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. x. JULY 25, IMS.
As the only son of the late William
Warden, author of ' Letters from St. Helena,'
I need not say how pleased I am to read
-what MB. E. MARSTON kindly says upon
this subject. He seems to me to be per-
fectly right, except that the letters in ques-
tion were written to my mother, then Miss
Elizabeth Hutt of Appley Towers, Ryde.
Several of them are now in our possession,
postmarked " St. Helena." We also have
my father's journal, which is written upon
Government paper supplied to the ships
in the Navy, so there can be no doubt of
the authenticity and genuineness of the
book. It had a very large circulation
when first published by Ackermann in 1816,
but has now, as MR. MARSTON says, dropped
out of memory ; the contents, however,
have been largely used for concocted stories
.about Napoleon by both French and English
writers. One instance I will give. In a
French book called ' Le Cabinet Noir '
pp. 160 to 256 are an exact copy, through
a French version, of part of my father's
book. This book purports to be " translated
from the original documents and manu-
scripts " by C. H. F. Blackith, and was
published by Longmans & Co. in 1887.
I shall be glad to give MR. MARSTON such information as I can. We have also some curious relics of Napoleon among others, the gold buckles out of his knee-breeches, which in parting Napoleon took out and gave to my father in response to his request for some small personal memento. He had previously received a magnificent set of ivory chessmen as a present.
GEORGE COCKBURN WARDEN.
SYDNEY DOBELL AND HIS EDINBURGH
FRIENDS. The intimation by Mr. Bertram
D obeli that he has undertaken to write
a memoir of Sydney D obeli will perhaps
revive interest in the work of the poet, and
elicit, it is hoped, hitherto unpublished
facts concerning the author of ' Balder '
and some of his contemporaries and friends.
Sydney D obeli was one of a distinguished
group of men of letters, consisting, among
others, of the author of ' A Life Drama,'
Gerald Massey, Hugh Miller, and Prof.
Aytoun, all resident in Edinburgh in the
mid fifties of last century. During his three
years' sojourn in the Scottish capital Sydney
Dobell assisted Smith in procuring the
Secretaryship of the University, and jointly
with Alexander Smith he published when
in Edinburgh ' Sonnets on the War.' In-
cidents of the Crimean campaign and of
the Indian Mutiny also formed the theme,
fifty odd years ago, of a number of poems
by Gerald Massey. Possibly all those
named above foregathered at Craigcrook,
the hospitable home, west from Edinburgh
two or three miles, of John Hunter, to whom
Dr. Walter C. Smith dedicated ' The Bishop's
Walk,' his first volume in verse ; and it is
not improbable that in his poem ' Craig-
crook Castle ' Gerald Massey makes allusion
to Dobell " our poet, Rubens " and other
members of the group. Was Sydney Dobell,
one wonders, familiar with Patrick Proctor
Alexander, friend of Alexander Smith, and
the editor as well as writer of the memoir
in * Last Leaves ' ? The author of a clever
burlesque of Carlyle, of an able criticism
of J. S. Mill's ' Freedom of the Will,' of a
volume entitled ' Moral Causation,' and a
brochure on Spiritualism, P. P. Alexander
is nevertheless absent from the ' D.N.B.'
He contributed the article ' Golf ' to the
ninth edition of * The Ency. Brit.,' and,
curiously, his name appears in the recently
issued Times handbook ' 2,000 Men of the
Day' !
Thoroughly Bohemian in temperament and habits, Alexander had numerous friends in the literary circles of Glasgow and Edin- burgh, and besides producing the works mentioned, he contributed verse at intervals to Fraser's Magazine The Glasgow Citizen, and other periodicals. As in the case of Dobell, Massey, and Smith, war was both the stimulus and subject of some of Alex- ander's most characteristic poems. He died in 1886, and it has been the regret of his friends that no memoir of " Pat Alex- ander," as he was familiarly called, has been published. The now rare little volume, edited by Thomas Spencer Baynes and Emeritus Professor Lewis Campbell 'Alma Mater's Mirror St. Andrews, 1887,' con- tains a tributary sketch of Alexander from the pen of the Rev. W. W. Tulloch. D.D.
J. GRIGOR.
105, Choumert Road, Peckham.
THE "DEEDLER": " DEEDLING." In The Manchester Guardian of 13 April is a most interesting communication on " deed- ling " by Mr. Bertram Smith, " deedling " being, he considers, a lost art, and the "deedler" himself obsolete. The " deed- ler," however, is not quite obsolete, nor the art quite lost, though seldom put into prac- tice. The "deedling" is done by the mouth, the lips somewhat apart, and the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth. Mr. Bertram Smith says that " deedling was the outcome of an absolute poverty of
