468
NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. xn. DEC. 11,
than was customary in that period. The
association of the Order with St. Francis is
not necessarily more ribald than the action
of a very innocent club which calls itself the
Whitefriars Club, of which many well-known
men are members.
The principal sources of information about the "monks" would seem to be Charles Johnstone's ' Chrysal,* published in 1760, and Almon's * Life of Wilkes,' published in 1805. Obviously the information in both these books is mere hearsay evidence, the purveying in print of the extravagant kind of libelling of public men which has always gone on, and was much more common in the eighteenth century than at present. Yet the biographers of Wilkes and Dashwood in the ' Dictionary of National Biography ' both accept these sources of information as authorities, whereas they are obviously quite worthless as such. It is exceedingly doubtful if Wilkes was ever a member of the so-called Hell-Fire Club. My information is that he was only twice at Medmenham, and never before 1762, twenty years after the Club was first formed, and then only as a guest, as he states in a letter to Lord Temple. The Club was really founded by Dashwood as a meeting-place for the Opposition of that day, headed by Frederick, Prince of Wales, the father of George III. The careless way in which libels are copied into responsible biographical works without in- vestigation was never more strikingly exemplified than by the persistence of so much fiction concerning Dashwood and Wilkes. The hundred and one contempo- rary references to the Hell-Fire Club are obviously worthless as a means of arriving at facts ; and the whole story of indecent orgies, of a baboon made to impersonate the devil, and the like, may now, I believe, be dismissed into the region of fable.
CLEMENT SHORTER.
WHITBY CHURCH. Can any reader kindly let me know of special incidents, stories, or traditions connected with Whitby Church and Churchyard ? In particular, I wish to recover the more interesting inscriptions on the tombstones now obliterated. I know of those to be found in Gent's ' Hull/
G. AUSTEN, Rector of Whitby.
CLOTHES AND THEIR INFLUENCE. May trespass on the generosity of fellow- readers of ' N. & Q.' and ask them to help me in the following matter ? I am working on what I may call " ence of clothes."
" the psychological influ-
By this I mean the way in
which certain creative artists have found it-
necessary to dress themselves in a particular
way in order to produce a particular piece
of work. Well -known instances are, of
course, Wagner and Handel. I am anxious-
to obtain as many more as possible, with
references to the biographies in which
details are given.
RUDOLPH DE CORDOVA, 4, Greencroft Gardens, South Hampstead, N.VV.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND UNMEANING LATIN COUPLETS : CHARTERHOUSE. In The Times of 17 Nov., 1809, the following statement occurs in one of the leading articles (partially reprinted on the 17th of last month) :
" We recollect a dispute some years ago among the public schools, as to the possibility of furnish- ing the greatest number of hexameter and penta- meter lines from adverbs, conjunctions, preposi- tions, and other words, in themselves unmeaning, without the help of more important context ; when a wonderful production of this race of inexpres- sives appeared, ending, as we remember, with this pentameter :
Quandoquidem, quoniam, quippe, quod, atque quia.
"A folly of a similar kind appears to have possessed the writer of last night in the Govern- ment Evening Paper. . . .If, as Falstaff says, his- productions were ' sawn into quantities,' nineteen parts out of twenty would be found to consist of mere terms of abuse without sense or reason. And we shall, accordingly, on the Charter-house principle, versify a little of it (Quandoquidem, quoniam, &c.)."
Here follow four lines of disconnected words and epithets of abuse.
The Charterhouse contribution to the " dispute " would thus seem to have con- cluded with the above pentameter, com- posed, it will be noticed, of words all meaning "since" or "because." Can any of your readers supply the remainder, or give any particulars as to the "follies" of the other public schools ? J. L. STOKES.
Charterhouse, Godalming.
CHARTERHOUSE GRAMMAR SCHOOL, 1515. One John Jakys entered Winchester College from Winchester, aged ten in 1503, and New College, Oxford, from Nately (? Netley), Hants, 9 April, 1509. He resigned his New College Fellowship in 1515. On 19 Nov., 1534, he became Vicar of Madron, Cornwall, and died in 1535-6. As his career is preserved for us, it is not interesting, except that Mr. Kirby's ' Winchester Scholars,' p. 100, records that he, on leaving New College, " assumpsit onus scotss grammaticalis apud Charterhouse. n This school cannot have anything to do with the Carthusians, whose life is described by Dom Raymund
