10- S.V.MARCH 17, 1906.] NOTES AND QUERIES.
217
custom (and probably wag the custom in
Peel's time) for a minister of the Crown to
write his name on the envelopes of his
letters. Sometimes, no doubt, the name is
written by a secretary; and sometimes, I
think, it is a lithographed signature.
There is a remnant of franking which remains for every member of the House of Commons, viz., he can send a copj r of a Bill by post free if he addresses the paper band in the Vote Office and signs his name in the left lower corner. He then leaves it in the Vote Office. EGBERT PJERPOINT.
DEKKER'S * SWEET CONTENT' (10 th S. v. 106, 194). I should have said that my reference was to the revised and enlarged edition of 4 The Golden Treasury/ which was issued at a popular price in 1904. I regret the over- look, and have to thank MR. BUCHANAN for giving me the opportunity of making this explanation. THOMAS BAYNE.
PORTMAN FAMILY (10 th S. v. 48, 150, 178, 198). MR. HUTTON has gone elaborately into the history of the Pprtman family, with which I am well acquainted ; but his information does not meet the purpose of my query, viz., What authority is there for supposing that the Portman family derives its surname from the " Men at the Gate "1 As a Somerset man, and interested in all appertaining to the county, I am curious to know to what source the legend may be traced. K. T.
COPYRIGHT IN LETTERS (10 th S. v. 128, 176). If your correspondent's question refers to letters which have not been published in the lifetime of the writer, the copyright in such letters, after the writer's death, is (according to English law) in the person to whom the manuscript of the letter belongs. See the recent decision of Macmillan v. Dent, * Law Reports,' 1906, 1 Chancery 101. PELMET.
STEEMSON AND CLIFFE FAMILIES : THORNE QUAY (10 th S. v. 169). Thome Quay is in the parish of Thorne, near Doncaster ; see Hun- ter's * South Yorkshire ' and Tomlinson's ' Hatfield Chace,' 1882, p. 171. The Steemson's may have come of one of the foreign settlers who made the Hatfield drainage in the seven- teenth centur} r . One Steemson was a ship- builder at Paull, on the Humber, 1812 (Poul- son's ' Holderness,' ii. 487) ; and ships were formerly built at Thorne Quay. W. C. B.
LARGE-PAPER MARGINS (10 th S. v. 147). This drawback to uniformity is due to the expense of reimposition, which would involve an alteration of the chases. P. N. R.
BOHEMIAN LANGUAGE (10 th S. v. 168). In
reply to MR. PEARCE, I may say that the
works in English suitable for the study of
Cech are very meagre. Prof. W. R. Morfili
has added a grammar of the language (Claren-
don Press, 1899) to those he wrote of the
sister Slav tongues. This work is not a
manual, however, but a treatise for the
scholar, with exercises, reading lessons, and
a vocabulary. In the introduction Prof.
Morfili refers to grammars of English for
Bohemians written by Prof. W. E. Mourek
and the poet J. V. Sladek. There are
numerous German grammars of Cech.
My friend Prof. Mourek has lately com- pleted the second volume of his Bohemian- English dictionary, the first of which appeared as far back as 1879, and I have constantly heard it cited at Prague. He has also pub- lished a pocket dictionary in two parts (Leipzic, 1896).
Count Liitzow has a short account of the language at the end of his history of Prague (" Mediae val Towns Series"), and frequently alludes to it in his other works.
FRANCIS P. MARCH ANT.
Streatham Common.
See Count Liitzow's ' Historical Sketch of Bohemia and its Literature,' 1896. To the same author we owe likewise an excellent English version, with a commentary, of the Bohemian classic work The Labyrinth of the World,' written by Komensk3% or Corne- nius, in 1623, and published in English by Dent among "The Temple Classics," 1900, reprinted last year. As previously mentioned in 'N. & Q.' by MR. MARCHANT, this work has often been paralleled with ' The Pilgrim's Progress.' H. K.
The best practical Bohemian course is
- Bohemian Made Easy,' by Karel Jonas. Ib
was published in 1890 at Racine, in Wisconsin, U.S., but it can be got from Nutt or any other linguistic bookseller.
JAS. PLATT, Jun.
POEM IN ONE SENTENCE (10 th S. v. 148). When he said that Collins's * Ode to Evening ' contained only one sentence, Hood must have spoken from an imperfect recollection of the joem. Probably the linked sweetness of the irst five stanzas had lingered in his memory t giving him the general impression that the ode formed a continuous period. The five sentences into which it is divided in reprints are those of its original structure. Prac- tically there have never been but two versions of the poem, and these differ in certain forms of expression, not in substance and arrange- ment of stanza. THOMAS BAYNE.
