290
NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. i. APR. 9, mo.
pedigrees could possibly tell me the name of
her mother, and also give me some informa-
tion regarding the Hamon family. The
daughter of Col. Isaac Hamon married the
Very E/ev. Arthur Champagne, Dean of
Clonmacnoise in Ireland, grandson of the
above-mentioned Josias de Robillard de
Champagne. The Champagnes and the
Hamons came to England after the revoca-
tion of the Edict of Nantes. C. P.
WIRRAL. The western part of Cheshire, between the estuaries of the Mersey and the Dee, is called the Wirral Peninsula. What are the meaning and origin of that word ?
W. T. LYNN.
Blackheath.
"Do NOT PLAY AGNES." I find these words in a letter from Dr. Johnson to Mrs. Thrale, dated October, 1777. Do they refer to any proverb concerning elderly persons who play at youth? May "Agnes 3 ' be derived from " agneau,' 4 and the phrase mean the same thing as ' ' mutton dressed lamb-fashion " ? The sentence in which Johnson uses these words begins : * ' Do not think to be young beyond the time. ?i Can another instance of ' ' playing Agnes " be quoted. Y. T.
HENRY BOYLE, 1826. Is anything known of him ? No biographical dictionary to which I have access has any reference to him. He issued in 1826 "The Universal Chronologist, &c., from the Creation to 1825, inclusive, translated from the French of M. St. Martin, with an elaborate con- tinuation." D. M. R.
SUNDIAL INSCRIPTION. A recent number of Ulntermediaire, quoting ' Au Pays de P Absinthe, 1 par Emond Couleru (Monbe- liard, 1908), says that a sundial on the gate of the ancient monastery of the Augustines at Pontarlier bears the device :
HOM HORA AETERN. DEO.
Homini hora, seternitas Deo. Did the Augustines commonly use this motto on their solar dial-plates ? A. S.
BURIAL UNDER RIVERS. Is it known that there is, or ever has been, in any part of the world, a general custom of burying the dead under rivers ? I am aware that Alaric was entombed under Busento, and that Com- mander V. L. Cameron in 'Across Africa,' vol. ii. p. 110, informs his readers that a similar rite takes place when a chief of the
Ura dies, and also that a story of like
character figures in Persian romance. These
things were mentioned by me at 9 S. iii. 69.
At the present time I am anxious to know whether these are isolated cases only, or survivals that have come down from some remote time when it was the custom to make rivers not only the burial-place for chieftains, but also that of their tribesmen, or, as we should now say, the common folk also. I have taken some trouble to settle this question, but the labour has been without fruit. ASTARTE.
SIR T. BROWNE ON OLYBIUS'S LAMP.
(11 S. i. 227.)
THIS allusion is explained in great part by Sir Thomas Browne himself. Among the short notes which, according to Archdeacon Jeffery, the editor of the first edition of ' Christian Morals,' were found in the author's original MS., is the following on "like the lamp in Olybius his Urn" ' ' Which after many hundred years was found burning under ground, and went out as soon as the air came to it." Further, in ' Pseudodoxia Epidemical Book iii. chap, xxi., we read " Why some lamps included in close bodies have burned many hundred years, as that discovered in the sepulchre of Tullia, the sister [sic] of Cicero, and that of Olibius many years after near Padua."
For an account of the discovery on 16 April, 1485, near the Appian Way, of the body of a Roman lady preserved in a perfect state in a coating of ointment, and wrongly identified as that of Cicero's daughter Tullia, see Lanciani, ' Pagan and Christian Rome, 2 pp. 294-301, where a long list is given of modern writers on the subject and of con- temporary documents that deal with it.
Dr. Greenhill in his notes on the passage in the ' Christian Morals ? points out that it is twice mentioned ~by Jeremy Taylor : in a letter to John Evelyn, 29 Aug., 1657 (vol. i. p. Ixvii. of Eden's ed. of Taylor's works), " The flame of a candle can consist or sub- sist, though the matter be extinct. I will not instance Licetus his lampes, whose flame had stood still fifteen hundred years, viz., in Tullie's wife's vault " ; and in Sermon XII. of ' Twenty-Seven Sermons preached at Golden Grove ; being for the Summer Half- year J (Eden, vol. iv. p. 481), " In a tomb of Terentia certain lamps burned under
