ii s. i. APR. 16, 1910.] NOTES AND QUERIES.
RICHARD HENRY ALEXANDER BENNET
(11 S. i. 189, 238). MR. BEAVEN is assuredly
too positive in stating that R. H. A. Bennet
was at no date member for Newport, Corn-
wall. According to the official return of
Members of Parliament, issued in 1878
(part ii. p. 138), " Richard Henry Alexander
Bennett (sic), Esq., of Beckingham, county
Kent,* 1 was returned for that borough on
12 Feb., 1770, for the vacancy caused by the
resignation of William de Grey, the Attorney-
General, in order to stand for Cambridge
University in place of Charles Yorke, the new
Lord Chancellor, who committed suicide
three days after his appointment. Bennet
held the seat until the next general election,
which took place in October, 1774. Four
years before he became member for Newport,
and at a time when he is described in Burke
as of Babraham, Cambs, he had married
Elizabeth Amelia, eldest daughter of Peter
Burrell, Surveyor-General of Crown Lands,
who resided at Beckenharn, and who had
sat for the adjoining borough of Launceston
from a by election in 1758 to the dissolution
of 1767. And this connexion is of the more
importance to be noted because Burrell's
second daughter, Isabella Susannah, was
married in 1775 to Algernon, first Earl of
Beverley, and his third, Frances Julia, in
1779, as second wife, to Hugh, second Duke
of Northumberland, the former's elder brother,
who, by purchase of the Werrington estate
from the last Humphry Morice in 1775, had
become " patron " of both Launceston and
Newport. It is therefore no surprise to find
Capt. Richard Henry Alexander Bennet,
R.N., returned for Launceston at the general
election of July, 1802. He was not re-chosen
at that of December, 1806 ; but on 14 Jan.,
1807, he was elected for Enniskillen for a
vacancy caused by a double return. At the
general election of the following May he
was not again chosen for this Irish borough,
having offered himself in the Whig interest
for Ipswich, where he was placed last on the
poll. But on 17 July he was once more
returned for Launceston, in place of the
Duke of Northumberland's eldest son,
Earl Percy, who chose to sit for the county
of Northumberland ; and Bennet continued
to represent this one of the Duke's Cornish
constituencies until May, 1812, only four
months before the next general election,
when he accepted the Chiltern Hundreds (not
improbably because his ducal patron had
now joined the Tory party), and disappeared
from Parliamentary life.
If MR. BEAVEN'S statement is correct that
this " Post Captain, R.N.," as he is described
in his last electoral return, died in October,
1818, at the age of 37, he could not have
been, of course, the Richard Henry Alexander
Bennet who sat for Newport in 1770-74 ;
but the quotation by MR. W. ROBERTS
from the contemporary ' Memoirs of Eminent
English Statesmen 2 (1806) dates the post-
captaincy itself at 1796 ; and this despite
the added erroneous statement that Bennet
was then sitting in Parliament for the
first time would seem the more likely to be
correct. ALFRED F. ROBBINS.
' THE CANADIAN BOAT SONG' (11 S. i. 81, 136, 256). Some discussion has taken place in Canada as to the authorship of the familiar ' Boat Song l ; but it appears to me that it is impossible to arrive at the conclusion that any one but Moore wrote it, if his own words are accepted. In the published letters ascribed to him and I am not aware that their genuineness is disputed he writes as follows with reference to the song :
" I wrote these words to an air which our boatmen sung to us frequently. [He had been travelling down the St. Laurence.] The wind was so unfavourable that they were obliged to row all the way, and we were five days in descending the river to Montreal .... Our ' voyageurs ' had good voices and sung perfectly in tune together. The original words of the air to which I adapted these stanzas appeared to be a long incoherent story of which I could understand but little from the barbarous pronunciation of the Canadians. It begins :
Dans mon chemin j'ai rencontr^ (bis) Deux chevaliers tres bon montes. I ventured to harmonize this air, and have pub- lished it."
L. A. M. LOVEKIN.
Montreal.
In addition to MR. BAYNE'S contention at p. 136 that Lockhart's statement of having received the verses ' ' from a friend now in Canada n cannot be accepted as establishing a fact, it may be noted that if Lockhart's words are to be taken literally they could not apply to John Gait at the time of publication, for not only was Gait not in Canada in Sep- tember, 1829, but he had then been in London for some months. This is plain from an examination of letters to be found in the Appendix to Gait's ' Autobiography,' in the memoir prefixed to Messrs. Blackwood's issue in one volume, in 1844, of ' The Annals of the Parish ' and ' The Ayrshire Legatees,' and in Mrs. Oliphant's ' William Blackwood and his Sons.' In the first-named place there is quoted a letter from Robert Troup, an American, to an English M.P., dated
