6
NOTES AND QUERIES. [ii s. v. JAN. 6, 191-2.
All mouths I copy from my own ;
And when I look for eyes I see 'em as I walk abroad.
For colour, shape, and size.
Very likely this pamphlet was an ephe- meral local production, now quite unknown.
BOOKWORM.
PEPYS'S ' DIARY' : BRAYBROOKE EDITION Pepys evidently makes a mistake in the name of a town which he visited on 8 June, 1668. I write to point it out, as there is no note in my edition mentioning the error, though I think it must have been noticed before this.
On 8 June he travelled from Bedford to Newport (evidently Newport Pagnell, I think), then to Buckingham. Then he goes on :
" At night to Neicport Pagnell ; and there a good pleasant country town, but few people in it. A very fair and like a Cathedral Church ; and I saw the leads, and a vault that goes far under ground : the town and so most of this country, well watered. Lay here well, and rose next day by four o'clock ; few people in the town : and so away. Reckoning for supper, 17s. 6d. ; poor, Qd. Mischance to the coach, but no time lost.
" 9th (Tuesday). We came to Oxford," &c.
This town must have been Bicester, not Newport Pagnell. C. LESLIE SMITH.
DE QUINCEY : THE MURDERER WILLIAMS.
In the postscript to ' Murder, considered as one of the Fine Arts,' De Quincey winds up by the peroration :
" They perished on the scaffold : Williams, as I have said, by his own hand ; and, in obedience to the law as it then stood, he was buried in tho centre of a quadrivium, or conflux of four roads {in this case four streets), with a stake driven throtigh his heart. And over him drives for ever the uproar of unresting London."
However, at the beginning of August, 1886, the following statement appeared in
The Citizen :
" In excavating a trench for a main for the Commercial Gas Company, the workmen of Messrs. John Aird & Sons made a remarkable discovery -a few days ago. At a point where Cannon Street Road and Cable Street, in St. George's-in-the- East, cross one another, and at a depth of six feet below the surface, they discovered the skeleton of a man with a stake driven through it, and some portions of a chain were lying near the bones. It is believed that the skeleton is that of a man who murdered a Mr. and Mrs. Marr, their infant child, and a young apprentice in their house in Ratcliff
Highway in 1811 He hanged himself while
under remand in Coldbath-fields Prison. A coroner's jury having brought in a verdict of felo-de-se, the murderer was buried in accordance with the custom of the time."
It is true that there is nothing in the quotation from The Citizen to show that the remains have not been left in situ, and it
is possible that De Quincey 's prediction is
being fulfilled after all.
G. M. H. PLAYFAIR.
" CINEMATOGRAPH " : " CINEMACOLOR." 'N. & Q.' is protesting against linguistic impurities. Is it too late to protest against two recent introductions to our language ? For some time we have been suffering under " cinematograph," often pronounced as though it were written sinni-mattograph. Now we have the deplorable hybrid " cinemacolor." Better than the.se, though not themselves perfect, would be " kine- magraph," or " kinemascope," and " kine- machrome." They may serve, at least, as a starting-point for improvement, and, if adopted, would not give rise to the absurd sounds which now result from the words employed. A protest from 'N. & Q.' may move etymologists, and may, perhaps, induce PROP. SKEAT himself to say something in behalf of our language. Civis.
THE KING " OVER THE WATER." In his book ' Some Recollections ' the late Canon Teignmouth Shore, writing about a visit which he paid to Osborne in 1878, says :
" I had noticed before that at the Household dinners there were never any finger-bowls, and thinking there might be some interesting reason for the absence of what is so general elsewhere, I ventured to ask Sir John Cowell, the Master of the Household, whether this was so. He ex- plained to me that in old days, when there was a certain Jacobite element even in the vicinity of the Court, it had been noticed that on the toast of ' The King ' being given after dinner, some of those present used to pass their glass over the finger-bowl, and it was discovered that thus they drank ' To the King over the water,' and the temptation to do so was removed by the abolition of the finger-bowls."
HERBERT B. CLAYTON.
39, Renfrew Road, Lower Kennington Lane.
THE BLINDFOLDED MAN : JAPANESE VARIANTS. (See 11 S. iii. 424.) Only recently I have come across a passage in Hiuen-tsang's ' Si-yih-ki,' A.D. 646, torn, x., which seems to prove these Japanese stories to have originated in an Indian tradition. After narrating liow enormous a quantity of gold King Sadvaha had expended for the completion of the grand rocky monastery on Black Peak in Central India, the Chinese itinerary says :
"Then there arose a dispute among the ceno- bites resident in it, who applied for a decision to the sovereign. The anchorets deemed the ceno- bites to be the cause of the coming desolation of the monastery, and expelled all the cenobites from it. Thus it has become inhabited by the anchorets only, who made its entrance quite
