108
NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 S.JL FEB. & we.
ELIZABETH, DAUGHTER OP SIR PHILIP
SIDNEY. Hunter in his ' Chorus Vatum '
(Add. MS. 24,490) states :
" The date of her birth is very precisely fixed by the Inquisition on her father's death, which sets forth that at the time of his death, Oct. 17, 1586, she was aged 2 years, 8 months, and 18 days ; according to which she would be born Jan. 31, 1583/4 " (i.e., four months after her father's marriage, on Sept. 20, 1583).
Sir Sidney Lee in the ' D.N.B.' follows Hunter without a qualm. Mr. M. W. Wallace in his recently published ' Life of Sir Philip Sidney ' points out that Hunter's date is manifestly incorrect, but adds, " How the error arose it is difficult to see," " the exact date of her birth has not been discovered." The error arose through Hunter's misreading of the Inquisit. post mortem taken on July 6, 1588, which sets forth that at that date not at the date of her father's death Elizabeth's age was 2 years, 8 months, and 18 days. She was therefore born on or about Oct. 19, 1585, the year in which, as Mr. Wallace points out, her birth was celebrated in a poem by Scipio Gentili.
Hunter himself notes that (according to the Collectanea Topog. et GeneaL, ii. 311) the baptism of Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Philip Sidney, is recorded in the Registers of St. Olave's, Hart Street, on Nov. 20. 1585, but his previous miscalculation led him to doubt if this date was correct. As will be seen, it agrees perfectly with the date of Elizabeth's birth now proposed.
G. C. MOORE SMITH.
THE BLACK HOLE OF CALCUTTA. It may interest readers of ' N. & Q.' who are students of Indian history to know that the usually received story of the Black Hole of Calcutta has been seriously challenged.
The critic is Mr. J. H. Little, and his article is in the December number of Bengal : Past and Present. A summary appears in The Pioneer Mail of Dec. 18, 1915.
H. FIELDING-HALL.
Chagford.
THOMAS SEWARD. According to the ' Diet. Nat, Biog.,' li., 282, Seward was admitted a foundation scholar of Westminster School in 1723 ; " was elected by the school to scholarships at Christ Church, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1727 "; and " upon his rejection by both universities he became a pensioner of St. John's College, Cambridge " ! As part of this statement is quite unintelligible it is as well to put the
real facts on record. Seward was admitted
to Westminster School in Feb., 1718/19,
aged 9. He became a King's Scholar in
1723. On failing to obtain his election from
the school to either university he went to
St. John's College, Cambridge, where he
was admitted as a pensioner June 17, 1727.
G. F. R. B.
WE must request correspondents desiring in-
formation on family matters of only private interest
to affix their names and addresses to their queries,,
in order that answers may be sent to them direct.
WAS KEATS A CHRISTIAN ?
IT may be premised that this (to some,, doubtless) startling question is no more theological than that which crops up periodically as to whether Shakespeare was an Anglican, or Roman Catholic, or no Christian at all, but is a purely literary or historical attempt to determine Keats's attitude towards religion in general and Christianity in particular. I was led to the subject by happening on a letter of Keats to Leigh Hunt in Thornton Hunt's edition of his father's letters (' Correspondence,' vol. i. p. 104). The letter, which is dated from Margate, May 10, 1817, contains the- subjoined excerpt, and seems to be Keats' s solitary letter to Hunt :
" The last Examiner was a battering-ram against Christianity, blasphemy, Tertullian,. Erasmus, Sir Philip Sidney ; and then the dreadful Patzelicians, and their expiation by blood ; and do Christians shudder at the same thing in a newspaper which they attribute to their God in its most aggravated form ? " Mr. H. Buxton Forman gives the letter in his edition (1883) of Keats's works and letters (vol. iii. p. 56), but alters " Patze- licians " to " Petzelians," as correctly printed in The Examiner of May 4, 1817, and quotes in his Appendix (p. 346) the passage or incident referred to by the poet. This I need not reproduce here.
As to Keats's Christianity or non Christianity, which the above paragraph seems to me to leave indeterminate, a broken ray of light, not steady enough to help to decide either way, is shed upon the matter by the following extract by Mr. Forman (vol. iv. p. 359) from B. R. Haydon's ' Recollections of Keats ' :
"His [Keats's] ruin was owing to his want of decision of character and power of will, without which genius is a curse. He could not bring his
