i!s.ix.ocT.8,iji.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 283 the Register records : In 1603, six burials in all, of which : 30 August, a son of John Ditche, " peste." 3 September, Wm Edmunds, Senr. of St. Stephens, " of the plauge " (sic). 29 December, a son of John Crabb, " pest obyt." In 1604, nine burials in all, of which :- 24 February, " Richard Hetheringtunn [Hering- tunn erased], <fc Marian his wife : peste : sepulchru unu sub cespite uno utrosque capit : una Dies luce negavit utrisque." 9 March, a daughter of Thomas Hetheringtunn,
- ' pest."
14 March, a son of William Clarke, deadborne. 19 March, the wife of William Clarke, " pest-" In 1665, out of 12 burials in all, six, between August and the following January, are referred to "ye plague." These are the only annotations in the Register. GEORGE C. PEACHEY. Ridge, Barnet, Herts. PASSING STRESS. (See 12 S. ix. 241, 263.) DID Trench think that every Eliza- bethan poet, like Sylvester, would go to the theatre ? Yet not Shakespeare ; in his theatre, always. However, to the tradi- tional mass of his audience anyway of the groundlings- in Ireland, it would still, to-day, be theatre. As from Chaucer's Middle English (with, of course, normal sound of a, not our modern English freak vowel) : That swich a noble theatre as it was I dar wel say that in this world ther nas. (' Knighte's Tale,' 1027.) Something before 1850, the Irish Mangan in ' Pompeii ' has Or is there not a voice which peals alike To all from these, conjuring up that train Of scenes and images that shall be born In living, naked might upon the Judgment morn ? Not only in the other sense of solemnly calling on still, conjure * but in this sense of raising by incantation, or so, figuratively, Shakespeare had still, more than once, conjure ; as in ' Romeo and Juliet,' II. i. 24 : To raise a spirit in his mistress' circle Till she had laid it and conjured it down. _A man of science from North- West England,
- About 1885, the Irishman, Dr. Douglas Hyde,
to the English masses : " We reach you the right hand of friendship, and now, but oh ! never again, We conjure you to meet us as brethren, and to stand fast beside us, like men." finding things still an older poozle, in 1913, also accented ancestors and industry in Ireland ; and as Ireland. Ireland says confessor, indeed. And I that seems an exception. Yet it was the I unclassical Middle English man's pro- j nunciation spite of his hymn-singing, so | often in his liturgical ears : Iste confessor Domini, colentes Quern pie laudant populi per orbem. and we are told now that it is people with new Protestantism still in them who I go to a confessor ; and when the English ! confessed their sins, after " the olde gyse," j that generation sought a confessor to the llast.* Ford's ("Tis Pity,' 1633): O doe not speak of that (deare Confessor), J preserves the tradition ; and, so, it was ! living, in the first generation after the fall j of those religious practices, in Shakespeare's | memory : Bring him his confessor ; let him be prepared. (' Measure for Measure,' II. i. 35 ; c. 1600.) i though in ' Henry VIII.,' IV. i. 88, by whom- I ever that is : As holy oil, Edward Confessor's crown. Yet also in Dryden's ' Wife of Bath,' a couple of generations later : To this sagacious confessor he went, and in his ' Hind and Panther ' (iii. 1505) : And told his ghostly confessor his pain, and the -dictionaries so named him in the next, eighteenth century Johnson's, for ! instance ; and he was so in Wordsworth's nineteenth-century two usings of the word : I learned this when I was a confessor. (' The Borderers,' 1429.) The woman-hearted Confessor prepares The evanescence of the Saxon line. (' Ecclesiastical Sonnets,' i. 31.) Like acceptable, it is being ruled by the verb confess ; and now for his country in geneial the Saint-King is Edward the Confessor. Though, when back to Catholic Roman again, A. de Vere writes of our old English laws, The Confessor's, and theirs who went before him. Yet in Mangan's ' St. Patrick's Hymn before Tara ' is it And in the Apostles' manifold preachings, And in the Confessors' faith and teachings ? Perhaps not.
- In another sense, ' Two Noble Kinsmen,'
V. i. a ? Shakespeare passage : " I have been harsh To large confessors, and have hotly ask'd them If they had mothers."
