498
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. x. DEC. 20, im
Henry Hall, Printer to the Universitie,
1647." Of this illustrated brochure a capital
reprint exists, " Privately re-printed by John
Lane and his friends, Christmas, 1894,"
resident at " The Bodley Head, Vigo Street,
London, W." The descendants of the
great man still live in Exeter, and are iron
founders. Early in last century they
invented a particular kind of kitchen range,
still popular in the West Country, and uni-
versally known in these parts as a " Bodley."
Mr. G. F. Bodley, A.R.A., the well-known
architect, is a collateral descendant of Sir
Thomas. HARRY HEMS.
DR. HAWTREY'S ' NUG^ ' (9 th S. x. 261, 390,
455). On the interesting point raised by
LORD ALDENHAM at the last of the above
references it will be enough to quote the
words of Lord Neave :
" Commentators are not agreed as to the relation in which Meleager stood to some of the females to whom his verses were addressed, and iu particular to Heliodora, who is the subject of one of the most beautiful and passionate laments that affection has ever prompted. We will believe that she was his wife, though some think that she was his mistress, and high authorities infer from certain expressions that she was his daughter."
The poems of Meleager have often a ring of personal experience, and if LORD ALDENHAM or some other scholar would bring together those in which the name of Heliodora appear the result would be something like a poetical biography of the fair maiden, and the story would have both grace and pathos. May J take this opportunity of expressing the pleasure which many others must have fell in reading LORD ALDENHAM'S version of the beautiful poem in which Meleager has expressed his grief on the death of Heliodora" WILLIAM E. A. AXON.
NOTES ON BOOKS, &c.
The Complete Works of John Lyly. Edited bj R. Warwick Bond, M.A. 3 vols. (Oxford Clarendon Press.) To lovers of Tudor literature Mr. Warwick Bond' edition of Lyly will appeal as the book of th season. It is a work of solid erudition and wha in these days may alniost be regarded as monu mental labour. The time is past when the patien labour of a lifetime may be devoted to a magnur, opus ; and in days when opportunities of researc are multiplied and temptations to diversified pur suits are augmented, four years, the period assignee to the present work, may be regarded as a hug slice out of a life, and a prodigal use of accumulatec and never-to-be-replaced knowledge and energy Shakespeare-worship belongs virtually to the lat years of the eighteenth century ; for an apprecia tion of his contemporaries we had to wait unt:
le nineteenth. With a nearer approach to exact-
ess than is often obtainable in literary matters,
lie knowledge of the merits of the minor
ramatists may be dated from the appearance, in
808, of Lamb s ' Dramatic Specimens,' followed,
fter a dozen years, by the lectures of Hazlitt at
he Surrey Institution on ' The Dramatic Litera-
ure of the Afire of Elizabeth,' and later still by
he utterances of Coleridge and Leigh Hunt. About
he same time Alexander Dyce began his career as
ditor, giving us, between 1828 and 1867, editions of
i'eele, Greene, Webster, Middleton, Marlowe, and
Jeaumont and Fletcher, besides revising Gifford's
editions of Massinger and Ford. It is only in more
ecent years that Marston, Chapman, Lyly, Hey-
svood, &c., have been added to the list of printed
dramatists under the care of Mr. Bullen, Mr. Fair-
lolt, and other editors. Nobody seems disposed,
since the retirement from the field of Mr. Bullen, to
undertake the immense labour involved in a reissue
of Beaumont and Fletcher, the most poetical, after
Shakespeare, as well as the least accessible of the
Elizabethan dramatists.
Mr. Bond's Lyly is the most important addition
- o our Tudor drama that has been made during
recent years. It is, it must be remembered, an edition of the entire works, and not of the plays. These latter have been issued in an accessible, but not very critical form by Mr. F. W. Fairholt, while the 'Euphues' has been reprinted by Prof. Arber, and a play assigned to Lyly, and not printed in Fairholt's collection, is included in the first volume of Mr. Bullen's rare and precious ' Collection of Old English Plays.' So far as the present generation is concerned, Mr. Bond's edition may be regarded as final, though the editor, with becoming modesty, fails to regard it as such, and even speaks of what is conjectural in his work (and there is much that is so) as likely to be of utility for his successor.
The new edition of Lyly is a difficult book with which to deal. It is in many respects a noble piece of work, and in some a model. We know of no Tudor dramatist, with the exception of Shake- speare, who has been treated with the same amount of reverence. Everything that spares the reader difficulty has been done. With patient fidelity Mr. Bond has followed his subject, tracing out analogues and resemblances, showing sources of obligation, and leaving no stone unturned that will spare the reader trouble. It is, perhaps, the very amplitude and excellence of the work that jar upon our sense of proportion. Lyly is not in the first rank, not even in the second. We hesitate, indeed, to fix his position. To do Mr. Bond justice, he is far from overrating his subject. Sometimes, indeed, he speaks of him in terms of what we may almost regard as superfluous dis- paragement. He seems, none the less, to overrate Lyly's importance, and assigns him an amount of critical attention which greater men, though it may be in store for them, have not yet received. We have, however, no heart to censure, but are more disposed to be thankful than aggrieved. Hundreds of scholars of riper years will understand the longing we experience to go back to the period when we first read Lyly every accessible line before the appearance of any modern reprint, and when the plays were available only in ' The Sixe Court Comedies ' and ' Euphues and his England,' in the old black-letter edition and to find again the time to read both through. The worker knows well that all his reading and most of his assimilation
