198
NOTES AND QUERIES, rw- s. XL MARCH 7, IPOS.
borne any creast or cognizaunce of her Ancestors
otherwise than as followeth : If she be unmaned
to beare in her ringe, cognizaunce or otherwise, the
first coate of her Ancestors in a Lozenge : And
during her Widdowhood to set the first coate of
her husbande in pale with the first coate of her
Auncestor. And if she mary one who is noe gentle-
man, then she to be clearly exempted from the
former conclusion."
CHARLOTTE CARMICHAEL STOPES.
" FROM THE LONE SHIELING " (9 th S. ix. 483 ; x. 64 ; xi. 57, 134). MR. P. J. ANDERSON has evidently forgotten my reply to his private inquiry last July respecting "the words of the Gaelic version known in the Highlands to this day." These words occur in a foot- note in Margaret M. Black's monograph on R. L. Stevenson in the "Famous Scots/' where reference is made to Prof. Mackinnon's belief that such existed. While the Celtic professor, as I have learned, is " utterly unable to throw any light" on the present phase of the lone shieling song, he " saw Gaelic verses in print, and certainly " (a correspondent has informed me) "considered that, if there was a Gaelic original, as between these and the English verses, the Gaelic verses were not the original "an avowal quite in harmony with his opinion, as given in ' N. & Q.,' 26 July, 1902, that the
"version known in the Highlands is
founded on the Earl of Eglinton's lines." The Rev. Dr. Donald Masson, of Edinburgh, has searched for the Gaelic original, not only at home, but also among the Gaels of Canada, all the way from the Georgian Bay to Cape Breton, and has found no trace of it. Mr. Neil Munro has asserted that the Black - woods believe that the ' Canadian Boat Song ' came from the pen of John Gait, but I do not think the distinguished literary Celt shares that view, and I am quite sure MR. P. J. ANDERSON does not. In a contribution to Saint Andrew of 15 January Mr. Neil Munro wrote thus :
" The poem, though always said to be a translation of a Gaelic song by a Canadian exile, was never anything of the kind. It is beautiful, but it is in its thought, in its fancy, utterly unlike any Gaelic poem 1 know, and the thought and the language of it are so manifestly simultaneous in their inspira- tion that it is inconceivable it can be a translation in the commonly accepted sense of the term."
JOHN GRIGOR. 105, Chouraert Road, Peckham.
Mr. John Macleay is well known in Liver- pool journalistic circles. He edited 4 War bongs, and Songs and Ballads of Martial JwL ln the "Canterbury Poets" series Walter Scott). MR. GRIGOR would doubt- less hear from him in reply to a letter
addressed to him at the office of the Liverpool
Courier. E. RIMBAULT DIBDIN.
HISTORICAL CRUX (9 th S. xi. 81). In 1798 O'Coigly was concealed in my grandfather's house (where I myself was born and lived) in the City of London, formerly 164, Aldersgate Street, but now occupied by the National Provincial Bank. My father was then thir- teen years old, and when I was a child he often told us what he remembered about the " poor gentle Irish priest O'Coigly " who was trying to make his way to France with " a message " from the leaders of the " United Irishmen" to their French sympathizers. We knew the room in which he had slept (it was our playroom), and it had a trap-door with a short stair, at the bottom of which a door led out into our backyard. Across the yard there was my father's (or previously my grandfather's) counting-house ; and that again had a back-door opening into an alley which leads (I think) into St. Bartholomew's Close. My grandfather let O'Coigly out that way when he found he could no longer conceal him. He certainly considered him a harmless and an ill-used man ; and my father always believed that O'Coigly told the truth when he said the papers had been put into his pocket " by other hands."
My grandfather was a North of Ireland Presbyterian, so it was not because O'Coigly was a priest that he protected him, but simply because he considered him an honest man in a cruel fix. My father called the hanging a murder.
Froude's unfairness to General Arthur O'Connor is also glaring. My father knew General O'Connor, who lived to old age, in Paris, and I never heard anything to lead one to call him a " savage." It may interest some readers to know that his wife was the daughter of Condorcet, who as a young girl used to carry food by night to the grave- yard where her father was hiding, during one of the worst times of the French Revo- lution. L. G. GILLUM.
In vol. ii. of Madden 's ' Lives and Times of the United Irishmen,' and in ' Secret Service under Pitt,' by the late J. Fitzpatrick, there are many particulars about the unfortunate Father Quigley. If OXONIENSIS has not these books at hand, I will lend them to him with pleasure, to read and make notes from.
FRANCESCA.
A full account of the trial is given in ' State
Trials,' xxvi. 1191 to end, and xxvii. 1 to 142,
and this account is followed by O'Coigley's
life and observations on his trial written by
i himself. JOHN B. WAINEWRIGHT.
