98
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th s. xu. AUG. i, 1903,
And to make short of this long story,
1 '11 let you see the inventory.
Two nightrails and a furbelow,
To tempt you to the thing you know ;
A gown of silk which very odd is,
A pair of stays instead of bodies.
'The London Ladies Dressing-Room' (1705). A print in Walker's * Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards,' 1818, represents a lady placed in the stocks for wearing a nightrale. Under it is inscribed :
The night Raile, 'tis a cunning subtle thing, In summer its coole, in winter heat doth bring, What same thing hot and cold : strange Paradox, Can that be thick that 's thin, 'tis heterodox, Yet will this lady have it orthodox ; Wherefore wee '1 fairly put her in the stocks, Ladies beware ! from pride this error came, So sure as chalk and cheese are not the same.
See also 'N. & Q.,' 3 rd S. iv. 246, 332, 439, 460. EVERARD HOME COLEMAN.
When Lord Glenvarloch enters the Temple Walks, proposing to take himself to the sanc- tuary of Whitefriars, he meets with Master Reginald Lowestoffe, who accompanies him to Alsatia :
" ' Semi-reducta Venus,' said the Templar 'I
know the face of yonder waistcoateer,' continued the guide ; ' and I could wager a rose-noble, from the posture she stands in, that she has a clean head-gear, and a soiled nightrail.' " ' Fortunes of Nigel,' chap. xvii.
ADRIAN WHEELER.
MOTTOES (9 th S. xii. 7, 59)." Sohou, Sohou," is clearly the old hunting cry "So ho" or " So how," originally Norman-French. See 7 th S. xii. 144, 198, 253, 296. Much more difficult is the motto of the Comerford family, "So ho ho dea ne" or "So hoo dea ne," which has been discussed without any satis- factory explanation in the Inter mediaire, xxii. 199, 319, 336, 405, 433.
JOHN B. WAINEWRIGHT.
Cunningham in his 'London' says, v. l Soho Square,' that "So-ho" or "So-how" was an old cry in hunting when the hare was found. In the rate-books of St. Martin's-in- the-Fields the word is often spelt " So-Hoe."
J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.
QUARTERING^ (9 th S. xii. 8). The genea- logical collections of the late Mr. Edmund M. Boyle are probably in the possession of his widowed sister, Mrs. Quin, 14, Hill Street, Berkeley Square, London, W., with whom he lived. D. K. T.
There is now appearing in the Genealogist a list of the " 4,096 Quartiers " of King Ed- ward VIL, by Mr. G. W. Watson.
BERNARD P. SCATTERGOOD.
' The Seize Quartiers of the Family of Bryan Cooke, Esq., of Owston and of Frances
his Wife. 7 Printed for private circulation,
London, 1857.
'The Seize Quartiers of the Kings and Queens of England,' by G. E. C. In the Genealogist, New Series, beginning in vol. vi., 1890. W. 0. B.
NOTES ON BOOKS, &c
The Medicnval Stage. By E. K. Chambers. 2 vols.
(Frowde.)
MR. CHAMBERS'S 'Mediaeval Stage 'is not the less valuable because its title is to a great extent a mis- nomer. There practically is no mediaeval stage until we reach the liturgical drama. What Mr. Chambers essays to do is to show how much that is dramatic survived in the performances of the mimes, jugglers, and mountebanks generally who travelled about from castle to fair, in folk-enter- tainments, festival plays, May games, the proceed- ings of mummers, and even in the church song of the parted choir. He has produced a work of stupendous erudition, which, thanks to an index, useful, if scarcely adequate, may be consulted with facility and advantage, but which almost defies continuous perusal. A considerable portion of the work goes over the same ground as Frazer's epoch- making ' Golden Bough,' much of the information in which is, with due acknowledgment, incorporated in to the volume. Mr. Chambers is obviously sensible of the truth of what we allege, not against, but concerning him, and owns at the conclusion of the first of his two volumes that he has wandered in his discussions far enough from the history of the
All he claims is that from his labours "two or
three tolerable generalizations emerge." Consisting
as these do of the facts that " the drama as a living
form of art went completely under at the break-up
of the Roman world ; that the constant hostility
of Christianity and the indifference of barbarism,
which never imagined the theatre, accelerated the
processes of natural decay ; and that the deep-
rooted mimetic instinct in the people is revealed
"m the course of those popular observances which
are the last sportive stage of ancient heathen
ritual," little contradiction is to be anticipated.
How the book came to be undertaken is told in the preface, wherein also it is stated that a pur- pose was to explain " the pre-existing conditions which, by the latter half of the sixteenth century, made the great Shakespearian stage possible." Of four books into which it is divided the first to use the briefest description shows how Christianity and barbarism destroyed the organization of the Grseco-Roman theatre, and depicts the establishment of peripatetic minstrelsy ; the second presents the growth of village sports ; the third the methods by which, through the dramatic elements in its ritual, the Church developed the popular drama of the miracle play ; and the fourth shows the recovery by the stage of an organization which it had lost since the days of Tertullian. Those who seek to trace the constant hostility of the Church to stage plays need scarcely go beyond the monumental work of Prynne. Dr. Frazer, as has been hinted, is a safe guide to the development of folk-games, and may be read side by side with Strutt and other English
