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NOTES AND QUERIES.
S. V. FEB. 10, 1900.
" Art. XVI. If any inferior officer or soldier shall
refuse to obey his superior officer, he shall be
punished with Death.
" XXXVIII. If two or more, going into the field to fight a duel, shall draw their swords or other weapons, and fight; though neither of them fall upon the spot, or die afterwards of any wound there received, they shall be punished with Death.
" LXIX. Lastly, all the foregoing rules and articles shall be read and published at the head of every regiment, troop, and company, once every month at furthest. Whereof all Majors and Ad- jutants of each regiment are to take care at their peril."
W. J. G.
A SON OF GEORGE II. The 'Annual Re- gister' for 1801 (p. 65) records the death of Mrs. Dunckerley at her apartments in Hamp- ton Court Palace. She was the "relict of the late Thomas Dunkerley, esq., who bore for his arms those of King George II. with a batoon, and with this motto, ' Fato non merito.' In the engraving of his arms he was styled ' Thomas Dunckerley Fitz-George.' "
The uncertainty in the spelling of the name is that of the chronicler. As the ' Dictionary of National Biography' does not mention this son of George II., it may be well to note the claim. WILLIAM E. A. AXON.
Moss Side, Manchester.
"NiL ACTUM," &c. For many years my memory has been haunted by a famous line in Lucan's * Pharsalia,' ii. 656, which, said of Julius Caesar, transcends the particular instance, and passes into a general rule or maxim bearing on human action and conduct : "Nil actum reputans, si quid superesset agendum." I quote it as found in Coleridge's * Friend ' (' Misc. Essays,' No. 5), and in King's, Bohn's, and Mac- dormell's dictionaries of quotations. But in Walker's * Corpus Poetarum Latinorum ' the reading is " Nil actum credens, dum quid," &c. Montaigne, iii. 13, has " credens, quum," and another dictionary of quotations has " reputans, dum."
It would be satisfactory to know which of all these is the best accredited reading, and therefore the one to use in Quoting the line. The translation of the first three words most obviously is "Thinking nothing done," and thus it is Englished in the several dictionaries of quotations, and, virtually, by Coleridge, who applies the words to his friend Sir A. Ball ; but is there not a slight ambiguity in the Latin construction, sufficient to justify an alternative, and perhaps more forcible rendering, "Counting what was done as nothing, if aught remained to be done " ? Howe's version does not^help in this point : He reckons not the past, while aught remained Great to be clone, or mighty to be gained.
Johnson, transferring the thought from
Lucan's Cresar to his own Charles XII. in
'The Vanity of Human Wishes,' gives the
usual construction : " ' Think nothing gained,'
he cries, ' till nought remain.' "
The difference in the two ways of render- ingneither of which, it seems to me, can be called, grammatically, more correct than the other is very slight; but as a question of precision and taste, one would like to have it settled by some competent authority. In prose the latter would, I suppose, require "pro nihilo." C. LAWRENCE FORD, B.A.
Bath.
[The obvious translation seems right, and the other doubtful Latin, if " Nil actum credens cum," &c., is read with the best modern editions.]
A BULGARIAN BARD. The smaller nations of Europe often present as great interest to the student as the larger, from a literary point of view. In respect to poetry, romantic Switzerland has produced sweet singers in each of the tongues spoken on her soil. To mention Rou mania is to recall her gifted queen, "Carmen Sylva," a poetess in many languages. Servia has her singers, and her representative in this country, M. Chedomil Mijatovic', is a writer of renown, while Madame Mijatovic' has rendered the tales of her country into English.
Bulgaria, which on account of its pic- turesque rugged ness has been called the Scotland of Southern Europe, possesses those who sing.* In the reading lessons at the end of his Bulgarian grammar, Mr. W. R. Mor- fill furnishes a short account of the brothers Dmitri and Constantine Miladinov, of Mace- donia, who collected popular songs. (One of these, the pretty story of ' The Janissary and the Fair Dragana,' is also included by Mr. Morfill.) Through the kindness of the Oxford Slavonic Reader and of your learned con- tributor DR. H. KREBS, I recently had an opportunity of glancing through the poems of Ivan Vazov perhaps better known as the author of a novel, ' Pod Igo-to } ('Under the Yoke ') published under the title of ' Polia i Gori ' (' Fields and Hills '), at Plovdiv, 1893. The muse of Vazov is intensely patriotic, but very lachrymose. The Bulgarian language to him is "the sacred tongue of my sires, language of sorrows, eternal groans," and his country has worn "the crown of thorns."t
- A century ago, however, the Bulgarian learnt
and read Greek, and despised his own nationality, thanks to Phanariote zeal. See Mr. W. Miller's interesting work 'The Balkans' ("Story of the Nations "j, p. 198.
t This is a frequent metaphor of the sorrowful Russian bard Nikolai Nekrassov.
