JAMES PLATT, Jun.

J. S. M. T.

Ah! cruel death, to make three meals of one,
To taste and eat, then eat till all was gon.
But know, thou tyrant, wn th' last trump shall
call;

IRELAND YARD, BLACKFRIARS.-In pulling down a house, No. 7, on the west side of Ireland Yard, St. Andrew's Hill, Queen Victoria Street, lately in the occupation of Messrs. Reuben Lidstone & Son, carpenters, some fragments of walling and vaulting were discovered embedded in the modern walls, which are believed to be the remains of the Dominican priory founded by Hubert de Burgh in 1221, and removed from Holborn to Blackfriars in 1276. From the character of the mouldings, the remains appear to belong, in point of date, to the latter part of the reign of Edward I. There is a sketch of the ruins recently discovered by Mr. H. W. Brewer in the Daily Graphic, 14 May.

In 1613 Shakespeare bought a house in Blackfriars from Henry Walker for 140, which he bequeathed to his daughter Susanna Hall. This house was situate on the west side of St. Andrew's Hill, formerly Puddle Hill or Puddle Dock Hill, and was, according to Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, either partially on, or very near, the locality now and for

more than two centuries known as Ireland's Yard.

Ireland's Yard derives its name from William Ireland, a haberdasher, who occupied the house at the time of Shakespeare's purchase. In the deed of conveyance to the poet the house is described as

JOHN PICKFORD, M.A. Newbourne Rectory, Woodbridge. "STIVER" AND "STEEVER."-I find most people look upon these as merely two alternative pronunciations of the same word. This is not the case; they came into English from two different languages. Stiver is Dutch, its original spelling being stuiver. Steever is German, its original spelling being Stüber. Though both words are in common use, in the sense of a penny or small coin, only the first (probably because it is the oldest) is recognized by dictionaries. Prof. Skeat, for instance, in his Etymological Dictionary,' gives 'Stiver,' with a quotation from Evelyn's Diary' (1641), and the obvious derivation from the Dutch, and remarks that it is "allied to German Stüber." He appears to have no suspicion that the German Stüber in its turn has yielded an English word. It

Wharf......now or late in the tenure or occupation of one William Ireland, part of which said tenement is erected over a great gate leading to a capital messuage which some time was in the tenure of William Blackwell, Esq., deceased, and since in the tenure or occupation of the Right Honourable Henry, now Earl of Northumberland."

JOHN HEBB.

MILITARY DESPATCH.-The following touching extracts from the will of the Austrian Field-Marshal Benedek, written in 1873, may have some interest at a time when the publication of military despatches is a subject of discussion:

"I have a long, laborious, and active soldier's life behind me, but for all that I write my last wishes with peace and in a sound mind. I have never tried to make money, and never known how to keep it. I have been a loyal, true, and brave soldier, and am, it is true, a creedless, but a humble Christian. I look forward to my end with a quiet conscience, and herewith expressly declare that I leave behind me no memoirs or other biographical material. All my notes and diaries on the campaign of 1866 I have burned with my own hands."

The old soldier goes on to say that in the winter of that year he promised the Archduke Albert to take his reflections with him to the grave: "This promise was, perhaps, a hasty one, but it is the best testimony I can give to my character as a soldier." He goes on to mention the rebuke administered to hin by the Austrian Government for the conduct of the campaign, and its publication in the press, and a sob seems to break through the veteran's voice as he does so:

"I have taken it in silence, and now for seven years past bear my hard and painful lot with philosophy and resignation. I am at peace with myself and all the world-but all my soldier's poetry is gone."

He speaks of his wife, and thanks her from his heart

"for all her love and goodness to me: above all do I thank her that she bore my soldier's unhappiness by my side with such reasonableness and resignation."

J. H. RIVETT-CARNAC,

of tables, in its different varieties, is described. And I especially wish to ascertain whether in any variety of tables, or in any similar game, one of the pieces was ever styled the "knave." Has that word ever been used in any other games than card games? What relation did tables bear to chess? Are there any sets of men employed in playing tables-say in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries still preserved in any museum or private_collection ? K. E.

[Tables is another name for backgammon, and was, accordingly, played with draughts. Consult Brand's 'Popular Antiquities,' ed. Hazlitt, ii. 337.]

THE SHANNON AND THE CHESAPEAKE.-I am anxious to settle the question whether our familiar song

"INTENTIONS."-We want an early use of this in the sense "purposes in respect of a proposal of marriage," as in "to ask a man his intentions," "declaration of intentions," and the like. These must be common enough in novels, and are remembered before 1850, but we have no quotation before 1884. Will readers of N. & Q.' send a few? Address simply Oxford. J. A. H. MURRAY.

"INVISIBLE GREEN.”—We want one or two quotations for this phrase, which goes back to early in the century. Will some of our friends in 'N. & Q.' send one? (Address Dr. Murray, Oxford.)

pro

I have had only two replies to my inquiry about the pronunciation of inundate, both from correspondents who know no other nunciation than inun'date. J. A. H. M. "LAKOO."-In Science Gossip, 1876, p. 119, it is said that in Guernsey the herb Galium aparine is called "lakoo." Can anybody tell me what may be the French original of this plant-name? A. L. MAYHEW.

Oxford.

THE GAME OF TABLES.-I wish to learn in what work or works the early English game

Constitution on 19 August, 1812, is the original. That one is a parody or imitation of the other is certain; but it is not so easy to say which is the one and which is the other. Apart from a lifelong prejudice, there are many indications which persuade me that our version is the original; but nothing can be conclusive that is not based on recorded facts. I want, then, a reference to the earliest appearance in print or contemporary mention of either; and I do not want a statement that A. B., aged 100, remembers hearing one of them sung in a music-hall in 1812 or otherwise. I do not call such a statement evidence, and it is evidence that I want. Can any of your readers help me? J. K. LAUGHTON. King's College, Strand.

LOVELACE A GLOVER.-What authority is there for the statement that Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier poet, sold gloves in King Street? N. L. H.

FEARY.-One of this name was admitted to

Westminster School on 30 May, 1769. Can any correspondent of 'N. & Q' help me to G. F. R. B. identify him?

SHIPPEN LEYBORNE, who was admitted to Westminster School on 22 July, 1779, is said to have been the son of William Ley borne, of Oxford. I should be glad to obtain further G. F. R. B. particulars concerning him.

BRAIKENRIDGE.-In L'Intermédiaire des Mathématiciens for March I find a request for biographical notices of the English mathematician (of the first half of the eigh

Beplies.

Stay, traveller, tarry here to-night;
[The night is dark, the wind blows loud,]
The moon has, too, withdrawn her light,
And gone to rest behind a cloud.

Draw near the hearth and take a place;
Until the hour of rest draw nigh,
Of Robin Hood and Chevy Chase
[We'll sing unto our palates high.]
Had I the means I'd use you well,
"Tis little I have got to boast;
But should you of this cottage tell,

Say Hal the woodman was your host. As well as correct versions of the words, I should like the old airs of these songs.

C. SWYNNERTON.

OLD PERSIAN TRANSLATION OF THE GOSPELS -Cornelius a Lapide (Steen), a professor at Louvain in the beginning of the seventeenth century, says in his 'Promium in Evangelia,' vol. i. cap. iii. p. 11 of Antwerp edition of 1732, that Jerome Xavier, the well-known missionary at Akbar's Court and a grandnephew of St. Francis Xavier, sent from Agra to the Jesuit College at Rome a copy of a Persian translation of the Gospels. The copy was dated 790 A.H. or 1388 A.D., but Steen, who had seen and used the manuscript, thought that the translation must have been made at a much earlier period, as it contained many obsolete words. Can any reader inform me if the MS. is still in existence, and if it has been catalogued and described? Also if the translation is the same as that published in Walton's 'Polyglott,' vol. v., and supposed to have been made about 1341 ?

RED HERRING." (9th S. v. 125, 290.)

MR. SMITHERS has referred us to John Heywood's 'Proverbs,' published in the year 1546, for a very early use of this expresDelicia; or, the Muses' Recreation,' by Sir sion in a printed book. The Musarum John Mennes, or Mennis, and Dr. James Smith, first appeared in 1651, so if the phrase be really found in that work, for MR. MARTIN is not certain, the authority is not of much account, so far as time is concerned. I cannot, indeed, furnish a reference earlier than the one to Heywood, but I can show that the proverb was employed long before the days of either Sir John Mennes or John Dryden. In Thomas Nash's "Lenten Stuff, concerning the Description and first Procreation and Increase of the Town of Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk With a new Play never played before, or the Praise of the Red Herring," London, 1599 (reprinted in the second volume of the Harleian Miscellany '), I find the saying with only a slight change in the order of the words, which was probably meant to be emphatic. From this most amusing pamphlet I make the following extract :

་

"Other disgraceful proverbs of the herring there are, as Never a barrel better herring; Neither flesh nor fish, nor good red herring, which those, that have bitten with ill bargains of either sort, have dribbed forth in revenge, and yet not have them from Yarmouth; many coast towns, besides it, enterprising to cure, salt, and pickle up herrings, but mar them; because they want the right feat, how to salt and season them. So I could halec, the scauld rotten herring; but he meant that pluck a crow with poet Martial, for calling it putre of the fat reasty Scottish herrings, which will endure no salt, and in one month (bestow what cost on them you will) wax rammish, if they be kept; whereas our imbarrelled white herrings, flourishing scilicet, the three half lions, and the three half with the stately brand of Yarmouth upon them, fishes, with the crown over their head, last in long voyages, better than the red herring," &c.

The reference in Nash is to Martial's 'Epigrams, lib. iii. 77. I quote from a copy of the edition published at Lugd. Batavorum, apud Franciscum Hackium, A° j66j," which same copy, as an inscription informs me, was presented by a late distinguished proconsul of the British Empire to his beloved son John ("Filio meo charissimo Johanni") in the year 1835. I withhold the name, but cannot help saying that the gift of such a book by a father to his son is a thing calculated to make one wonder, to say the least.

Martial is inveighing against one of the "nice idle citizens, surfeiting courtiers, and stall-fed gentlemen lubbers" of his time (to use Robert Burton's language), whose appetite has become depraved by over-indulgence. Hence these two lines:

Capparin, et putri cepas alece natantes,
Et pulpam dubio de petasone voras.
With capers, onions in anchovy sauce,

And lumps of measly pork you cram your jaws. Halec or alec I take to be the generic term for the herring family, of which the anchovy is a member; for this particular condiment was neither the muria nor the garum, the former of which was got from the tunny-fish, while the latter, which was very expensive, is supposed to be of Indian origin. Brillat-Savarin, in his inimitable book ('Physiologie du Goût,' 41), almost identifies it with soy, which is a sauce produced from fish fermented with mushrooms. The word putre must be here taken in its secondary sense, as, for example, broken up or disintegrated. By the way, a correspondent from the other side of "the herring-pond" has asked (ante, p. 248) what is the force of putrem in Virgil's famous line "Quadrupedante," &c. I hope he will not consider me "saucy" if I say he must have been thinking of a bog rather than of a field. The crumbling is only superficial; the "solid ground" is there, which is the equivalent of putrem campum" in Dryden's translation of the 'Eneid. The meaning of the word is "dusty," according to Heyne, who refers the student to the Georgics,' i. 44, 215, and ii. 204. If MR. THORNTON Once hears the thud. thud, thud of a body of horsemen over an open stretch of country, he will instantly understand the truth and the force of the poet's words.

But enough of Nash, who boasts that he is "the first that ever set quill to paper in praise of any fish or fishermen." He makes no arrogant claim, for I think he is as much entitled to be called the "prose poet" of the herring as Fielding was of "human nature." With one last word, I end my contribution to this query. When Sir John Falstaff called Mistress Quickly "an otter," because "she's neither fish nor flesh "('1 Henry IV.,' III. iii.), it is clear that he was playing upon this proverbial expression. Shakespeare's play and Nash's pamphlet were both published near the close of the sixteenth century.

JOHN T. CURRY.

REGIMENTAL NICKNAMES OF THE BRITISH ARMY (9th S. v. 104, 161, 224, 263, 377). There are some details lacking as to the official title of the regiments at the time of their acquisition of a nickname, and as to the reasons for which such names were bestowed upon them.

"Barrell's Blues," the 4th Foot. Also called the "Lions" from their badge, the lion of England. Col. Barrell was their commander from 1734 to 1739. "Blues" because of their blue facings.

The "Bengal Tigers," the 17th Foot, now the Leicestershire Regiinent, from their badge, a green tiger.

"Bingham's Dandies," the 17th Lancers, owed their designation not so much to the fastidiousness of their colonel, the Earl of Lucan, formerly Lord Bingham, as to the already admirable fit and smartness of their uniforms, a characteristic fostered and encouraged by their colonel. Now the Duke of Cambridge's Own Lancers. Also the "Death or Glory Boys" (q.v.), sometimes corrupted to the "Dogs."

The Black Horse," also called the "Blacks" and "Strawboots," is the unofficial designation of the 7th Dragoon Guards or Princess Royal's Dragoon Guards.

66

Blayney's Bloodhounds," now the 2nd Battalion Princess Victoria's Irish Fusiliers (the 1st Battalion is the old 87th Foot), were so nicknamed because of the unerring certainty and untiring perseverance with which, under Lord Blayney in 1798, they hunted down the Irish rebels.

The “Blind Half Hundred,” the old 50th Foot, were so called from their great sufferings from ophthalmia when serving in Egypt.

The "Brickdusts," now the 1st Battalion King's Shropshire Light Infantry (the 2nd Battalion is the old 85th). So named from the colour of their facings, brickdust red. As the old 53rd the 1st Battalion was known as the "Five-and-threepennies," a play not only upon their number, but upon the pay of the ensigns.

The "Buff Howards," the 3rd Regiment of Foot, now as the East Kent Regiment contracted to the "Buffs," were so named from the buff facings of their uniform, and the name of their colonel from 1737 to 1749. Also called the "Nutcrackers," because of their despatch in cracking the heads of the Polish lancers at Albuera. Also the "Resurrectionists" and the "Old Buffs" from their facings, to distinguish them from the 31st, the Young Buffs." But the most ancient "Old Buffs were the Duke of York and Albany's maritime regiments raised in 1664,