remarkable about Becket's cross was the fact that he should bring it into the Council Chamber; but, as I understand the matter, the thing that provoked comment was that St. Thomas carried his own cross, instead of letting it be borne by a cross-bearer. This seems obvious from the whole account in William FitzStephen, and especially from the words thus translated in St. Thomas of Canterbury' (in the "English History from Contemporary Writers " Series), p. 75 :—

(1) by the insertion after the name of each figure of a reference to the page of the text on which the subject is described, and (2) by the addition at the bottom of each (to the deft) of the volume and the number of the plates therein printed, as well as (to the right) of the number of the plate in consecutive series (1 to 261), while the references found in the ordinary copies, which are at the top of the plate, are effaced. Changes like these must have been expensive in so long a series, and it can hardly be supposed that this is "The bishop of London recommended him to give the only copy in existence which shows his cross to one of his clerks, and said he looked as them. The matter is of some little interest though he were prepared to disturb the whole realm. to ornithologists, and I would invite any-You carry,' said the bishop of London, the cross body having access to a copy of this work in your hands. If only the king should take his sword, behold! a king bravely adorned and an -and copies are not very uncommon-to archbishop in like sort."" examine it and kindly to let me know the As is well known, an archbishop never takes result. I may add that the plates in Dr. his cross into his own hands: it is always Bureau's copy, which he obtained from the library of the late Prof. Alphonse Milne- the recent masterly revival of Becket' at This point was lost in Edwards, have never been folded, as is the Drury Lane, when Roger of York came in case with all others that I have seen, but with his cross in his hands. retain their original folio form-42 by 31 mm. ALFRED NEWTON.

Magdalene College, Cambridge.

LORD NELSON AND CARDINAL YORK.

(1) Lord Nelson gave a silver-mounted dirk to Lieut. Suckling (a cousin), who had served with him on board the Agamemnon.

(2) There is in existence a print of the interior of St. Peter's, which belonged to Cardinal York, and on the back is some writing, in which Lord Nelson's name, Charles Edward's, and the word dirk are decipherable. (3) The Agamemnon was in commission from 1794 to 1796. It does not appear that Cardinal York was driven from home and in distress till 1798.

A story copied from some review relates that Nelson rescued the cardinal, had him for seven weeks on board his ship, during which he saw some fighting; that he landed him on Austrian territory; that the cardinal afterwards visited the ship, thanked the admiral, officers, and crew as his deliverers, and gave Nelson a silver-mounted dirk and cane, which the cardinal valued much, as having belonged to his brother, Charles Edward.

From the facts given above it seems impossible that this could have happened on board the Agamemnon; but can any lover of the Stuarts or of Nelson help me to further corroboration of the story from the cardinal's NELSON.

life?

borne before him.

FitzStephen, however, makes it quite clear that he did nothing of the sort :

66

'He [Roger] had his own cross carried before him, [though it was] outside his province, as though dart threatening dart. He had been forbidden by the lord pope, in letters despatched to him, to have his cross borne before him in the province of Canterbury," &c.

Yet another point. The cross which Becket carried at Drury Lane was the single cross carried before archbishops (and the Pope, too, for that matter) at the present day; but Roger carried the double or so-called archiepiscopal cross, i.e., a cross with two bars of which the upper is the shorter. There may be authority for this, though the only cross of the kind I have seen in use, viz., at Genoa, was carried at the head of a procession of canons, &c., the archbishop having the plain cross carried before him. The Misses Malleson and Tuker, in their 'Handbook to Christian and Ecclesiastical Rome,' part iv. pp. 470471, seem to be of the opinion that the double cross is usually borne before archbishops, but I am convinced from personal experience that this is an error. It may be used in some places, but certainly the Pope, and the Archbishops of Milan, Genoa, and Westminster, and (if my memory be not at fault) of Mechlin, Florence, Pisa, and Edinburgh, use the simple cross. The Rev. John O'Brien, in his 'History of the Mass,' p. 128, says :

"We are entirely at a loss to know how this double cross came to be an archiepiscopal ensign. Neither the Cærimoniale Episcoporum nor the Pontificale Romanum' gives a word to distinguish it from any other, nor is it spoken of by any liturgical writer of our acquaintance, and there are few

blood in their veins? Is it through the
Bavarian Modenas, or through Princess
Mary of Hesse, who married Alexander II.?
A. A. N.

exist." He had, as a matter of course, many
difficulties to encounter; and "he complains,"
says Sir Walter Scott, that he had, even in
his time, to contend with the disadvantages
of copies old, maimed, and mutilated, and
which long before our day must, but for this
faithful transcriber, have perished entirely."
MS. for his Evergreen' in 1724, and he was
Allan Ramsay drew upon the Bannatyne
followed in 1760 by Lord Hailes with his
carefully edited 'Ancient Scottish Poems,’
and by Pinkerton, Sibbald of the Chronicle
of Scottish Poetry,' and others of later date.
The poems
known as Alexander Scott's are

BASIL MONTAGU'S MSS.-This busy littérateur is now best remembered by Macaulay's essay on his edition of Bacon; but he left at his death, in 1851 (according to Charles Knight's 'Cyclopædia of Biography"), "about a hundred volumes of MSS., including a Memoir of himself and a Diary." Montagu's wide acquaintance with politicians, lawyers, and men of letters ought to make his memoirs and his diary interesting enough those assigned to him by Bannatyne, and or, perhaps, too interesting-for publication. Can any of your readers say in whose possession these MSS. now are? No information about them is given in the recent account of Montagu in the 'D.N.B.'

CYRIL.

KYNASTON'S TRANSLATION OF CHAUCER.— Can any of your readers give information as to the present owner of the MS. of Kynaston's translation into Latin of Chaucer's Troilus' It was sold with James Crossley's library, Manchester, 1884. Has any edition of this ever been printed? and are there other MSS. known?

HARRY H. PEACH.

BOOK-PLATE MOTTO, "TORCULAR CONCULCAVI SOLUS."-Can any one tell me to whom this fairly common book-plate belonged, and what were the place and date of the sale?

Beplies.

C. S.

POEM BY SIR THOMAS WYATT.

(10th S. iv. 70.)

IT is clear that there are two versions of the lyric "Lo! what it is to love!" and that the one is a deliberate adaptation from the other. The earlier is Sir Thomas Wyatt's, grouped as one of his odes. and the later is assigned in the Bannatyne MS. to Alexander Scott, whom Pinkerton called "the Scottish Anacreon." Wyatt died in 1542; and although little is known of Scott, it is almost safe to say that he was born about 1520, and produced his poems between 1545 and 1568. One of his most ambitious efforts is entitled 'Ane New Year Gift to the Quene Mary, quhen scho come first Hame, 1562.' In 1568, when the plague was raging in Edinburgh, George Bannatyne, a young business man of the city, secluded himself for a period, and occupied his leisure in transcribing into a volume of about 800 pages "nearly all the ancient poetry of Scotland now known to

one of these is "Lo! what it is to love!"
to which the transcriber duly appends his
edited from the MS. in 1821 by Dr. David
Scott's poems_were
countryman's name.
Laing, the greatest of Scottish antiquarian
editors, and a reprint of this was privately
issued in 1882. In this volume the lyric
prompted by Wyatt's ode has its own first
line for title, as it also has in Bannatyne, but
Lord Hailes, Pinkerton, and Sibbald enter it
in their anthologies as a 'Rondel of Luve.'

A cursory glance at the Bannatyne MS. shows that, even now, it would profit by careful sifting. The copyist, in his assiduous zeal, had not always exercised an exact discrimination in the choice of his material, and occasionally allowed the work of others as well as Scotsmen to creep into his neatly and closely written pages. It is not necessary to labour this point now; but it is apposite to mention that one of the lyrics included is Sir Thomas Wyatt's ode 'The Recured Lover,' which opens with the line, "I am as I am, and so will I be." Had "Lo! what it is to love!" been in the form in which it appears in Wyatt's works, it would have been easy to say that Bannatyne had given it to Scott by mistake, and the matter would have rested there. As it is, however, the one poem is undoubtedly a compressed re-cast of the other, as if the later poet had tried to give a fresh and impressive setting to what the earlier had elaborated. Wyatt's poem is entitled 'The Abused Lover admonishes the Unwary to beware of Love,' and consists of five stanzas of eight lines each, while in Scott's there are four stanzas, each containing but six lines. In both the opening stanzas are practically identical, but Scott utilizes Wyatt's fifth, third, and second respectively for his second, third, and fourth. The first stanza of each may be given, to show how closely the one movement follows the other, and Scott's fourth and Wyatt's second may be placed together to illustrate the greatest

divergence made by the younger poet from
his original. Wyatt opens thus:-

Lo! what it is to love!
Learn ye that list to prove
At me, I say;

No ways that may

The grounded grief remove,
My life alway

That doth decay;

Lo! what it is to love.

Scott presents this as follows:

Lo, quhat it is to lufe,

Lerne ye that list to prufe,

Be me, I say, that no ways may,
The grund of greif remufe,

Bot still decay, both nycht and day;
Lo, quhat it is to lufe..

Wyatt continues the admonition in this wise:

Flee away from the snare:
Learn by me to beware

Of such a train

Which doubles pain,

And endless woe, and care
That doth retain;
Which to refrain

Flee away from the snare.

In his second and third stanzas Scott slightly
refashions what his leader says in his fifth
and third of the character of love and the
woful condition of the wight who has become
its victim, and then, by way of concluding
the whole matter, presents as follows what
has just been quoted :-

Fle alwayis frome the snair,
Lerne at me to be ware;

It is ane pane, and dowbill trane,
Of endles wo and cair;

For to refrane that denger plane,
Fle alwayis frome the snair.

In such a matter it is, of course, evident that an unqualified judgment must not be given, as it would be inevitable and imperative that it should be given in the case of authors who deliberately publish their own writings. The dates of the two poets concerned show decisively that Wyatt's lyric is an independent study, and that nothing can be laid to his charge for the extraordinary coincidence that has thus been revealed. On the other hand, there is enough in Scott's presumably original work to show that he had a strong and serviceable literary faculty, and had no need to depend upon plagiarism, or even imitation, in order to secure artistic and effective results. His address to the queen, to which reference has been made, is a dignified and graceful exercise in the ballet-stave of eight; his Justing and Debait,' after a conventional fashion, is one of the best of its class and his "To luve unluvit it is ane Pane," in its vigorous movement, its procla mation of strenuous independence of spirit,

and the freshness and adequacy of its lyrical expression, fairly anticipates Wither's "Shall I, wasting in despair?" One of the best masters of expressive alliteration in the whole range of Scottish poets, Scott was manifestly given to metrical experiments, and it seems possible, perhaps it is exceedingly probable, that he worked on Wyatt's lyric to see what could be made of it, and left among his papers, without explanation, the chastened result which Bannatyne faithfully transcribed, fully believing that he had to do with an original composition.

THOMAS BAYNE.

[MR. J. GRIGOR also thanked for reply.]

"To PLY" (10th S. iv. 44).-There is, I think, little doubt that the verb ply is the aphetic form of apply, in M.E. aplie, just as pose is of appose. and prentice of apprentice. The article Ply' has not yet been finished for the New English Dictionary,' but it was fully examined when 'Apply' was done, and the general parallelism of sense development noted. If apply be examined in the 'Dictionary,' all the senses of ply will be there found: thus, sense 16, to apply or ply one's business, the plough, the world, husbandry, one's books, devotions, the spade, an oar, &c. So sense 17, to apply or ply a person with questions, speeches, bills, various things. So, also, sense 24 shows a ship applying or plying to Dover or to the Cornish coast. Ply is thus certainly of Romanic derivation, and represents L. plicare; only not plicare as a separate word, but as it exists in composition How these senses were developed from the in Latin applicare, O.F. a-plier, Eng. ap-ply. original one of folding one thing into contact with another can be studied in the Dictionary' in the verb 'Apply,' with which the aphetic form 'Ply' will, when published, be found to correspond. Ply occurs in the West Midland alliterative poem Cleanness,' 1. 1385, and is frequent in Gower in various senses; it has apparently been missed by Stratmann. It has, of course. to be kept historically distinct from its relative ply, to bend, which represents the non-compounded French plier, Latin plicare.

Oxford.

J. A. H. MURRAY.