(6) In particular, the description of the parade, a broad terrace walk, towards the beginning of chap. xxxi, corresponds to Park Parade, High Harrogate, where the library still stands, with only one other between the present proprietor and Hargrove, who occupied it in Scott's day. An advertisement of Hargrove's records that he supplied" A fresh assortment of genuine patent medicines." Mr. Pott, Scott's librarian, also pharmacopolist as well as a reader of literature."

The Library.

An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students. By Ronald B. McKerrow. (Oxford, The Clarendon Press. 18s. net). MR. Baldwin, in one of his recent speeches, jestingly remarked that as Primes Minister he had found nothing which increased labour so much as the multiplication of labour-saving devices. Of all these devices the very king is printing; and of none, surely, has that_remark been proved so abundantly true. simple an affair is the bibliography of manuscripts compared with the bibliography of sight of scribes, what extravagant expenditure printed books! In saving the hands and eyewe have run into in the way of trouble and ingenuity and constructive imagination; making one more good instance of a truth humanity refuses to learn except by fits and starts, the truth of the more labour the more

The need for brevity compels me to curtail further evidences at present. I believe the above will be found very remarkable, local knowledge makes them more so. W. SABINE.

and

'MELISMATA,' 1611 (cliii. 334).-Halkett and Laing and all the chief musical histories agree that the author of this collection of "musicall phansies fitting the court, citie and countrey humours," was Thomas Ravenscroft. The dedication is signed "T.R.B.M." (i.e. Thomas Ravenscroft, Bachelor of Music. A copy of the work is in the British Museum (see Catalogue of Printed Music, under R., T."), and there is also a copy in the Bodleian. Ravenscroft wrote at least three other books, all of which are in the British Museum.

ARCHIBALD SPARKE.

How

Fourteen years ago Mr. McKerrow published in the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, and then in a small edition as a separate pamphlet, a set of Notes on Bibliographical Evidence for Literary Students and Editors of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. This proved extremely useful and is now out of print; nor is it to be wondered at that Mr. McKerrow has been often pressed The volume before us is his

to re-issue it.. response to this pressure: the material of the pamphlet, much added to, re-written, and, while still centred in the Shakespearian period, extended so as to deal with English book production up to the end of the that the development of the art of printing eighteenth century. Our author reminds us has been peculiar in that after forty or fifty years of experiment it settled down, about 1500, to methods which in essentials remained constant for three hundred years. He will for having set out fully all the operations in receive the gratitude of numberless students the production of a book about the year 1600, without assuming this or that detail to be too well-known for mention. His footnotes are no less interesting than the main text. In one he expresses with some discussion of it-the opinion that at about the above date variations in spelling were one of the chief expedients relied on by printers for justification"; in Milone, printed c. 1482, is the earliest example another he notes that the Oxford Cicero Pro he has found of "leading " in English printing. It may be interesting to notice that he finds the first recorded use of pagination in an English printed book to be the Opus grammatices of S. Sulpitius (Pynson, 1494) in which the pages marked are Pagina prima,' pagina ii" and so on; and that the earliest English title-page occurs in an edition of the "Treatise of the Pestilence' by Canutus printed by Machlinia before 1490. The use of title-pages for posting up as advertisementsa practice continued till the eighteenth cen

tury-seems satisfactorily ascertained, and Mr. McKerrow sets out some of the allusions to it. An interesting development of this was the mention, tantamount to an advertisement, of an author's earlier work on the title-page, the first instance of which found by Mr. Michael Sadleir, who has made some search on the subject, is in 1791, on the title-page of the School for Widows' by Clara Reeve, author of The Old English Baron.'"

6

Description of operations and apparatus, and explanation of technical matters generally are admirably clear, a point of praise, which it seems not superfluous to make. In the Note on Paper' we get something on the wider economic aspect of book production, and in the interesting chapter on the decoration of books, clear and useful distinction between illustration and decoration, as well as insight into the conditions which impelled the printer to restrict illustration, with information about the technique of wood-cutting and about the points to look for in examination of wood-cuts in old books. On the question of the form in which books were issued to the public Mr. McKerrow thinks that by the end of the sixteenth century the booksellers sold copies of new books ready bound and that publishers' temporary bindings, in grey or blue boards, usual from about the middle of the eighteenth century, formed the means to counter the disadvantages (largely "psychological in origin) of issuing books in loose sheets, which the purchaser had to send to a binder before they could be comfortably read. An interesting conclusion recorded in a chapter on sundry miscellaneous topics is that, at the time of the Restoration and onwards, considering the much smaller reading-public, the sale of good work by well-known writers seems to have been surprisingly large and rapid.'

Part II deals

with bibliography more strictly speaking, and furnishes the pages to which the practical worker will most often have recourse. We have found them excellent in every way, whether we consider treatment of minute detail, or sound general counsel-such as that which insists on the difference between errors of wording and errors of printing, and the consequent difference between the importance of the two in the matter of 'readings." The chapter on how to detect the order of successive editions gives two amusing examples of the results of a proof-reader's or compositor's attempts at correction, and shows their force as bibliographical evidence.

Part III has to do with the relation between the compositor and his copy. A debated question here is whether or no copy in early printing was set up from dictation. There is a certain amount of evidence in favour of the practice, but Mr. McKerrow believes that it was never customary though resorted to occasionally, perhaps to meet failure of light or of eyesight on the part of the com

Printed and Published by The Bucks Free

positor. How far the compositor followed his author's spelling-apart from the exigencies of "justification". a fascinating question which still awaits investigation, as does the equally good one of punctuation, in which it is likely that literature owes much to the printer, for it would seem that authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were beyond belief careless and erratic in this matter. In fact, it may be necessary, by the light of what is known of printers' methods to modify some of the opinions about the principles followed by older authors in punctuation which certain admiring critics have recently propounded.

An appendix of eight sections adds matters We have here what will of no little value. assuredly remain for many years the central, or fundamental, standard authority upon the topics with which it deals.

Dear Sir,

PROFESSOR PLATT'S ESSAYS.
To the Editor of N. & Q.'

EVERY friend of the late Professor Platt will be grateful for the appreciative review of his Essays in your issue for October 8th.

Your reviewer points out that those of the Essays which were read before the Literary Society of University College, London,

have

a sort of calculated and coaxing flippancy, which many lecturers seem to think proper to divert a youthful audience with." It is important in this connection to remember that, during the long period of years over which the papers were read, the paper was invariably It was the rule of the followed by a debate. game that lecturers must throw out as many challenges as possible to a row of opponents, who used to perch themselves on a conspicuous ledge at the end of the room. When, for instance, Platt uttered the sentence your reviewer quotes about "the curtain of history at the death of Julian falling on living men, not to rise again till Dante saw Beatrice," this was a challenge hurled at a medievalist (whom I might name) who was present. course the phrase represented a truth which Platt felt very strongly, but the exaggerated form in which it was couched was merely an invitation to that gentleman to tread on the tail of his coat. The challenge was of course taken up, and, in his final summing up, Platt made it quite clear that he never meant his rule to be one which did not allow numerous exceptions. He would not grant Beowulf to be very living, but he was as quick as anybody to appreciate that Njal and the sons of Njal living men."-I am, Sir, yours very

were

faithfully,

A PERMANENT VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNVERSITY COLLEGE LITERARY SOCIETY.

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Muggletonians

NOTES: The Children of Edward IV, 381-The King's Ships, 382-Hog v. Latton and wife-The Chippendale Family, 385-Tremlau (Tremeslau) -An Early Medical account, 386. QUERIES:-Nineteenth century pottery group: I.O.G.T.-Don John of Austria-Block Tympanum over Church door, 386-" Scamells": Sea-mells Dr. Harrap Graves bound with osiers-The City entertaining four kings-West Country folk customs--Cobham, Surrey-Concordances-" Worenday Clownes "-Sky-scrapers in fiction-Charles Lovell, 387-Queen Victoria at Royal United Services Institution-Cheyne of Dorset and Wilts Authors wanted, 388. REPLIES: All Souls' Day at Salerno, 388 Spenser's mistress, Rosalind, 389 Thomas Neale, 390-Names in Monastic Life-Seventeenth century silver medal 'Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family' Bevil Family of Chesterton, Co. Hunts-Cronshaw, 391-Burial upright-The Bank of England and other city gardens Southampton: Bevois and Ascupart, 392 - Scratch dials Ancient Seals - Delabere Robertson Blaine-Admiral William Ward, 393John Evans, author of The Juvenile Tourist Charles Polhill of Cheapstead Red Dane King's Ships built at Bursledon-Double Piscinas-Domestic Buildings of Norman period. -Tennyson Portraits by Watts, 394.

-

THE LIBRARY:- Historical Notes on the Use of the Great Seal'-' Parish Register of Sheffield,' Part V A Poetry Book for Children.'

No. of Inserts.

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Memorabilia.

ALL antiquaries will have read with quite unusual interest Mr. O. G. S. Crawford's article (illustrated by several pictures on the picture page) in The Times of Nov. 23, on the Glozel finds. Mr. Crawford sets out with the contention that, in spite of the high names supporting the authenticity of the finds, scepticism has justified itself. It was in March, 1924, that the son of the peasant family named Fradin, whose farm occupies the site, first struck some big stones with his plough, and then, digging in the place, found certain flat clay tablets or bricks, fragments of glass vessels, and large, thick-sided vases for the holding of molten glass-remains, it would appear, of a glass-furnace which may not have been more than two or three hundred years old. Reported to the local archæological society, the discovery was investigated further, and in January, 1925, turned up the first object of "Glozelian interest, an inscribed clay tablet. Six months after were found a flat stone ring and three slate axes, all having letters incised. Later on Dr. Morlet of Vichy, an "enthusiastic but inexperienced amateur of archeology," as Mr. Crawford describes him, took the matter up, and now new finds of very various sort were made in abundance: not only rings, axes, pins, but clay-pots with owl-faces, and an immense number of inscriptions. The grounds upon which the claims set up for these things are to be suspected are, as Mr. Crawford states them after an examination on the spot, that the excavations have not been conducted in a systematic, scientific way. This line of argument, under the

auspices of M. Vayson de Pradenne, is that which has proved most damaging to the sup"clean porters of authenticity, for it was a section" of the soil which revealed a small tunnel whereby, without disturbing the surface, one of the inscribed tablets had been inserted into the ground. His opinion has been reinforced by M. Dussaud, who is an expert on inscriptions, and pronounces the Glozel inscriptions to be forgeries. Mr. Crawford does not refer to the finding of the International Commission.

A LETTER of Lady Fortescue in The Times of Nov. 21 affords a curious, if rather melancholy, instance of what may happen if there is mixing up of the significance of emblems. On Armistice Day Flanders poppies were sold in the streets in Paris, as they were here. But wearers of these were looked at askance, elbowed away in a crowd, Hostility was even pushed by the police. experienced by so many and in degree so marked that at last French friends was sought, when it an explanation from revealed that the poppy, to us a symbol of sleep, is in France a symbol of Communism, being a poisonous weed which, springing up in field of wheat, destroys the good crop. Apparently it has this sinister significance for all Continental nations. It would be interesting to learn when this was first estab

lished.

was

as distinct from the actors-on the con

The

are

CRITICISM of the plays of Shakespeare— temporary stage is often worth noting. dramatic critic of The Times, who witnessed the performance of Much Ado ' at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, on Monday last, drops rather heavily on Dogberry. Mr. Hay Petrie, for all his more than competence, "cannot reconcile us to Dogberry's comic reputation "-the "poor malapropisms "but there is filled out by the actor's skill, hardly anything in the actual lines to give him inspiration.' This writer is frankly shocked by Beatrice a most delicate creature, flaunting her maidenly virtue with a zest that is at times thoroughly nasty." The question he puts is, of course, that of the relation between this sort of thing and the popular taste which the Elizabethan playwright had to meet. The notice winds up with the suggestion, "let us not be too hard on the Bard. It is not his fault that he is played too often now-a-days.' Are these words one of the faint omens of some coming obscuration of the great luminary?