jury not to believe her; for if she could have flown, she would through the window of the court, which was open, instead of staying there to be tried for her life. Justice Twisden laid down, that if a woman is charged with bewitching a man, it must be shown that she is old and ugly, otherwise she may have bewitched him by the beauty of her person and the charms of her conversation, against which the law does not provide. Not so if the charge is for bewitching inanimate objects, such as milk; but then strict proof must be given that it would not have gone sour in the usual way." Anecdotes Original and Selected, by T. Bayliss, London, 1776, pp. 78.

1

I shall be much obliged by a reference to the authorities, if any? PHILOMAGES.

"LE SACRÉ CŒUR."-Michelet, writing on the worship of the Sacred Heart, says:

"Ils ont conservé la précieuse équivoque du cœur idéal et du cœur de chair, et défendu d'expliquer si le mot de Sacré Cœur désignait l'amour de Dieu pour l'homme, ou telle morceau de chair sanglante. En reduisent la chose à l'idée, on lui ôtait l'attrait passionné qui en a fait le succès.

"Dès le dernier siècle, des évêques s'etaient avancés plus loin, declarant que la chair etait ici l'objet principal. Et cette chair, on l'avait placée dans certaines hymnes, après la Trinité, pour une quatrième personne."-Le Prêtre, la Femme, et la Fumille, p. 181. Paris, 1861.

A copy of one of these hymns, or a reference to where they may be found, will oblige U. U. Club.

H. B. C.

GENERAL SPALKEN. In the collection at Hampton Court Palace is a portrait, No. 910., described in the Catalogue as "General Spalken." The dress appears to be the uniform of a General in the British service. Can you give any account of General Spalken?

T.

Political and Friendly Poems, London, 1758. What are "unipods"? Who is H-? An explanation of the last stanza will oblige W.

66

Queries with Answers.

LETTER OF ANNE HYDE.-In Grace Kennedy's Father Clement, mention is made of a letter of "the Duchess of York, who was carefully educated by Protestant preceptors in the faith of the Church of England," detailing the causes of her change of religion. Is such a letter in existence, HERMENTRUde.

and where can it be found?

[This printed document in folio, 2 pages, is in the British Museum (Press mark 816. M. 1. Art. 117.) It is entitled, "A Copy of a Paper written by the late Duchess of York, &c.," and dated" St. James's, Aug. 20, 1670," and reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, edit. 1810, vol. v. p. 44. Her father, the Earl of Clarendon, wrote two letters in reply, which may be found in vol. iii. p. 555. of the latter work, entitled "Two Letters, written by the Right Hon. Edward Earl of Clarendon, late Lord High Chancellor of England: one to his Royal Highness the Duke of York; the other to the Duchess, occasioned by her embracing the Roman Catholic Religion." See also Harl. MS. 6854, fol. 102-106, for the three letters in manuscript.]

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY AND SOUTHEY.-It appears from a letter of Southey to Sir Egerton Brydges, in Sir Egerton's Autobiography, vol. ii., that Southey had commenced a Life of Sir Philip Sidney, and made considerable progress with it, but had delayed its completion from a desire to consult, before proceeding further with it, certain volumes which he had not then at hand. Was this work ever finished? or, if left incomplete, has any portion of it been printed?

A.

[On Nov. 11, 1804, Southey, in a letter to Messrs. Longman & Rees, proposed to edit the Works and write the Life of Sir Philip Sidney in three octavo volumes. See his letter in his Life and Correspondence, ii. 306. edit. 1850. The Life of Sir Philip Sidney was never printed; but the MS. of it, nearly, if not quite complete, is in the hands of the Rev. C. C. Southey. See Southey's Common-Place Book, by J. W. Warter, Series iv. p. 240.]

MARSH'S MICHAELIS. When Herbert Marsh first published his translation of Michaelis in 1793, can any of your readers inform me how the work was received? MEMOR.

[An ample critique on Bishop Marsh's translation of Michaelis will be found in the British Critic, first series, vol. iii. p. 601-608, and vol. iv. 46-54, 170-176. The Rev. Dr. Randolph (subsequently Bishop of London) in 1802, published anonymously some severe Remarks on the Dissertation, by way of caution to students in divinity. To these Remarks, Dr. Marsh replied in some Letters, published in the same year, in 8vo. Dr. Randolph objects to Michaelis's views of inspiration, and endeavours to show that Dr. Marsh's hypothesis of the origin and composition of the first three Gospels is neither well-founded nor consistent with itself. Dr. Marsh's notes extend only to the first part of the work. Consult Horne's Manual of Biblical Bibliography, p. 160., and Orme's Bibliotheca Biblica, p. 315.]

COLONEL JOHN BINGHAM.-As mention has recently been made in your columns of the Bingham family, I am led to inquire where any information can be found respecting Colonel John Bingham,

publishing mere obscenity and lasciviousness, we must alter all our notions of his character.

The Erotika Biblion of Mirabeau, really printed in Switzerland, bears on its title-page the palpably false imprint "Rome." Is it possible that r. seriously believes this imprint to be true? What can he mean by saying that he got his copy" direct from the Vatican "? JAYDEE.

CHESTNUT BEAM.

(2nd S. x. 431.)

In "N. & Q." MR. HOOPER makes mention of a "chestnut" beam in Meopham Church.

The timbers of ancient buildings in south-west Middlesex are invariably found to be a very hard wood in wonderful preservation, and stated to be chestnut procured "from Hounslow Heath, when it was a forest of that tree." The king-post and knees composing the framework of the spire of Stanwell church, are of the same wood; in short there is scarcely a house or barn older than, say the Tudor accession, throughout the district lying between Harmondsworth and Sunbury, which does not, on being pulled down, disclose massive beams, girders, &c. hewn from the wood in question.

But is this timber chestnut is my Query? I have long ventured to doubt if it be so; and until my opinion be refuted by competent judgment, must be permitted to doubt on. If chestnut it be, I am of course beaten (beech is beech, sycamore is sycamore), and the only question to be disposed of is ascertainment of its place of growth. Now the space between Staines and Hounslow formed part of the forest that covered the country of the Trinobantes from Finchley to Laleham (the great plain of Middlesex), bounded on the south-west by the broad belt of swamps which extended from Drayton to Staines. How does it happen that not one survivor remains to attest the truth of the assertion that the above tract was a dense wood of chestnuts? How is it that at Feltham Hill an oak gives rame to a residence? Why was not "Perry-Oaks"* Perry-Chestnuts? The oak at Feltham was growing at the period of the Norman conquest, perhaps of the Heptarchy; along the flat of the country are dotted oak pollards, whose trunks have weathered many hundreds of years; and it is most erroneous to suppose that these remnants originally grew few and far between, that is, taking them as planted by Nature's hand. Whenever sylvan singleness occurs it may be concluded, either that the tree was planted by the hand of man (in our case an absurd suggestion), or that it is a remnant in the same predicament as the thorn on Ettrick quoted by Scott,

Whose prickly spears
Have fenced him these three hundred years,
While fell around his green compeers."

* Qy, Petty, stunted?

A fragment of primitive Middlesex woodland is still extant at Littleton, and flourishing in hoar entanglement : —

"The same causation there as active now,

As when the Picti, roaming through the glade, Tended the bison tamed to meeker brow; Or from his hide wrought vestments in the shade." At Littleton the seedlings of oak and ash are nurtured by an underbush of furze, bramble, and thorn. This successional vegetative process has endured for thousands of years; and if the chestnut was once indigenous there, no earthly reason exists for its non-appearance at this day, unless, indeed, we imagine the builders in the times of the Plantagenets to have been so resolute in its use that they picked it out from among all other stems, even to utter extermination-a rather wide conjectural margin. Is, then, the timber under consideration any other than oak, which, worked up for internal fittings, has kept up a particular grain and colour from being unexposed to atmospheric influence and change? and is the prevalent notion to the contrary a legendary and stereotyped myth? H. HORNE.

Camberwell.

HAMMOND THE POET'S MOTHER.

(2nd S. xi. 348.)

The confusion touching the subject of Hammond's mother is even greater than is suggested by the contribution of D. Johnson says of the poet's father, that "he was allied to Sir Robert Walpole by marrying his sister." Now, the only sister of Sir Robert was Dorothy, who married Charles, 2nd Viscount Townshend, in 1713, three years subsequent to the poet's birth.

There is no less uncertainty about the poet's Christian name than there is about the name and person of his mother. Johnson, and nearly all other writers, call him "James." Lord Stanhope, in his edition of the Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield, calls him "William " (vol. iii. 452. note).

There is some uncertainty, too, with regard to the genuineness of the amorous poet's feelings as depicted in the elegies. In 1737, at the very hottest of his ardour for Catherine Dashwood, Chesterfield describes him as gayest of the gay among the women at Bath. Johnson ridicules the alleged reality of the sentiment, and cites excellent contempt does not extend, of course, to the beaureasons for the contempt he entertains, which tifully simulated tenderness of the elegies, which Johnson believes that Chesterfield could never have read, so little is the Earl's criticism warranted by the text.

Lord Lyttelton referred his "Delia" to them as containing all that of love could be expressed in soft numbers. The writer of the preface in my edition of Hammond (Edinburgh, 1781) says,

that he "about three years ago, hoped to have drawn from her, by means of a lady, her friend, a more satisfactory account" than the meagre one he was able to give, "but she entreated that no questions might be asked on so distressing a subject." Notwithstanding all this, Miss Dashwood, who survived her lover nearly forty years, and is stated to have declined many excellent offers, lived not in cloisters but in courts; as did Lord Lyttelton's "flame." Walpole closes his account of the wedding of George III. and Queen Charlotte by saying (after detailing a string of comicalities):

"It is as comical to see Kitty Dashwood, the famous old beauty of the Oxfordshire Jacobites, living in the palace, as Duenna to the Queen. She and Mrs. Boughton, Lord Lyttelton's ancient Delia, are revived again in a young court that never heard of them."

J. DORAN.

How could D. suppose that Anthony Hammond's father was named Stanley? or why should he wrest to that meaning the plain suggestion of "Mr. Urban's correspondent," that "Thomas Stanley, Gent., and Mary Hammon," married at . Bishopbourne, Oct. 15, 1621, were "the father and mother of the poet of that name"? There was in the seventeenth century not only a poet named James Hammond, but also one named Thomas Stanley, who, like other people, went by the name of his father, not that of his mother; and memoirs of him will be found in various biographical works, as Wood's Athenæ Oxonienses, the Biographia Britannica, and the Biographical Dictionary by Chalmers, and more particularly in the preface to his Poems, re-edited by Sir Egerton Brydges in 1814. His father was knighted, and styled Sir Thomas Stanley, of Leytonstone in Essex, and Cumberlow in Hertfordshire, whose second wife was Mary, daughter of Sir William Hammond, of St. Alban's Court, Kent, the poet's mother. Stanley's portrait by Faithorne, from a painting by Sir Peter Lely, is prefixed to the first edition of his History of Philosophy, 1655, folio, and is characterised by Granger as 66 a fine head."

J. G. N.

Your correspondent D. is indebted to himself only for the genealogical net in which he is entangled. There is no connexion between the extracts from the Tunbridge and Bishopbourne registers, and consequently no discrepancy in the statements of the contributor to Gents. Mag. (1796, p. 466.) with which he is puzzled.

James Hammond, or Hammon, M.P., for Truro, and author of Love Elegies, was the second son of Anthony Hammond, who was also both a poet and member of parliament, and who, on account of his eloquence, received from Bolingbroke the sobriquet of "Silver-tongued Hammond." The

evidence of the register as to the Christian name of his (Anthony's) wife Jane is far better than the unauthenticated statement in the memoir of James, which makes her Susanna; and there is nothing strange in his being born sixteen years after marriage, as he was the second son, and probably the fourth or fifth child. James Hammond was born 1710, and died 1741-2.

The marriage at Bishopbourne in 1621 was that of Thomas Stanley, a man of some literary eminence, afterwards knighted by Charles I., with Mary Hammon; they "were the father and mother of the poet of that name," viz. Thomas Stanley, born 1625, author of The History of Philosophy, and Lives of the Philosophers, besides various poems and other works. He died 1678, and was father of a third Thomas Stanley, also celebrated as an author. The note, "the father and mother of the poet of that name," could have no relation to the name of Hammon.

I may add that I am much interested in the Hammon family, my mother having been a member of its Sussex branch, deriving, I believe, from the Hammons of Ellingham, co. Norfolk, whose pedigree is entered in the Heralds' Visitations, and shall be much obliged for any information which will throw light on its subsequent history. S. T.

"THE MYSTERIOUS MURDER."

(2nd S. xi. 88. 259. 317.)

On the subject of the alleged murder of the unfortunate Mary Ashford by Abraham Thornton, May 27, 1817, several letters have recently appeared in the Birmingham papers, from which it may be inferred that the awful event has not entirely lost the interest which it so intensely excited at the time of its occurrence. In addition to the errors, both legal and circumstantial, which prevail more or less through these, I was surprised to see once more the attribution to the Rev. Luke Booker, LL.D., Vicar of Dudley, of the piece entitled

A

"The Mysterious Murder; or, What's o' Clock. Melo-drama in Three Acts. Founded on a Tale too true. Written by G. L. Birmingham. 12mo., pp. 56. N. D." (1817.)

This production, which is certainly of a very improper character, as imputing guilt to a person who had been legally acquitted, and perjury to the witnesses by whom a satisfactory alibi had been established, was really written by a young man named George Ludlam, at that time prompter at the Theatre Royal, Birmingham, but who shortly afterwards left the town with another company of actors. It was, at the time of its publication, in very great request; and I have been told by a contemporary that copies could not be obtained by the local booksellers and hawkers,