—we have something very like an echo of Shelley's phantom of happier things remembered shall come

5.

"If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?"--Princess, vii.
"Can man be free if woman be a slave?"

Shelley, Revolt of Islam, ii.

It would be easy enough, no doubt, to extend these quotations. I only give what have occurred to me from occasional readings of the poets, of both of whom, like MR. BULLEN, I am an ad

mirer.

It can scarcely be needful to say that I have no desire to suggest a charge of plagiarism. No doubt the same parallelism might be illustrated from the works of any one who has been at the same time a wide and appreciative reader and a

writer.

Мотн.

THE FRENCH STATE PAPER OFFICE. Histoire du Dépôt des Archives des Affaires Etrangères à Paris au Louvre en 1710, à Versailles en 1763, et de nouveau à Paris en Divers Endroits depuis 1796. Par Armand Baschet. 8vo. Paris, Plon.

(Third Article.)

and preserved either in the Tower or elsewhere. The occupation of Normandy and Guienne by the English, during the fifteenth century, had naturally placed in the possession of the conqueror a character, and which were equally interesting to number of state papers very valuable in their France and to England. Would it not be possible to obtain leave to catalogue those papers, sort them, copy them, and perhaps obtain the gift of a few of the originals? From M. Durand's letter, appears that the Engpublished by M. Baschet, it of the documents themselves, were disposed to lish Government, whilst refusing to part with any entertain favourably the rest of the demand; and the final issue was a mission entrusted to M. de Bréquigny, who, under the direction of the Duke de Choiseul-Praslin, visited this country twice, and took back to France a rich harvest of historical documents, filling no less than ninety large portfolios. The Recueil des Ordonnances, the Table Chronologique des Chartes concernant l'Histoire de France, &c., may be named amongst the most noteThe second book of M. Armand Baschet's vo-worthy results of M. de Bréquigny's scientific tour, lume takes us to Versailles, where the Duke de Choiseul transferred the Foreign State Paper Office. Celebrated by his liberal tendencies, and by his constant opposition to Madame Dubarryopposition which brought about his disgrace Choiseul was in every respect a most distinguished man; and, as our author remarks, he well deserves to be taken as the subject of some carefully prepared biography, for which materials are not wanting. His early education had been neglected, and he was not naturally of a studious disposition; but, when circumstances placed him amidst the difficulties of political life, he devoted his attention to history, and ever afterwards he encouraged, by every means in his power, those persons who showed any talent for historical researches. Fully understanding the importance of bringing together all the documents bearing upon the foreign relations of France, he gave the necessary orders for the building, furnishing, and decoration of an office at Versailles, and the works were completed with a rapidity which seems perfectly astonishing. Transferred from Paris in 1763, the Archives des Affaires Etrangères remained at Versailles till 1796, when Charles Delacroix, Minister of Foreign Affairs, ordered them to be moved back again to the capital.

One of the most important events connected with this portion of history is the appointment of M. Durand de Ditroff as keeper of the Foreign State Paper Office instead of M. Le Dran. The nomination took place in 1762, and having been designated to accompany the French ambassador, the Duke de Nivernais, to London, M. Durand conceived the excellent idea of examining the enormous quantity of historical documents, charters, title-deeds, letters, &c., relating to France,

accounts of which have been given by MM. Champollion-Figeac, Jules Delpit, Léopold Delisle, and Louis Paris, to say nothing of the compte-rendu which the explorer contributed to the Transactions of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (vol. xxvii.).

Anquetil and Lémontey are the two most distinguished writers whom we can name in connexion with the Revolutionary period of the Dépôt des Affaires Etrangères; they were freely admitted to study and copy the documents accumulated at Versailles, and made excellent use of their opportunities. GUSTAVE MASSON.

Harrow.

MILTON'S FORESTRY.

book upon forest trees,* has given prominence to
The Times of Dec. 20, 1875, in a review of a
a statement of some errors in forestry said to be
committed by Milton. With your permission, I
will essay a reply to the attack. I copy from the
Times. "Thus" (says the reviewer)
"Milton's Penseroso, wandering in

'Arched walks of twilight groves
And shadows brown that Sylvan loves
Of pine or monumental oak,'

has hitherto met with general approval, but Mr. Menzies will have none of him. No reason is known why the oak should be called "monumental," and the whole passage is rather confused. Pines and oaks seldom grow together naturally. The soil which produces one tree would not suit the other, and neither of them is remarkable for giving "arched walks" or "shadows brown."" But what Mr. Menzies thinks to be, perhaps, the poet's two weakest lines,

*Forest Trees and Woodland Scenery, as described in Ancient and Modern Poets. By W. Menzies. (Longmans.)

Under the shady roof
Of branching elm starproof,'

though undeniably open to the accusation he charges
upon them, have surely a beauty of their own, which
pleads against such condemnation. The elm,' says
Mr. Menzies, is one of the thinnest foliaged trees of
the forest. After the first flush of spring the leaves
begin to fade; many drop, and long before the autumn
they begin to shrivel, and present anything but a star-
proof canopy.' This, however, is not the most severe
piece of criticism in the volume. Few passages in Paradise
Lost are better known than the famous comparison of
the fallen Archangel to a tree blasted by lightning:-
'As when Heaven's fire

Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines
With singed top their stately growth though bare
Stands on the blasted heath.'

It is not clear, says Mr. Menzies, whether the poet
means that the lightning singes the tops of both oaks
and pines, or only those of the latter tree; but in either
case he is false to Nature. The oak, indeed, is liable to
a sort of baldness, alluded to by Shakspeare, but the
lightning never singes its top. It either shivers the tree
to atoms, or cuts one long deep furrow down the stems,

or divides into three or four grooves, twisting and making the trunk like a corkscrew."

Now (to take the points in order), Keightley tells us the oak is called "monumental" because monuments in churches are often formed of carved oak. He cites

"Smooth as monumental alabaster,"

Windsor Forest, within a walk of Horton, which are "monumental" in the ordinary sense of the word. Keightley also tells us the word "brown is used in the sense of the Italian bruno, dark. So far upon the Penseroso. Now for the Arcades. The weak point of the objection here is that the objector fails to see that the description is specific, and not arbitrary. The meaning is

Under this shady roof

Of branching elm starproof
Follow me,

i.e. (probably) under the elm avenue at Harefield, called "the Queen's Walk," in honour of Queen Elizabeth's visit to the Lord Keeper and Countess of Derby at the end of July, 1602.

In the simile from Paradise Lost, and elsewhere, Milton very justly uses the oak and pine to express majesty and strength. He is, besides, happy here in his choice of the oak, since it probably is more often scathed by lightning than any other tree. The "singed top" is perhaps less defensible. I am not, however, concerned to prove Milton an infallible writer on forestry, but merely to see justice done him, if he be judged,-even by the Deputy Keeper of the Parks and Forests of Windsor. J. L. WALKER.

As

Othello, v. 2, and says Milton probably had in mind "the builder MRS. BINCKES, A DAUGHTER OF THE PRINCESS oak" of Chaucer and Spenser, and wished to en- OLIVE. In a private and confidential letter hance on it; and that nothing, besides, was more which is now before me, which does not relate in suitable to the Penseroso than to think of the the remotest degree to Mrs. Serres or her claims, most solemn use to which the oak was put. I pass but contains references to many public and political by Mr. Menzies's opinion that "the whole passage personages, mention is made of a "Mrs. Binckes, is rather confused," and come to the statement who was a daughter of the Princess Olive, and that "pines and oaks seldom grow together natu- thereby related to the Royal Family." From rally." Milton does not say they do. But there another passage in the same letter, which is dated is authority for saying that the pine will grow in in 1871, it appears that Mrs. Binckes had, some every description of soil and situation, though it time previously, retired to the Continent. thrives best in good timber soil. It might, there-a perusal of the letter leaves little doubt that fore, well grow beside the oak, which will also Mrs. Binckes claimed to be a daughter of the grow in every variety of soil. Possibly Milton Princess Olive, and the writer believed her to be here speaks of the ilex or holm-oakx-a monumental so, I "make a note" of it for Mr. Thoms's infortree in another sense, for Pliny mentions some as mation. M. L. existing in his time which must have been 1,400 or 1,500 years old, and one of which had brazen THE MANTIS, OR HOTTENTOT GOD.-The late letters in the ancient Etruscan character fixed lamented Dr. Bleek's notes on Bushman Folk-lore upon its trunk. The ilex may have been known throw a great deal of light on the mythology to Milton through books, for he was a great reader and traditions of that curious but almost extinct of books of travel; and he may have seen it, for it people, especially on the subject of the mantis appears to have been introduced into England (Mantis precaria of naturalists). As far back as about the middle of the sixteenth century. Both the time of Kolben, the veneration of the Hottentot the pine and the ilex tend to form "arched walks" races (with whom he confounds the Bushmen) was by their freedom from low boughs and by their well known, and they were supposed to worship it. dense upper foliage. It is noticeable that the It is an insect of a bright green colour, belonging poet chooses the pine and the oak, and never men- to a family of orthopterous insects, holds up its tions the yew, though every time he entered the forelegs as if in the act of prayer, and can hardly church at Horton he must have seen two fine trees be distinguished from the plant on which it of this kind; which favours Keightley's explana-rests. Dr. Bleek, in his last report on Bushman tion. But there are, or were, several oaks in Folk-lore (Cape Town, 1875), says of it :

"Although the mantis is apparently the most prominent figure in Bushman mythology, and, at all events, the subject of the greatest number of myths, yet it does not seem that he is the object of any worship or that prayers are addressed to him."

St. Paul's is the site of meditation, and not the broken arch of London Bridge :

"Poems by a young nobleman, of distinguished abilities, lately deceased, particularly the state of EngThe heavenly bodies, sun, moon, and stars, are, letter from an American traveller, dated from the ruinous land, and the once flourishing city of London. In a however, prayed to, and thus the Bushmen are portico of St. Paul's in the year 2199, to a friend settled clearly to be included among the nations who in Boston, the metropolis of the Western Empire. Also have attained to sidereal worship. The Bushmen sundry fugitive pieces, principally wrote whilst upon his consider that the sun is a man from whose armpit travels on the Continent. 4to. 2s. 6d. Kearsly, 1780." brightness proceeded, and who lived formerly on There was a very clever book published in earth, but only gave light for a space around his own French, styled L'An Deux Mille Quatre Cent house. Some children belonging to the first Bush-Quarante: Rêve s'il en fut jamais. I do not know men were, therefore, sent to throw up the sleeping sun into the sky. Since then he shines all over the earth. In Bushman mythology the moon is looked upon as a man who incurs the wrath of the sun, and is consequently pierced by the knife, i. e., the rays of the latter. This process is repeated until almost the whole of the moon is cut away and only one little piece left, which the moon piteously begs the sun to spare, for his children's sake. From this little piece the moon gradually grows again till it becomes a full moon, when the sun's cutting and stabbing processes recommence.

The dasse or hyrax, the Bible coney of the rocks, is called by the Bushmen the wife of the mantis, and the porcupine their adopted daughter, who has a son, the ichneumon, who plays an important part in Bushman mythology.

Another curious myth is that the moon is formed of an old shoe of the mantis, which he threw into the sky with an order that it should become the moon. Thus the moon is red because the shoe of the mantis was covered with the red dust of Bushman land, and cold because it is only leather. Some think that the mantis misleads Bushmen by putting evil ideas in their heads. Bushmen women use a curious charm, made from the foot of the hartbeest, for their children, as a protection against the mantis.

Many other curious traditions are found in Dr. Bleek's researches, but they require the use of a peculiar type to properly illustrate them.

Lavender Hill.

H. HALL.

NEW ZEALANDER.-This famous allusion of Macaulay's I remember to have seen traced to Shelley, but it appears to have belonged no more to Shelley than to Macaulay. Happening to look into the Monthly Review, 1780, lxii. 128, I came upon the notice of a book of poems published in that year, with a couple of extracts of verse from it and a few remarks, amongst which occurs the following sentence :

"A Bostonian is supposed to visit the ruins of London; & poor emaciated Briton, who officiates as Cicerone, is his attendant."

The title of the book is given in full as follows, from which it appears that the ruined portico of

in what year it first appeared, but an edition was given in London, 1773. It is evident that the above vision of the year 2199 was suggested by the French book. The vision in the last chapter of the French book treats of the ruin of Versailles," ce palais superbe, d'où partoient les destinées de plusieurs nations"; the seer treads amongst its ruined basins and fallen columns, and, wandering, meets a man of contrite air in tears. "Why weep," he cries, "when all the world is happy? This wretched relic testifies to nothing but the public misery that existed when these gardens were ficurishing."-" Miserable man," replied the wanderer, "it was I, Louis XIV., who built this woe-stricken palace: Je pleure et je pleurerai toujours."" Our Frenchman was about to reply to the kingly shade when an adder sprang from the stump of a column on which it lay coiled; it stung him in the neck, and he awoke.

I suppose that all the foregoing must be known to some readers, but I have never yet seen the facts placed in connexion with the celebrated simile of the New Zealander, so that possibly it may be worth chronicling in "N. & Q." This suggests a work worthy of the labour of a man of wide reading, viz. The Growth of Fables, Illustrations, and Similes in Universal Literature, from the Earliest Times to the Present Century. It is manifest that some similes develope according to the same law that governs the growth of national melodies, by change of note, by fall and turn of bar or key, by spontaneous change in recital at the advent of every fresh genius, suggestion being caught from suggestion. C. A. WARD. Mayfair.

HEYWOOD ATHENÆUS. - It has not been pointed out, so far as I know, that the amusing passage in Heywood's English Traveller, describing the "shipwreck by drink," is also related in Athenæus (Deipnosoph. lib. ii. sect. v.), where it is quoted from Timæus of Tauromenium. Casaubon's edition of Athenæus came out in 1597, and again, with a Latin translation, in 1600. The edition of 1600 was probably in Heywood's hands when writing this passage, which, according to Charles Lamb, "for its life and humour might have been told or acted by Petruchio himself."