state of the drama, called The Saucy Collier of Croydon "In conclusion we may add the remarks of Patrick 'Oh, the rustics of Roydon, his old house, if he had inquired later !* He gives in full the ballad of "John Gilpin." Whether his language is precisely that of the time, or the old play was written by Shakespeare, may be open to doubt (Hazlitt's Old Plays, Dodsley's Collection, vol. viii. p. 385, published by Reeves & Turner, 1874). It seems almost conclusive that his knowledge of the Gilpin family had been derived from the tradition of him of Collier's Water, possibly before the era of the last, for there is an earlier deed of 1648 which recites how "John Gilpin and Elizabeth his wife, one of the daughters and co-heirs of Elizabeth Jackson, widow of Robert Jackson, were in joint possession of the property, which seems to have been finally sold to Mr. Bennington by the heirs of a later Gilpin of Southwark in 1781." And though this does not certainly point to the individual or the date of the adventure, it does seem, like all I have otherwise "The same old farmhouse is still standing in which far older than Cowper's day, and that the poet and found, that the name and fame of John Gilpin are the sturdy Collier lived, just at the station now made at his friends all knew that it was so, and did not Collier's Water Lane; it is in possession of Mr. Benning-need to choose a new name when the story was ton, to whose family it has belonged for many years." Oh, the Jolly Colliers of Croydon,' &c. The beauty of the country and the charming put into verse. A topographical work on Croydon, of which the title-page is gone, date 1817, shows that Thornton Heath was the name of a tract of land on which there were sixty-eight copyhold tenements before the enclosure of the wastes in 1797 by the Crown, when these copyholds, of which Collier's Water was doubtless one, were made freeholds. I have no reason to think that any Gilpin resided there. The style of the house points rather to it as an investment to be let as a farm, and visited, perhaps, by a wealthy citizen, after its original use was over. ("The trade of the town being chiefly in oatmeal and charcoal.”) In the list of monuments in the church and churchyard the name Gilpin is not once seen, though that of Robert Jackson, yeoman, probably the first John Gilpin's father-in-law, appears in 1622, and is seen no more. But I find the name of John Unwin, Esq., who died 1787, aged seventyfive, and others of his family. This was the brother at whose house Mrs. Unwin said she had met the Rev. William Gilpin. The poems and messages were frequent through her son in Cowper's correspondence. Mr. Unwin was in the law, and doubtless acquainted with the traditions of the place; and a Mrs. Unwin's name is among the small number of subscribers to the book, 1817. So there seems every reason to believe the stone in St. Margaret's Churchyard, which has been PAROCHIAL REGISTERS (6th S. v. 141, 211, 233, 248, 273, 291, 310, 329, 409, 435, 449). I wish to add my voice to many others in favour of allowing parish registers to remain where they are. Use all means for their careful preservation in their present places of deposit, and as a security against loss or damage take all proper steps for duplicates to be made. But the removal of the ancient registers to London would be a serious blow to archæological research in country parishes. I have printed the inscriptions on the church bells in four counties, and am now engaged on two more, and I have no hesitation in saying that if many of the notes appended to the inscriptions are of any value it is very much derived from the information readily given me by the parochial clergy from the registers and other documents under their care. Wishing to trace the descent of a country bell-foundry for upwards of one hundred and fifty years, I inquired, a few days ago, through a friend, whether it was likely that the rector of the parish in which the foundry was formerly situated would assist me. Instead of answering my letter he sent it on to the clergyman himself, who, in a note just received by me from him, says, "If there is any further point in which I can be useful to you, please write to me without hesitation......I will gladly send you extracts from the registers if I hear from you that you wish for further information." This is by no means a solitary instance of courteous help I have received from clergymen to whom I am an entire stranger; I could mention a vast number. Will provincial antiquaries (unless they are rich ones) be so well served by Government officials in London? THOMAS NORTH, F.S.A. Llanfairfechan, I have examined one very limited register, covering three centuries, with about thirty entries, and all relating to the manorial owner's family. I became satisfied that it had been, like others, very imperfectly kept. I do not think such registers present the interest imagined, so many events taking place in town during the season. I have found incumbents very courteous and obliging, the clerks frequently exacting and dictatorial as to time, place, and opportunity. My searches, however, have beeen tedious and protracted. Personally I do not advocate the removal or centralization of these documents, but do most earnestly recommend that all such transactions should be treated as merely civil, not quasireligious, matters. A. H. should not be photographed, and in that manner Has anybody ever said yet why parish registers copies preserved or multiplied? In these days of progress surely this might be done and undoubted perfect copies obtained. I have by me the whole of a number of Fun, plates and all, and a copy of the Times thus photographed, and afterwards printed in ink by a well-known process, and every word is readable even with a good naked eye, and perfectly so with a glass. Here, then, it appears to me, is a means of getting over all difficulty, and also of storing the registers copied in a small space, besides the advantage of being able to multiply copies. The indexing of registers is, however, quite as important a matter; but when this has been done, this work, too, could be similarly treated, and thus be made easily accessible. R. W. HACKWOOD. I cull the following from the one-hundred-andfiftieth catalogue of Mr. James Coleman, of 9, Tottenham Terrace, Tottenham. Have we here an example of the fate which has befallen some of the transcripts which are supposed to be housed in episcopal registries? The county of Dorset was at this time in the diocese of Bristol : "No. 175. Marriages, Births, and Burials.-Transcripts of all the Register Books for one year, viz., 1737-8, of the important town and parish of Wimborne Minster in the county of Dorset, nicely written on one skin of parchment, signed by the Minister, William Russell, and both the churchwardens. 10s. 6d. Here we find the important names of (buried) Thomas, son of Thomas Fitch, Esq., 26 Aug., 1787; James Carnocken and Mary Chaffy, married 19 Dec., 1737; Mary, daughter of William Frampton, baptised 1 Sept., 1737; together 154 certified registers. I have some more yearly transcripts of this and surrounding parishes at same price for sale." Can it be possible that the authorities at Bristol at any time sold these valuable transcripts as waste parchment? C. H. MAYO. In the present discussion I hardly think that the distinction has been sufficiently attended to between the preservation of the documents themselves and that of the information they contain. This latter is clearly of the greater importance. Will it be better sought by their removal to London or by having them copied? It is confessed that natural decay is doing its work, and all the care imaginable cannot preserve many of them from ultimate loss, and that an early transcript of them is imperative to preserve their contents." Surely our first care should be to have them copied. These copies might be kept either in the Record Office or at Somerset House, the originals being left where they are. To remove these latter to London would be, as it has been very properly argued, an act of consfication. And cui bono? Are the interests of London genealogists to be preferred to those of local ones? And is antiquarianism to suffer (for I feel sure it would suffer) for their sake? Why not form, as I see with pleasure it is proposed to do for Yorkshire, county register societies, or rather register and record societies ?for MR. GIBBS has well pointed out that churchwardens' and overseers' account books contain matter of the greatest value, and ought equally to be cared for with the registers. For my own part, I do not see why such societies should not, under proper regulations, be subsidized by the Treasury. This would ensure uniformity of plan, and a pub-in Galloway, was dedicated to him, and was celelication, as in the case of the "Chronicles and Memorials issued under the direction of the Master of the Rolls, "without mutilation or abridgment." Would not this be productive of much more good than Mr. Borlase's Bill? And would it not serve to kindle a large amount of enthusiasm in antiquarian researches ? up against him by the nobles of the land, he left Aleth and retired to Saintonge, where he was welcomed by Leontius, Bishop of Xaintes. After a time he revisited his diocese, but returned again to Saintonge and died about the year 627. A church was erected by Leontius on the spot where he was buried. A century or two later his remains were stolen from their resting-place and carried to Aleth, where, however, they did not remain long, having been translated about the beginning of the tenth century to Paris. The cult of St. Malo, or Maclou, was very widely spread. Under his alias of St. Machute the earliest church in the town of Wigton, brated enough to have been visited in pilgrimage by some of the Scottish kings and queens. It is, therefore, by no means extraordinary, especially when his connexion with St. Brandan, an Irish saint, is taken into account, that a place in Ireland should bear his name; nor is there anything very singular in his grave being shown, as it is well known that the relics of saints may be deposited in more than one place. As to the stone trough, British saints were in the habit of using this sort ST. McLoo's STONE (6th S. v. 446). of conveyance in their voyages across the seas and question is asked, Who was St. McLoo? With-rivers. Vide their lives as related by Père Albert out venturing on a positive answer, I would suggest that St. Malo may be meant. The learned Benedictine, Dom Gui-Alexis Lobineau, in his Vies des Saints de Bretagne, says of this saint that his name varies no less in the Latin, in which he is called Maclovius, Macliavus, Macutus, and Machutes, than in the French, in which he is named Malo, Maclou, Macou, and Macut. He is said to have been the son of a lord or prince of that part of South Wales now known as Monmouthshire, to have been educated by St. Brandan, at that time abbot of Lancarvan, and to have accompanied him in his famous voyage in search of the Fortunate Leigh Vicarage, Lancashire. J. H. STANNING. The Islands in the Western Ocean; to have been con secrated, against his will, Bishop of Caer-gwent, In le Grand and others. St. Malo is commemorated on the 15th of November; and if any pardon or feast is held near the spot described by your correspondent about that time of the year, the identity of St. McLoo with St. Malo, alias Maclou, may be considered as proved. EDGAR MACCULLOCH. Guernsey. DESCENT OF THE EARLDOM OF MAR (6th S. v. 405, 452).—I am much obliged for L. R. A.'s courteous correction of my hasty assumption that the fact of Janet Keith's having had a daughter by her first husband, Sir David Barclay, could affect the claim of her son by her second husband, Sir Thomas discovery thus becomes of less consequence, I may Erskine, to the Earldom of Mar. Though the point out that it throws light on a hitherto unintelligible entry in the Scottish Exchequer Rolls of 1373, of a heavy payment to Sir Thomas Erskine for the wardship and marriage of his youthful step-daughter, the heiress of Brechin, for the purpose, evidently, of securing her hand for the king's son, Walter Stuart. Had she been the daughter of Sir David Barclay's first wife, Elizabeth Ramsay, daughter of William, titular Earl of Fife (not Isabella the last Countess of Fife, as erroneously in a footnote), she would doubtless have been left stated by the learned editor of the Exchequer Rolls in ward to the Ramsays. EQUES. SILHOUETTES, OR BLACK PROFILE PORTRAITS (6th S. v. 308, 393, 458).-As the fortunate possessor of upwards of eighty silhouette portraits of members and relatives of my family, more than forty of which are in original black oval frames, it may be convenient to note the information that I have gathered from them with regard to their first introduction and the various styles of treatment which they present. There appear to be six different styles of silhouettes; of these the chronological sequence is as follows: 1. The portrait cut out of a piece of white paper and removed, leaving the margins, which are laid upon a background of thin black wood or paper. Of this kind I may instance portraits of a greatgrandfather and his wife, who were born respectively in 1723 and 1726. These likenesses were taken soon after their marriage in 1744, and are the earliest of the kind with which I am acquainted. 2. The portrait painted in black on white paper. Of this sort I have, besides many single portraits, a large full-length group, "( a conversation piece," of much interest, representing my great-greatuncle, Mr. James Essex, his wife and daughter. The details of these ladies' head-dresses are rendered with much minuteness. Mr. Essex was born in 1723, and died in 1784. A variety of this style of work exhibits the likenesses cut out of black paper and laid upon a white or pale-green ground. Strictly speaking, these are silhouettes, properly so-called, according to Brande. 3. The portrait etched black on a copper plate. Many of this kind were done by Christopher Sharp of Cambridge about 1780. 4. The portrait painted in black with the headdress, hair, &c., pencilled and shaded lighter, the earrings, &c., in gold. Some of these are delicately and beautifully done. They first appear at the extreme end of the last century. 5. The portrait painted in black on a concave glass, with the hair and dress shaded lighter, and the whole floated over with a thin coat of white wax, producing a very soft effect. At the present time the wax is usually full of slight cracks. These portraits are not earlier than 1800. They are generally mounted in narrow gilt brass margins of oval form, and set in flat square frames of black polished pasteboard, and hung from a ring attached to the frame by a gilt brass clip, which shows an oakleaf and an acorn in front. The styles mentioned under clause 2 are the easiest of execution and consequently the most common, and it is in this form that the art has descended to our own day, though it certainly cannot be said that modern silhouettes possess the value as likenesses which the earlier ones undoubtedly had. In the first quarter of this century full-length silhouettes, cut out of black paper laid on white, were much in vogue, and notably at Cambridge, where lived a famous practitioner of the art named Edouart. He executed a set of five silhouette portraits of the Rev. Charles Simeon, in as many of his striking attitudes in the pulpit of Trinity Church, and numerous full-length likenesses of Cambridge men, such as "Jemmy Wood," Master of St. John's, and other celebrities. The faithfulness of these delineations will be fresh in the recollection of Cambridge men who were undergraduates at that time. With regard to the oval black frames which are so inseparable from the early silhouettes, it may be noted that their original manufacture died out fully fifty years ago. In our own time the silly craze for reproducing the houses and furniture of our grandfathers has brought back a very degenerate descendant of the "black ovals." The older examples are tenderly and accurately turned, with beautiful mouldings, often in ebony, while the modern imitations have wretched shallow mouldings coarsely worked in soft wood. ALBERT HARTSHORNE. I have two silhouettes, without date, but belonging to the latter part of the last century. Pasted to the back of each is the following printed advertisement : "Perfect likenesses in miniature profile, taken by Mrs. Lightfoot, Liverpool, and reduced on a plan entirely new, expression of the Features, much superior to any other which preserves the most exact symmetry and animated method. Time of sitting one minute. N.B. She keeps the original Shades, and can supply those she has once taken with any number of duplicates. Those who have Shades by them may have them reduced, and dressed in the present taste. All orders addressed to Mrs. Lightfoot, Liverpool, will be punctually dispatched." C. H. MAYO. BAGNAL OR BAGENAL FAMILY (6th S. iv. 288, 318, 375, 456).-I stated in my note, at the last reference but one, that Ralph and William Bagnall appeared to be the only persons of that surname on the index to wills in the Worcester Probate Office between 1600 and 1651. The fact is, Ralph and William both occur under the year 1624; Nicholas Bagnall, of Worcester, 1635; and a second William under 1638. Ralph died intestate, and letters of administration were granted to his son Thomas in September, 1624; the inventory mentions that his rapier and three brushes were valued at one shilling. William Bagnall, of the parish of St. Andrew, within the city and county of Worcester, brewer, made his will Oct. 30, 1624, having then three sons, minors, William, Gilbert, and George, to whom he bequeathed one hundred marks apiece; wife Alice, and mother Johan Bagnall; a legacy for "my brother Ralph Bagnall att his Coming ou' into England"; legacies also to sisters Eleanor and . "sergeants," i. e., sheriff's officers, could have been Like sergeants [stop] gallants in the street." The following example of a pluralized adjective occurs in the Letters and Papers of John Shillingford, Mayor of Exeter, 1447-50, printed by the Camden Society in 1871: Ther was at that day atte dyner with my lord the ij chif justises, and so we appered before them......My lord Chauncellor therwith sodenly went right to the justises Torquay. WM. PENGELLY. In Gage's A New Survey of the West India's, 1655, p. 8, is this passage :— "The Order of the Province being read to the Generall, or his Generall Chapter, then are Letters naming him his Vicar Generall for such a Province." Patents granted unto this Procurator from the Generall, W. D. SWEETING. Maxey, Market Deeping. Johan Bagnall, brother Hugh, the poor of the THOMAS P. WADLEY: Naunton Rectory, Pershore. Though not strictly adjectives, yet the following adjectival examples may be added: Knights-Templars, Knights-Hospitallers, and lords-lieutenants. The first two are never varied; the last is sometimes written lord-lieutenants. E. COBHAM BREWER. THE "CHEAP MAGAZINE" (6th S. v. 287).The projector, editor, proprietor, and printer was Geo. Miller, of Haddington, where it was printed 1813 and 1814, two volumes only. In connexion with this Miller published a remarkable book at Edinburgh in 1833, entitled Latter Struggles in the Journey of Life; or, the Afternoon of my Days: being the Retrospection of a Sexagenarian, containing much curious matter relating to his labours towards furnishing cheap reading for the people, in which he may be considered the precursor of the Chamberses in Edinburgh. This Cheap Magazine appears to have been a great hit in that direction. Miller speaks proudly in 1833 of the "great Lord Chancellor" (Brougham) only then beginning to supply the people with "penny a week's information," an achievement accomplished by him unsupported except by the public, twenty years before, and of the compliment paid him by the Chamberses of his being in reality the one in advance of his age in that respect. Besides this magazine our persevering leader in cheap literature followed it up with a Monthly Monitor in 1815, and a series of "cheap tracts" which, he says, gave the death-blow "to that copious source of mischief, the hawker's basket," with its loose chapbooks, which had previously been the only reading of the humbler classes. Wilberforce and other eminent philanthropists of the day encouraged the compiler, but after all the life of poor Miller was, |