OSPHAL

[Some account of Raymund Lully, the Enlightened Doctor, may be found in the Penny Cyclopædia; Aikins's Biographical Dictionary; the new edition of the Biographie Universelle, and Trithemius On the Illustrious Writers of the Church, 1546, 4to.]

Replies.

BISHOP PERCY, AND HIS "RELIQUES."

(4th S. ii. 169.)

Having contributed several articles to the Third Series of "N. & Q." on Thomas Percy, Bishop of Dromore, and his books, under my old signature, OXONIENSIS, I am rather surprised that MR. PAYNE COLLIER has not noticed them before, as his note in the last number of your periodical indicates his taking an interest in the subject. They were written, besides, chiefly with a view of obtaining additional information, and any given would have been gladly received.

Now, first, the letter which MR. PAYNE COLLIER prints, dated Easton Maudit, April 16, 1761, is, I imagine, addressed to the publisher of the Grand Magazine a periodical to which Percy contributed. I have in my possession a copy of a letter of a somewhat similar kind, transcribed from an original in the Bodleian Library, from him to the publishers, offering some translations, &c., for insertion. Then as to the little poem, "Deep howls the storm with chilling blast," &c., it was inserted in the Appendix to my Memoir of Bishop Percy in order to show that the attachment to Mrs. Percy was of the most permanent kind, and the date given is undoubtedly March 22, 1788, as MR. PAYNE COLLIER observes, "six years after Percy became Bishop of Dromore," and, it may be added, when he was fifty-nine years of age. I pass no judgment on the merits of the poem. It was sent to me by the Rev. H. B. Knox, the present rector of Dromore, who told me that he had copied it from an album belonging to a lady of that place, but I was unable even with the assistance of a friend to decipher some of the words in the MS., and this will account for inaccuracies, for we had to guess at some words, and endeavour to go as near the mark as we could. Mr. Knox informed me that the poem was addressed to Mrs. Percy, and that he believed it to have been written for the album above-mentioned, and never to have been printed.

Percy's connection with the ducal house of Northumberland is "not proven." In the Bridgnorth register the name is spelt "Pearcy;" in the Council books of that town" Piercy," and also in the catalogue of Oxford Graduates; in a Battel book at Christ Church it is "Peircy; 17 but in the register at Easton Maudit, in his own hand, it is most clearly and legibly written "Percy," and the date of this is 1753. The fact of his father having been a grocer at Bridgenorth was disputed by his descendants, but it is now proved beyond doubt; for MR. HUBERT SMITH, the deputy town clerk of Bridgenorth, found a minute referring to his trade -namely, "it is ordered and agreed that Arthur Piercy of Birmingham, the son of Arthur Low Piercy of Bridgnorth, grocer, shall be admitted as a burgess, August 12,1755," the said Arthur Piercy being the brother of the editor of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

The Memoir of Percy prefixed to the Ballad Book was undertaken and written from my having ever taken an interest in the Reliques, and from once having held a curacy almost within a walk of Easton Maudit, in Northamptonshire, for so many years his quiet home. Several inaccuracies have crept in, and it might easily have been made more perfect had access to a good library been afforded, but in a lonely country place the chance was not permitted. It has, however, I hope, chronicled hitherto unrecorded facts concerning Percy, and shown his industrious painstaking character. He might not indeed have been a man of first-rate abilities, but at any rate the merit is his of having been the first to pioneer the way in several hitherto untravelled tracts of literature.

I should imagine that no library possesses a complete collection of the books that Percy either compiled or edited, for they are many in number and some are of extreme rarity. Very few copies again were printed of his interesting correspondence with Paton, Edinburgh, 1830. One is in the Bodleian stores, and was shown to me by a friend. I have heard that MR. PAYNE COLLIER possesses a copy of the works of Surrey edited by Percy, the whole of the impression of which was destroyed by a fire which took place in Red Lion Passage, in 1808, with the exception of a few copies privately circulated. It may interest him to know that now an excellent photograph of the bishop's birth-place at Bridgnorth may, for a very trifling sum, be procured, and that the house itself was very recently in the market, and might have been purchased at a reasonable rate.

Tamworth, Staffordshire.

JOHN PICKFORD, M.A.

While I am pleased to see MR. PAYNE COLLIER's notes on "Bishop Percy and his Reliques," and obliged to him for printing them, I ask you to

allow me, in justice to MR. PICKFORD, to observe that lines 5 and 6 of MR. PICKFORD'S "Life" state that Percy's grandfather was a grocer as well as his father; and also that the note on the second page of the "Life" states that a woodcut of the old Percy house is to be found in Mr. Bellett's Antiquities of Bridgnorth. F. J. FURNIVALL.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF BISHOP PERCY'S
FOLIO MANUSCRIPT.-No. 11.
"THE FARMER AND THE KING."
(4th S. ii. 152.)

When I was a boy I heard this ballad sung, and I have ever since remembered it. My recollection enables me to supply some of the lacuna in your correspondent's version. I think there is a dash of the seaside in such terms as "he darned his eyes." It smacks of Plymouth.

"There was an old chap in the west countree,

A flaw in his lease the lawyers had found; 'Twas all about felling of five oak trees, And building a house upon his own ground. Right too ra loo ral, &c. "This old chap to Lunnon would go To tell the king a part of his grief, Likewise to tell him a bit of his woe, In hopes the king would give him relief. Right too ra loo ral, &c. "When this old chap to Lunnon was come, He found the king to Windsor was gone; And gain he had known that he had not been there, He dashed his wig if he'd comed so far. Right too ra loo ral, &c. "So when this old chap to Windsor was come, He walked right up before the door; He banged and he thumped wi' his oaken clump, 'There is room enough there for I to be sure.' Right too ra loo ral, &c.

"Please, Mr. Noble, show I the king.

Lord! bee's that the king as I sees there!

Well, I seed a chap at Bartlemy Fair

Look'd more like a king nor that chap there.'
Right too ra loo ral, &c.

"Well, Mr. King, an' how do you do?
I ha' gotten for you a bit o' a job,
And gain for me the thing you will do,
I ha' gotten a summat for you in my fob.'
Right too ra loo ral, &c.
"The king he took the lease in han,

To sign it too he were quite willin;
So the farmer to make him a bit o' amends
He pulled out his bag, and he gi'ed him a shilling.
Right too ra loo ral, &c.

"The king to carry on the joke,

He ordered ten pounds to be paid down. The farmer he stared, but nothing spoke, He stared again, and he scratched his crown. 'Right too ra loo ral, &c. "The farmer he stared to see so much gold, And to take it up he were quite willing; But he said, gain he'd known he had so much cash, He darn'd his eyes if he'd a' gien him the shilling." J. EMERSON TENNENT.

I have known this song for nearly thirty years, though I am unable to say if it has been in print; but I think that such must have been the case. Í remember hearing it sung, when I was a boy, at the Kidderminster Theatre, by an actor dressed in character as an old farmer. It was sung between the drama and farce, and went to the tune of "The Cork Leg," and I afterwards sung it myself at some schoolboy theatricals. Since then it has lived in my memory, and it differed but little from the version quoted in your pages. The omitted lines of the third verse were these (following "He found the King to Windsor had flown,")— "If he'd a known he'd not been at home,

He'd dang'd his buttons if he'd ever have gone." "Home" was pronounced "whum," so as to rhyme with " The next verse began with the line

come."

The friend of MR. FURNIVALL's correspondent says that the ballad of "The Farmer and the King" was printed many years since. I have a copy before me, under the title of "The King and the Countryman," in a little volume, The Comic Songster, published in 1840, by Hamilton, Glasgow, from the press of our Paisley Nestor of printers, John Neilson. It varies a little from the Devonshire version printed in "N. & Q." In printing the third stanza, Mr. Shelley does not recollect the last two lines of it. This is the third stanza in our Paisley copy:

"When this old chap to Lunnun had come,
He found the King to Windsor had gone;
But if he had a-known he'd not been at home,
He domed his buttons if ever he'd come."
JAMES J. LAMB.

Underwood Cottage, Paisley.

LETTER FROM SIR T. FAIRFAX.
(4th S. ii. 149.)

Your Dewsbury correspondent deserves the thanks of all who take an intelligent interest in the history of our great civil war. The document which he has published in your columns to-day has not, as far as I can make out, appeared in print before. No doubt it was one of many copies sent abroad among the towns and villages near Bradford for the purpose of raising forces for the then contemplated assault on Leeds. A letter from Sir Thomas Fairfax to his father, dated "Bradford, January 9th, 1642" [1643], is extant. The original is, I think, but am not sure, among the Additional Manuscripts in the British Museum. I only know it from the modernised copy in Bell's Memorials of the Civil War, vol. i. p. 33. In this communication Sir Thomas says that the people

of those parts grow very impatient that the Royalists should be driven out of Leeds and Wakefield, "for by them all trade and provisions are stopped, so that the people in these clothing towns are not able to subsist; and goes on to state that if speedy action be not taken by the Parliamentary leaders the people will rise of themselves. He then proceeds to urge Lord Fairfax to give instructions as to what course he is to pursue, as he shrinks from the responsibility of raising the country without the orders of his superior in command. The conclusion of the missive shows that he calculated on finding great readiness for war among his neighbours. He

I am sure I shall have above six hundred muskets if I summons the country to come in, besides 3000 and more with other weapons, that would rise with us. If your lordship please to give me power to join with the readiness of the people, I doubt not but, by God's assistance, to give your lordship a good account of what we do."

The old lord's answer has not, I fear, been preserved. The summons to the Mirfield constable shows that he gave his consent to the proposition "to raise the country." It appears from Sir Thomas Fairfax's own memoirs that summonses of this kind were issued on two occasions. He wrote this meagre sketch of his public life many years after the events narrated had taken place, and the book is therefore very scanty in dates: though, where they are given, it is usually safe to trust them. I gather from these memorials that the first summons had been sent out, probably in December, for the purpose of getting together footmen for the protection of Bradford; and that the second, of which the Mirfield document is a specimen, was issued after Lord Fairfax had been communicated with, and when Sir Thomas had fully determined on his line of conduct.

"We summon'd the country again," he says, " and made a body of twelve or thirteen hundred men, with which we marched to Leeds."

These raw levies must have formed a considerable part of the force with which he on January 23 drove the Royalists under Sir William Saville out of Leeds.† On the 26th of the same month Lord Fairfax was at Selby. From thence he wrote a letter to Lenthall, the Speaker of the House of Commons, in which, among other facts relating to the state of the

Short Memorials of Thomas Lord Fairfax, written by

Himself, 1699, pp. 14-15.

Sir William Saville of Thornhill, co. York, married Anne, daughter of Thomas Lord Coventry, Keeper of the Great Seal. After his defeat at Wakefield he was appointed Governor of Sheffield Castle. He was afterwards Governor of York, in which post he died Jan, 24, 1643-4. Hunter's Hallamsh, p. 112; Courthope's Synopsis of Baronetage, p. 176; Whitaker's Loidia and Elmete, pp. 314, 317.

country, he gave an account of this action.* The fight lasted about two hours; only forty men were slain in all. The Parliamentarians were completely victorious. They captured five hundred prisoners, of whom six were officers; took four colours, and two "brass sakers,"† and all the munitions of war in the place," which was not much." Of Fairfax's people only thirteen were killed, but two officers, Captains Briggs and Lee, were wounded. The Royalist commander escaped "by secret ways towards Pomfrait. Serjeant-Major Beaumont was drowned crossing the river, and Sir William Saville very narrowly escaped the like fate."

There is, I think, a misprint or an error of transcription in the fifth line from the end: "ye common pock" should be "ye common stock."

If your correspondent has found any more relics of the great civil war among the papers he has examined, I hope he will commit them to the custody of the printing-press.

Bottesford Manor, Brigg.

EDWARD PEACOCK.

MODERN INVENTION OF THE SANSCRIT
ALPHABET.

(4th S. i. 125, 610; ii. 67.)

In reply to the objection that no notice has been taken of the Arabic collection of alphabets on which the hypothesis of the modern invention of the Sanscrit alphabet is founded, I have to observe that, never having met with the work either in the original or translation, I did not feel competent to criticise it. I considered that if the Lát character could be shown to have existed before the Christian era, the argument based on the collection of Ahmad bin Bakar, made in the seventh century after the birth of Christ, with the inference that therefore "the Sanscrit, Tamil, and other dialects of S. India" "must have been invented subsequent to that compilation," would necessarily fall to the ground.

Believing that the identification of the earliest known inscriptions discovered in India with the name of Asoca, a Buddhist sovereign of the third century B.C., was a fact accepted by all Oriental archæologists now living, I contented myself with a reference to it, as a sufficient reply to the suggestion founded on the work of the Arabian palæographer. But, as R. R. W. ELLIS is not satisfied with this answer, I will shortly state the evidence on which it rests; which, moreover, may

The letter may be seen at length in Rushworth, part II. vol. iii. pp. 125–127.

"A very old gun 8 or 9 feet long, and of about 5lbs. calibre . The name is thought to have been derived from the French oath sacre." (Smyth's Sailor's WordBook, sub voc.) Surely it comes rather from sacre, a kind of hawk.

perhaps prove not uninteresting to some of your readers less versed in Indian antiquities.

Two monolithic columns, one near Delhi, the other at Allahabad, bearing inscriptions in an unknown character, had long excited the curiosity of the learned. In 1833 the interest felt in them was revived by James Prinsep, who published drawings of them, with copies of the inscriptions, in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.* This led to the discovery of other similar pillars or láts, as they were called, at Mathiah and Radhia in Tirhoot, and of inscriptions on rocks in Cuttack, Ganjam, and Guzerat, which, on comparison, proved to be repetitions' identical, or nearly so, one with another. At length, in 1837, Prinsep detecting the constant recurrence of the same word in some short cave-temple legends, which, by a happy guess, he conjectured to represent the Sanscrit for "gift" [danam], hit upon the value of a few letters; and following the clue thus obtained, he completed the alphabet.† The inscriptions were then found to consist of a series of Buddhist edicts, promulgated by a prince named Piyadási, whose rule, as indicated by the extent covered by his decrees, embraced the whole of India. Another copy of the same edicts in the old Pehlivi character was found in the neighbourhood of Peshawer.

This Piyadási was next identified with Asoca by means of the historical annals of Ceylon, brought to light by Mr. Turnour, and confirmed by M. Csoma de Koros from those of Tibet. They clearly describe the rise and progress of Buddhism, and the conversion of "Asoca or Dhamma Asoca, surnamed Piyadassi," to that faith. He is shown Sandracottus of the Greeks, as first suggested to have been the grandson of Chandragupta, the by Sir William Jones. Originally a mere military adventurer, he succeeded in delivering his country from foreign invaders, about 316 B.C.; and then extending his sway over all N. India, he left his ceeded, B.C. 263, and still further extended his throne to his son Bindusára, B.C. 291. Asoca suckingdom towards the south.§ With the zeal of a recent convert, he employed his great power to promulgate the tenets of his new creed, despatching missions to Tibet, Burma, Ceylon, and the neighbouring countries, and causing his orders to be engraven on rocks and pillars from the frontiers of Affghanistan to the Bay of Bengal.

Although no date is found in the inscriptions themselves, they contain allusions to contemporary tian era. Among these is an Antiochus of the princes, who undoubtedly lived before the ChrisSeleucidæ, a Ptolemy of Egypt, and other Greek

* Vol. iii. 105, and following vols.
Jour. As. Soc. Beng. vi. 460, 566, 790.

Jour. As. Soc. Ben. vi. 791. Turnour's Mahawanso.
Cunningham's Bhilsa Topes, chaps. viii. ix. and xi.

names.

Epigraphs in the Lát character likewise occur on coins of some of the Bactrian kings, as Agathocles and Pantaleon, to whom Wilson assigns the dates of 135 and 120 B.C. respectively. The evidence for the antiquity of an indigenous Sanscrit alphabet thus appears to be complete. Whether the promulgator of the edicts was named Piyadási or Asoca, or whether, as Wilson maintained, they were different persons, does not affect the question.

In addition to the above historical proof, I attempted in a former reply to show by internal evidence, deduced from the forms of the letters themselves, that they were not derived from a foreign source. The simple forms of the characters, as they occur in the earliest inscriptions, seem to prove that they were invented or taken arbitrarily to meet the requirements of the phonetic system of India when the use of written symbols in other (probably western) countries had shown the superior value of permanent records over oral tradition. Thus, the letter was represented by a cross; ther by a line; the g by an angle; the t by a curve; the t'h by a circle; the b by a square; the p by a hook; the n by a perpendicular on a horizontal line; the m by a curve on a circle; the v by a line on a circle, and so on, the aspirated letters being often a reduplication of the simple one, as in the case of t, th above. And from these, not only the modern Sanscrit or Deva-nagari, but all the diversified Hindu alphabets now in use throughout India have been derived.

Prinsep inferred, from its complete and perfect elaboration, that the Lát character had already been used for some time before Asoca, and assigns to it an origin of at least two centuries earlier, assuming the sacred works of the Buddhists to have been written in it by the cotemporaries of Sakya himself, whose death is placed in 543 B.C. Mr. Thomas is not disposed to admit even this limit, and contends for a still earlier origin.

The whole subject has been fully discussed in the second volume of Prinsep's collected essays, and illustrated by plates exhibiting the gradual mutation of the letters from the normal types into all the modern Hindu characters in use throughout India, the different stages being derived from inscriptions on stone and copper at every period from the sixth century B.C. down to modern times.

The Mayúra Varma Déva referred to by COL. ELLIS has no connection with the Asoca of the Pali Buddhistical annals. A considerable number of inscriptions recording grants made by him and his immediate descendants have been collected *Arcana Antiqua, 294, 300; Jour. As. Soc. Beng. vi.

and copied, from which it appears that he was a mere, petty, local chief in the S. W. part of the Dekhan-a feudal dependant of the great Chelukya empire of Kalyán. In his grants, extending from A.D. 1034 to 1064, he is styled "the head of the Kadamba family, and chief of Banawagri; " but in reality his territorial influence was confined to a tract of country around Hangal, in the modern province of Dharwar, between the Krishna and Tungabhadra* rivers. W. E.

HAWAIIAN ALPHABET.
(4th S. ii. 80, 140.)

Thanks to MR. T. J. BUCKTON. But as my "native" informant, who appeared to understand the matter, assured me that the twelve letters, a, e, i, o, u, h, k, l, m, n, p, w, constituted the fundamental alphabet, and as it appears Ellis says it consists of seventeen letters, the other five being b, d, r, t, v, which is correct,-twelve or seventeen? Let us try.

Now, as v is but a condition of b (see further on), both v and b may be referred to p; and as it appears that t, the twin of d, is but a poetical substitute for k, to k may both t and d be referred. Next, r may be referred to on the twin principle; and then Ellis's seventeen letters becoming thus reduced to twelve, will corroborate the statement of my informant. Ellis, it appears, also says "there are no sibilants in the language," and that f, g, 8, and z. have been added to his seventeen "for the purpose of preserving the identity of foreign words." Why may not his other five have been some time added to the primitive twelve, as the language became developed either by culture or by civilisation. Singularly enough our twenty-six letters may be classified under the said twelve thus-1. a; 2. E; 3. I, y,j; 4. 0; 5. U; 6. H; 7. K, c, q, g, t, d, s, z, x; 8. L, 7; 9. M; 10. N; 11. P, b, f, v; 12. w = 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, possessing identity, and 3, 7, 8, 11, requiring explanation. Ionia, pinion, John, exemplify the classification 3. In classification 7, e being k or s, q being = k, g being twin of k, d being twin of t, and z being twin of 8, we have only to show how t, s, and x may be derived from k. Well, a child, imitating an adult and trying to say come on, get away, generally says tum on, det away, and shows thereby that t and d are the natural substitutes of k and g (hard); and thus the Society Islanders, whose language was infantile, pronounced Cook, Toote; and most likely Gore, Doarro, and not Toarro. Next, t being the natural substitute of k, we find that s is not only a natural equivalent for t by the Society

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* Hindu Inscriptions in the Jour. Roy. As. Soc. No. 7. and Jour. Madras Lit. Soc. vii. 223 to 229.