12 8. V Nov... 1919
NOTES AND QUERIES.
297
JOHN WILSON, BOOKSELLER (12 S. v. 237,
277). In answer to MR. OSCAR BERRY'S
note, I should gladly welcome any con-
clusive solution of this long-vexed question.
.Meanwhile, I must beg leave to refer him
to the statement of a valued contributor
to these columns, MR. WM. JAGGARD, who,
.at 10 S. iv. 229 ("O, for a Booke ") says
that he transcribed the lines referred to
from a collection of early English poems
,and ballads of which he retained no record,
and that he sent them to Mr. Ireland " for
^inclusion in his ' Enchiridion,' " where they
appear. The collection mentioned has not
been traced; and, as the "obscurity sur-
rounding the printed source " is conceded
by MR. JAGGARD, I submit that, in the
-circumstances, the claim of Mr. John Wilson,
as presented by me at 10 S. ix. 192, and
repeated in 'A Bookman's Budget,' 1917,
rpp. 1056, at least deserves consideration,
though I am open to conviction.
I learn from a Brooklyn correspondent, Mr. R. Kleiner, that the lines have been ascribed, in America, to the ingenious Mr. Eugene Field, who, "in the late eighties," printed them in The Chicago Morning News. The " late eighties," however, would be after the date of the ' Enchiridion,' 1882.
They also figure in another book-plate, "being "worked into the background of the "beautiful and elaborate example designed fay Mr. Hugh Thomson for Mr. Ernest Brown, a facsimile of which is given at p. Ill of my ' De Libris,' Macmillan, 1908. AUSTIN DOBSON.
Possibly I can shed a little light on the quotation under notice : " O for a booke, and a shadie nooke," as I supplied it, with several others, to Alexander Ireland, in or about 1881, and I still have, I fancy, some letters from him on the subject, but being over a hundred miles from home I must rely .for the moment upon memory.
The verses were repeatedly used by my antiquarian friend, the late Thomas Simmons, /upon the titles of his lists of old books, in the late seventies and eighties of the last century. He also used them, printed in red and black, on his invoices at that time. During ten years (1881-91) I supplied Simmons with .some hundreds, or thousands, of bookish .quotations, used as running headlines on
- the pages of his frequent catalogues. I have
the impression he told me he obtained the quotation under review from a fragment of an Elizabethan book of verse he purchased, in a very large collection of black-letter '.books, about 1878 or 1879, from one of the
tall houses at the top of Newbold Terrace
Leamington. When I get access to my
collection I can give the exact year Simmons
first published the verses, which date may
settle whether he or Wilson first printed
them in modern years.
If the composition is as old as it purports, the spelling obviously places its original date as 1592, or earlier, rather than anywhere so late as 1670. W- JAGGARD, Capt.
Central Registry, Repatriation Records, Winchester.
NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD : HEREDITARY SCHOLARSHIP (12 S. v. 118). OBSERVER cites the instance of two members of the Haldane family, father and son, being fellows of the same college, and states that he is not aware of any other similar in- stance. The sister University, Cambridge, supplies a still more remarkable instance of hereditary scholarship, one extending over three successive generations, which, I think, may well be a record. In my somewhat lengthy account of the Rev. Robert Uvedale, LL.D., the well-known seventeenth-century scholar and botanist, in ' N. & Q.' 12 S. ii. 361, et seq., I drew attention to the fact that he obtained the law fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge, in competition with Mr. Newton (afterwards Sir Isaac), and that his son Robert was also a fellow of the same college and D.D. of that University, and that his grandson, the third Robert and cleric in succession, held the same distinctions. The holding of these fellowships in the same college, for three successive generations from father to son, is an instance of hereditary scholarship, I think, unlikely to be surpassed.
I may add that his great - grandson, another clerical Robert, was also a member of Trinity College, Cambridge, though not a fellow of that college.
J. S. UDAL, F.S.A.
THAMES TUNNELS (12 S. v. 181). I have in my possession a very curious coloured transparency of the ' Brunei's Tunnel.' It is contained in a wooden box of perhaps one foot diameter, with an elongated ex- tension, terminating in an orifice to look through, with a lens, which gives a very fine view, in perspective, of the transparency of the tunnel when the slide at the end of the box is removed, and the box held before a light or a window. The view of the tunnel is painted in colours on a removable slide. It shows a man on horseback and a peasant in the space for vehicles, and a couple of the gentry walking on the raised side-walk all,
