by Mr. Wilmshurst are not perhaps quite what M. Montégut might be expected to know, and probably they would not be of much interest to him, as his interest in Shakespeare's works, to judge from his preface to each play, is of a higher and ethical kind. But one fancies that occasionally he does not seem quite to catch the correct meaning. Thus in 'Le Soir des Rois,' Act II. sc. iv., where the Duke calls Cesario's attention to the song that the Clown is about to sing:—
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun……
Do use to chant it,
M. Montégut renders the second line: "Les fileuses, les tricoteuses en plein air," instead of "au soleil," thus missing the pathos of the picture of the old bodies warming themselves at their work in the sunlight. And in the concluding lines,
It is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age,
he renders the last: "A la manière des âges antiques." But is not Shakespeare's meaning "like the impotence of old age"—"de la vieillesse"?
To the line of Sonnet xviii.,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
he gives the plain and literal meaning "Toute beauté décline sûrement." Some have supposed the meaning to be that every fair one from his or her fair one sometime declines, alleging in support that it conveys a more profound meaning in the thought of the evanescence of even our deepest feelings.
To judge by the appearance of the bird depicted in the earliest Liverpool seal, called variously the "liver," the eagle of St. John, and a wild swan, there seems strong probability that the artist intended to represent the common gull, which exists in many thousands on the Mersey. Its voracious appetite and scavenger habits may well have earned it the nickname of "cormorant." Wm. Jaggagd.
It is a tradition in my family that the name Liverpool is derived from "Lever's pool," a property in the possession of the Levers. Is there any authority for this tradition? R. T. Love.
Rattlesnake Colonel (10 S. x. 189; x 17, 135, 191).—Mr. Maleeson's explanation (ante, p. 135), which had not reached me when I wrote my former reply, confirms the identification of Mrs. Browne's Col. Crisop with Col. Thomas Cresap, and adds to the interest of the incident, since movements can now be followed in detail.
"The English army" was, of course, General Braddock's force, consisting of the 44th and 48th regiments of the line—the only part of the regular army then in America. Bellhaven or Bellehaven, on the peninsula bordernig Chesapeake Bay eastward, must have been Mrs. Browne's own point of departure, as the troops did not go there. On arriving from England the troopships anchored in Hampton Roads, 20 Feb., and then conveyed the army up the Potomac to Alexandria, where the men were encamped from the end of March till shortly after the middle of April, when by several routes they marched to Wills Creekall arriving by the middle of May. At Wills Creek, now Cumberland, Md., was a fortified trading-house, built by the Ohio Company, and it was from this point that the trail—which Col. Cresap, whose home was a little further along on the Maryland frontier, had aided in making for that company—ran over the hills towards Fort Duquesne. This was Braddock's route. The army, reinforced by Colonial enlistments, left Wills Creek, or Fort Cumberland, on 10 June to begin the passage over the divide, and by 12 June those whom Mrs. Browne accompanied could have reached the home of Col. Cresap. M. C. L.
The Curious House, Greenwich (10 S. x. 469; xi. 32, 111).—It is to be feared that no information can be given without more means of identification. Without being too boastful, I may say that I have a good collection of materials for Greenwich local history, but I never came across anything like this. Old Crowley House, erroneously called the Old Palace, was never in the possession of a family named Gibson. That name does not occur in the exhaustive survey made in 1697. There was a Richard Gibson who died in 1714. He had served in the Navy under General Blake, and had held an office in the Trinity House at Deptford; but there is no evidence extant as to his being a property holder in Greenwich. A. Rhodes.
Charles James Auriol (10 S. xi. 108, 177).—I imagine the Auriol family to be extinct as regards the male line in England. Of the three sons of James Peter Auriol, George died at the age of six in 1807; Charles James, the subject of the query, in 1881;
