14'
NOTES AND QUERIES. no* s. in. JAN. 7, 1905.
story as having happened to himself, begging
the said person on no account to repeat it
during the narrator's lifetime. This is why
I am anxious to get at the facts.
JOHN HOBSON MATTHEWS. Monmouth.
" FORTUNE FAVOURS FOOLS " (10 th S. ii. 365, 491). It seems not unlikely that this proverb is an adaptation of an older one, viz., " Fortune favours the hardy man, "in Chaucer's ' Troilus,' iv. 600. This may have been applied, in particular, to the fool-hardy man. Chaucer 'had it from Virgil's "Audentes Fortuna iuuat," 'yEn.,' x. 284. It also occurs in Terence, ( Phormio,' I. iv. 26.
WALTER W. SKEAT.
BANANAS (10 th S. ii. 409, 476). In El Grdfico of Madrid, Niimero 187, for 17 de Diciembre de 1904, MR. J. PLATT will see a confirmation of MR. JAGGARD'S opinion as to the superiority of the bananas grown in Las Cariarias. On p. 8, in an illustrated article headed 'Los Platanos de Canarias : Esplendida Exporta- tion,' these words occur :
"El platano es originario de Asia, de donde en tiempos remotos paso al Africa, llevandolo despues nosotros a America, y aun en el Mediodia de la Peninsula pueden cultivarse con exito, aunque nunca son tan sabroeos y tiernos como los canaries, y pocas plantas le igualan por la majestad y ele- gancia desu aspecto, la amplitud y la bellezade sus hojas, la riqueza de su floracion, las cualidades de su fruto y las numerosas utilidades que de todo el se obtienen."
E. S. DODGSON.
SCHOOL SLATES (10 th S. ii. 488). In con- nexion with this subject it is worth while recalling these remarkable lines in Chaucer's Roundel, which has been named 'Merciless Beauty ' :
Love hath my name y-strike out of his sclat, And he is strike out of my bokes clene For ever-mo ; ther is noil other mene. Surely slates are not very modern.
WALTER W. SKEAT.
Slates " to write upon " must have been in use long before Walpole's time (1781), for. they are so described by Thomas Dysch, the author of the 'New General English Dictionary,' 1754, and by Dr. Ash in his 'New and Com- plete Dictionary of the English Language,' 17J5. EVERARD HOME COLEMAN.
71, Brecknock Road.
I have a small book of accounts connected with a night school carried on in this village some eighty or ninety years ago. Under date 5 November, 1820, is the entry " 1 doz. of slates, 4s. 6d." These would presumably be the small plain slates without frames
which I remember to have seen in use in the
charity school here about forty years ago.
This note may not prove of much use as a reply to your correspondent's question, but the recorded price of school slates at the time named is not without value.
JOHN T. PAGE.
West Haddon, Northamptonshire. .
RICHARD OF SCOTLAND (10 th S. ii. 408, 449). By far the best account of this personage is to be found in a pamphlet of 96 pages, by the late Thomas Kerslake, called ' Saint Richard the King of Englishmen and his Territory, A.D. 700-20 ' (1890).
Mr. Kerslake was a careful and painstaking investigator who has left many valuable notes and papers on historical subjects. He traces St. Richard's connexion with St. Boni- face and Willibald down to his burial at Lucca, proving that he was "Rex Anglorum, : ' as stated on his tomb in an epitaph of seven lines. The subject is led up to in a previous pamphlet, published in 1879, 'Vestiges of the Supremacy of Mercia, 1 &c.
In addition to the ' Hodceporicon of St. Willibald,' the late Bishop Brownlow read papers before the Devon Association at Twerton in 1891, on ' The Brother and Sister of St. Willibald,' and at Plymouth in 1892, on 'St. Boniface in England.' Both papers are printed in the Transactions of the Devon Association for the years as above, and con- tain much matter of interest in connexion with St. Richard. F. T. ELWORTHY.
" STOB " (10 th S. ii. 409, 495). I see no reason why stob may not be the usual M.E. tfob, which is the modern stub. Cf. A.-S. stybb, Icel. siubbi, a stump of a tree. It might easily have been the name for a " clearing " where the stubs had been left. I do not admit "corruption"; it is a word used in the interest of guessers who wish to infringe sound-laws. To me, Olive does not suggest " holy " ; it rather suggests Olaf.
WALTER W. SKEAT.
Stobe occurs as the name of a family in the north of England, as I have a book-plate label of John and Ann Stobe, Whitehaven, 1803. A. H. ARKLE.
VINCENT STUCKEY LEAN (10 th S. ii. 466). As bearing on the question raised at this reference it may be interesting to place on record that " A Bill to enable Persons of Irish Birth or Extraction to adopt and use the Prefix O, or Mac, before their Surnames," was introduced into the House of Commons by Mr. MacAleese and other Irish members in the session of 1898. The third section of
