362
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. xn. NOV. 7, i%3.
institution. Within this "nest of singing
birds " had resided for a time John Hey wood,
" the old English epigrammatist," who, if not
the father of English comedy, was at least
one of the earliest masters in that art. His
new and very merry interlude, ' The Play of
the Wether,' can be read with pleasure and
profit to-day. To Broadgates came also, in
the first instance, George Peele, Greene's
friend and fellow-dramatist ; and two poets
of the younger generation, Sir John Beaumont
and his more famous brother Francis, the
dramatic colleague of John Fletcher.
Bacon's prospective glass in the play may have been suggested by the magic mirror into which John Dee, the astrologer, used to call his spirits. This mirror, which Queen Elizabeth herself examined with great in- terest, is still extant, and is described as " a disc of highly polished cannel coal."
Roger Bacon, being a Franciscan or Friar Minor, would dwell when in Oxford within the precincts of the Grey Friars Monastery there. This lay westward of Pembroke College and St. Ebbe's Church, immediately within the city wall, which had been espe- cially extended southwards so as to receive the friary within its bounds. The monastery of the Dominicans, or Black Friars, lay to the south-eastward of the Franciscan, at the end of Milk Street (now St. Ebbe's, High Street), in a straight line from Little Gate a small portion of which yet remains at the south- west corner of Pembroke Dining-Hall. The exact site of the Grey Friars' place of inter- ment is uncertain. Therein, according to John Rouse, the Warwick antiquary, still rest the bones of the admirable doctor even as all that was mortal of Alfred the Great may yet lie without the northern wall of royal Winchester, where once stood his own Abbey of Hyde. But "the most astonishing phe- nomenon of the mediaeval schools," as Dr. Hastings Rashdall calls the learned friar, is traditionally connected with the famous tower or gatehouse which stood upon Grand Pont (Folly Bridge) until the spring of 1779. Mentioned in the twenty -eighth year of Henry III. as "Nova Porta et Turris, supra Pontem Australem," it may have been erected to strengthen the old south gate of the town by Christ Church. Joseph Skelton in his 4 Oxonia Antiqua Restaurata,' vol. ii., 1823, gives two engravings of this structure one from the Oxford Almanac top of 1780, and the other after a drawing in the Gough col- lection in the Bodleian whence it appears to have consisted of an ancient semicircular gateway with two stories built over it, of sixteenth or seventeenth century character,
and apparently hexagonal in form. The
legend went that the Franciscan ascended
thither to make astronomical observations,
and that when a greater man than Bacon
should pass under it it would fall. It never
fell but remained to be destroyed by the
Philistines. This fable suggested to Dr.
Samuel Johnson his famous lines in the
' Vanity of Human Wishes ':
When first the College rolls receive his name,
The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame ;
Resistless burns the fever of renown,
Caught from the strong contagion of the gown :
O'er Bodley's dome his future labours spread,
And Bacon's mansion trembles o'er his head.
Wood repeats Button's opinion that the
connexion with Bacon is "meerly traditionall
and not in any record to be found," and,
after discussing the whole question, signifi-
cantly adds in the margin, "But I believe all
this was at Little Gate." And elsewhere
('City,' i. 251) he gives evidence that the
chambers over and about this gate were in-
habited by scholars in "King Edward IL's
time and a great while before."
In his "brief life" of the witty Bishop Richard Corbet, John Aubrey mentions "Fryar Bacon's Study (where was good liquor sold)"; and on 9 June, 1668, Samuel Pepys, after recording visits to other local attractions, adds:
" So to Friar Bacon's Study, I up and saw it and gave the. man 1*. ; bottle of sack for landlord, 2s. Oxford mighty fine place and well seated, and cheap entertainment."
With the first part of the last sentence, at all events, the Emperor in Greene's play (in- tended for the amazing Frederic II. , whose third wife was Henry III.'s sister Isabella) would have agreed :
These Oxford schooles Are richly seated neere the river side : The mountames full of fat and fallow deere, The batling pastures laid with kine and flocks, The towne gorgeous with high built colledges, And schollers seemely in their grave attire, Learned in searching principles of art.
A. R. BAYLEY.
BURTON'S 'ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY.'
(See 9 th S. xi. 181, 222, 263, 322, 441 ; xii. 2, 62,
162, 301.)
THE following are some of the passages which Shilleto has failed to trace to their source.
Vol. i. p. 5 (signat. 3 of unpaged section at beginning of 6th edit.), first line of 'Demo- critus Junior ad Librum suum ' :
Vade liber, qualis, non ausim dicere, felix. See Burton's marginal note at foot of p. 341 (I. ii. iii. xiv., p. 122 in 6th edit.), "Vade, liber
