470
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. v. JUNE IG, 1900.
Tribune had the most expensive telegrams of
any paper. These were arranged for by Mr.
G. W. Smalley, now the New York corre-
spondent of the Times ; and as there was an
alliance between the Daily News and the
Tribune providing for the use of each other's
telegrams, the readers of the London paper
no doubt received mucli benefit.
The present outlay of the Daily News for war telegrams, exclusive of the remuneration and expenses of the correspondents, amounts to an average of 1,200/. a month.
Although the cost to the daily newspapers for correspondence and telegrams during the present war must be large, it cannot, of course, compare with that of the American Press during the fight between the North and the South. The New York Herald during the four years the contest lasted employed sixty special correspondents. Theloss in horses was seventy -eight out of one hundred and twenty- three.* The account of the capture of New Orleans, which occupied three columns, cost alone 260., while the entire outlay during the war amounted to 120,000.
Most of the newspapers, with the exception of the Times, now give the names of their cor- respondents. " Y. L ," in the Sphere of the 9th inst., states his belief that the practice was first commenced by the Daily Telegraph, in 1879 when it sent out Dr., now Sir W. H. Russell, to describe the incidents of the Zulu war. " Y. L." well describes our mili- tary historians as
"no longer chroniclers ; they are now literary kinematographers, who, from the distance of 7,000 miles, flash you out a transparency picture of a battle ere yet the mountains at the seat of war have ceased to resound with the roll of invisible musketry and the thunder of eight-mile-range guns."
No record of special correspondents can be complete without a tribute to those brave men who fell in the Soudan, and to whom a memorial has been fittingly placed in the crypt of our great Cathedral.
JOHN 0. FKANCIS.
THE OLDEST BASQUE SONG.
MUCH has been written, in five or six
languages, since the time of Wilhelm von
Humboldt, who did so much for Bascological
science, about the oldest known Heuskarian
song. The latest publication dealing with
this difficult question is the Appendix to a
treatise called 'Cantabria y la Guerra Can-
tabrica 7 (Tolosa, 1899) by my friend Don
Isaac L6pez ta M.endizabal, of the University
of Madrid. The song is the renowned Lelo
- Grant's Newspaper Press,' vol. ii. p. 255.
or Erezciac ( = Eretziak = Elegies) preserved
in the mansion called Solartekua at Markina,
on the margin of the provinces of Gipuskoa
and Biscaya, accessible by coach from the rail-
way stations of Olacueta-Berriz or the coast-
line. I had the curiosity to call there on
26 July, 1897, in order to see for myself if the
words had been correctly copied and printed,
and to obtain, if possible, a photograph of
the page of the manuscript where it occurs.
I was accompanied by Don J. M. de Bernaola,
a priest of Durango, whose grandfather had
entertained the learned German friend of
Goethe when he made a stay in that former
capital of Biscay. Don F. de Mugertegi, the
master of the house (Etcheko-Jauna), not only
very graciously consented to let us inspect
the manuscript, but sent it to our inn on
loan, so that we might look at it at leisure in
true scholarlike fashion. He told us that
Humboldt had been the guest of his grand-
father there, and had seen the manuscript.
For some account of Humboldt's tour in
Basqueland see 'Guillaume von Humboldt
en Espagne' (Paris, 1898), by my friend
Dr. A. Farinelli, of the University of
Innsbruck. The manuscript is a small
library, an odd collection of miscellaneous
documents in five volumes, bound in
parchment, and entitled ' Antiguedades de
Vizcaya,' formed by Ibarguren or Ibargiien,
a lawyer of the sixteenth century. There
was no index or book-marker to guide us to
the page bearing the song, but my com-
panion had the luck to find it early the next
morning in tomo iii., cuaderno 71. We
agreed that the text of it had never been
correctly published by any of the preceding
editors, most of whom had carelessly copied it
the one from the other, with a sliding scale of
blunders. We decided that the dialect in which
it is written was Biscayan (in the provincial
sense) of Ibarguren's own time, and that the
song, which my friend called a sortsiko mayor*
miglit well be a patrana or jest of that in-
dividual himself. He thinks, rightly, that
its value has been overstated. But it has a
grim majesty of its own, and stands in the
same relation towards later Basque as ' Beo-
wulf ' does to English. Its scansion is irregular,
as will be seen. It is the work of some one
unaccustomed to Heuskarian spelling, and so
curt and laconic in style as to be very obscure
even for those gifted with the Pindaric spark
(pindar in Basque) of vaticination. It
certainly does riot come down, as some have
- For a successful bit of work in this metre see
pp. 8-11 of ' Amona' ('The Grandmother'), a senti- mental poem by Antonio Arzac (San Sebastian, 5 May).
