378
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. ix. MAY 10, 1902,
maladroit a translation as your corre-
spondent asserts that he did. It is pre-
posterous. Are we to imagine that the
masterminds originally at work in translating
the Scriptures, and their successors in re-
vising the version, were so stupid as to boggle
over the very first verse of the Pentateuch 1
The translation as we find it is absolutely
correct. The particle eth, twice repeated in
the verse, is known to the merest tiro in
Hebrew as representing the accusative case,
"heaven" and "earth" being the direct
objects of the verb " created."
M. D. DAVIS.
EPIGRAM ON WOMEN (9 th S. ix. 288). I do not know the author, but pray let me cap it: Oh, the shrewdness of their shrewdness when
they 're shrewd, And the rudeness of their rudeness when they 're
rude ; But the shrewdness of their shrewdness and the
rudeness of their rudeness Are as nothing to their goodness when they're
F.P.
SWAYLECLIFFE (9 th S. ix. 329). The sense is "swallow-cliff." Swalewan is the gen. case of swalewe, usually swealwe^ a swallow. Cliff does not always mean " escarpment " ; it also meant, formerly, a shore, bank, strand. See ' Cliff ' in ' H.E.D. ' CELER.
THE LAST or THE PRE- VICTORIAN M.P.s (9 th S. ix. 226, 333). Mr. J. Temple Leader was alive and in Florence in January, 1898. I have a letter from him addressed to my father, to whom he was sending a copy of his life of Sir John Hawk wood, of whom my father was a lineal descendant.
E. E. STREET.
Chichester.
KOYAL WALKS (9 th S. ix. 244). "King Henry's Walk " probably takes its name from having been a favourite spot of Henry VIII., who, tradition has it ; occupied an old house at the corner of Newington Green as a rural resort for his illicit amours. This tradition, which was strongly held throughout the neighbourhood in John Nelson's time, is handed down to us in that writer's ' History of St. Mary, Islington,' 1811, pp. 187-8. Be this as it may, Henry Algernon Percy, Earl of Northumberland, gave away a great part of his lands and inheritance to the king and others when living probably at the house alluded to (Nichols's 'Hist, of Canonbury,' ' Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica,' vol. ii. p. 9) And this, says Thomas Cromwell in his 'Walks through Islington,' 1835, p. 122,
is evident from letters in the Earl's own writing
still extant j it is therefore not unlikely that in thia
manner these premises might have come into the
possession of the Sovereign. Again, the tradition
receives no little sanction from the circumstance,
that a path (of late partly converted into a road)
from the south-east corner of the Green to the road
near Ball's Pond, has been, time out of mind, called
'King Harry's Walk." 5
Thomas Edlyne Tomlins, in his ' Perambula- tions through Islington,' frequently mentions this walk, out makes no attempt to assign any reason for its being so called. Queen Margaret's Grove is, no doubt, named after Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland and eldest daughter of Henry VII., who may, either voluntarily or compulsorily, have stayed here during her sojourn in London about the year 1515.
J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.
NOTES ON BOOKS, &c.
In a Minster Garden : a Causerie. By the Dean of
Ely. (Stock.)
IN a preface with a pleasantly antiquarian flavour the Dean of Ely describes the conditions under which were written the gossiping confessions, medi- tations, reflections, and dreams which constitute what he calls a causerie. Excogitated during the enforced leisure of convalescence in the course of repeated strolls down the Cloister Walk at Ely from Prior's Door to Refectory Wall, they deal with the manuscript treasures of the cathedral library, the beauties of the garden of what is called the Liberty House (a name now all but forgotten in Ely), sunset on the river, some verses ('The Carol of King Canute') inspired in part by Milton's 'Hymn on the Nativity,' together with criticisms, narrations, correspondence, speculation, what not, the whole constituting a book agreeably varied and readable throughout. There are, under 'On the Walsingham Way,' some serious reflections on women and the stupidity of the early Churchmen, "with their unnatural and unwholesome views of ascetic discipline, and their foolish confusion of the fact of virginity with the virtue of chastity "; an insistence on the strangeness of the fact that "it was in the earlier and ruder and more barbarous, as we should say, periods of Grecian history [or, in more precise language, in the Homeric writings], not in the later and more refined, that the ideal of womanhood is to be found in its highest perfection," and other matters, including the influence of Mario- latry on the mediaeval conception of women. Numerous illustrations depicting portions of the cathedral, one of the loveliest and most majestic of Eastern England, add to the attractions of a book that solicits and deserves a leisurely perusal.
Church Folk-lore. By J. E. Vaux, F.S.A. (Skeffing-
ton & Son.)
THOUGH Mr. Vaux writes about folk - lore he is hardly a folk-lorist, nor indeed does he claim to be considered such. He has industriously collected a number of isolated facts many from our own
