BRONTOSAURI EXISTENCE.

SEARCH for possible survival of the Brontosaurus brings to mind that the subject of extinct monsters was under discussion nearly a century ago, seriously in Davy's Consolation of Travel,' and in Ure's Geology,' and humorously in a poem by Chandos Leigh entitled The Sauri,' printed in his 'Fifth Epistle to a Friend, 1835,' full of amusing literary references. Brief extracts

will show Leigh's style :

Ere as it is the world its course begun.
The world o'erteemed with children of the sun
Goliath lizards of a former age

When a hot temperature was all the rage

Though heat-begotten monsters we encase
In our museums, perish'd have the race.
Whether they were herbivorous, or ate
Dirt like an Otomac, I cannot state.
They thirsted not, like monsters since the flood
Begot-the taste is ancient too-for blood
Perchance, as Waterton a crocodile

Rode, they were ridden though in length a mile!
Conjecture here-geologists advance

But sober truths-loves somewhat to romance.
The freeborn Sauri scorned a reigning lord,
Half-monkey and half-tiger, beast-abhorred,
That rides, like tailors on their fluttering geese,
A many-headed hydra, not with ease

Shallow, as Trinculo deem'd Caliban,
Whether through fens they paddled, crept, or ran
Singing in chorus marshy songs, devouring
Fern salads, like our idlers bored, and boring,
They lived-chronologists may guess the time-
And then returned to-what they came from-
slime

Ere Alorus they lived; or to go higher

Ere lived forefathers of a Cambrian squire*
They may, sublimed into another sort

Of beings, through ethereal space transport
Themselves with a rapidity intense,
With tubes provided, every tube a sense.
Such Davy saw, or dreamed he saw, at Rome.
Philosophers have sober views at home

Would they were now alive, consuming wheat,
And kept by rich zoologists to eat
They, like Napoleon, prices might exalt
More than remission of the tax on malt;

And land-owners would cease to grieve, that they
With crippled means increased rent-charges pay.
Soon would they disappear on Erin's bogs,
Cherished, as Isaac Walton cherished frogs,
To be impaled by Orange seers, who hope
To prove that monsters symbolize the Pope-
Especially if their long tails emit
A phosphorescent light-like Irish wit!
W. JAGGARD, Capt.
Central Registry, Repatriation Records,
Winchester.

Refers to Cadwallader, whose ancestry, accord ing to Foote's " Author," was older than the

ELIZABETHAN GUESSES.

A MAUSOLEAN LAMENT,' 1651, by Samuel Sheppard, has some rather cryptic allusions, not yet cleared up. He makes quite obvious references in his catalogue of poets toSpenser and to Sidney, and says, after paying tribute to this latter idol of all. England:

After him rose as sweet a Swaine
As ever pip'd upon the Plain.
He sang of warres, and Tragedies
He warbled forth on him the eye[s]
Of all the Shepheards fixed were,
Rejoicing much his songs to hear.'

Of course, it is just possible that the man pointed at here is Drayton; the verse might be accepted as somewhat descriptive of 'Piers Gaveston,' 'Matilda,' and The Tragicall Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy,' or of the better known Mortimeriados,' republished as The Barrons Wars' in 1603. Drayton of the satires and the lovely pastorals, the useful, if rather boring, Polyolbion,' and the ringing shorter 'Agincourt,' is barely recognisable as 8 "warbler " of "tragedies." Whom else, then, would the lines suit? Not Marlowe : for his own day thought him not sweet,' but bold and dangerous. Would not Daniel be a safe guess? Drummond, perhaps with his eye chiefly upon Delia and The Complaynt of Rosamond,' commends Daniel precisely for his sweetnesse of rhyming and certainly Cleopatra' and Philotas and The Civil Warres' in eight books come forward well, as candidates for Sheppard's clumsy praise. Bibliographically, also, Daniel follows Sidney even more closely than Drayton does. Sidney's first (posthumous) publications appeared in 1590and 1591; Daniel's in 1592; Drayton's in 1593.

And then lived He who sweetly sung
Orlando's fate in his own tongue,

Who would not deigne t' divulge his own,
But by another would be known,

O gentle Shepheard! we to thee
Are bound in a supream degree.

It would seem as if this translator of Ariosto, dignified with a capital letter, can be no other than Sir John Harington. Queen Elizabeth, his dreaded godmother, made him do the 'Orlando Furioso.' The circumstances were a matter of public knowledge; there was no attempt not to "divulge Sir John's name or "fate" this latter Sheppard actually says, but does not in the least mean! Is the first edition of the

tions.

And, by the by, Evelyn adds:-
:-

"I dined at Mr. Houblon's, a rich and gentle French merchant (Morant in his History of Essex' says the Family were eminent merchants in the time of Queen Elizabeth) who was building a house in the Forest, near Sir J. Child's, in a place where the late Earl of Norwich dwelt some time, and which came from his lady the widow of Mr. Baker. It will be a pretty villa, about five miles from Whitechapel."

HORACE WALPOLE AND WANSTEAD. When on July 17, 1758, Horace Walpole wrote to Richard Bentley, he said :

"I dined yesterday at Wanstead. Many years have passed since I saw it. The disposition of the house and the prospects are better than I expected, and very fine; the garden, which they tell you, cost as much as the House, that is, £100,000, is wretched; the furniture fine but totally without taste; such continences and incontinences of Scipio and Alexander, by 1 don't know whom! Such flame-coloured gods and goddesses, by Kent! Such family pieces-1 believe the late Earl himself (the heirs of Child, now Irish Peers, were in possession), for they are as ugly as the children that he really begot! The whole great apartment is of oak, finely carved, unpainted, and has a charming effect. The present Earl is the most generous creature in the world; in the first chamber I entered he offered me four marble tables that lay in cases about the room; I compounded, after forty refusals, with only a haunch of vension; I believe he has not had so cheap a visit a good while. I commend myself as I ought, for to be sure, there were twenty ebony tables and a couch and a table and a glass that would have tried the virtue of a philosopher of double my size!

THOMAS HOOD AND WANSTEAD HOUSE. It was at Lake House, an appanage of the Child-Tylney palace, that Thomas Hood dwelt for the four years to 1836. His fierce

FIELDING'S ANCESTORS AT SHARPHAM PARK, SOMERSET.-It may be worth while to put on record some facts, which I have recently noted, indicating how Henry Fielding's birthplace at Sharpham came into the possession of his mother's family.

Richard Davidge, a London merchant, bought the estate from the Dyer family and others in 1657, and in 1692, after the deaths of himself, his widow, and five of his children, the whole of the considerable Davidge property had come to three of the merchant's daughters, viz., Sarah, wife of Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Gould, grandmother of the novelist, Katherine, wife of Charles Cottington of Funthill, Wilts, and Ann Davidge. There can be no doubt that Sarah brought Sharpham to her husband as her share of her father's and brothers' estates.

settled for a century or more at Bridport The Davidges were a family of merchants and Dorchester, Dorset. Sir Henry Gould was not, as stated in Burke's Landed Gentry,' a member of the Gould family of Upwey, Dorset. He was in fact a son of Andrew Gould, a yeoman of Winsham, Somerset, and a grandson of Henry Gould, also a yeoman living at the same place.. Thus in Fielding the "blue blood"" inherited from his father was mingled with another kind of blood (yeoman and commercial) derived from his mother.

17 Holland Road, W.14.

F. J. POPE.

he

Crateman," i.e., a hawker of pottery, is given in the Burnley Parish Register in 1650, twenty-nine years earlier than the reference in the Oxford Dictionary'; and "bedlamer "-a lunatic, will be found in the Croston Parish Register for 1640, the