  Parallel Passages.— "The Father of the gods his glory shrouds, Involved in tempests and a night of clouds."—Dryden's Virgil. "Mars, hovering o'er his Troy, his terror shrouds In gloomy tempests and a night of clouds."—Pope's Homer's Iliad, book xx. lines 69, 70. Unpublished Epitaphs.—I copied the following two epitaphs from monuments in the churchyard of Llangerrig, Montgomeryshire, last autumn. They perhaps deserve printing from the slight resemblance they bear to that in Melrose Churchyard, quoted in Vol. vii., pp. 676, 677.: "O earth, O earth! observe this well— That earth to earth shall come to dwell: Then earth in earth shall close remain Till earth from earth shall rise again." "From earth my body first arose; But here to earth again it goes. I never desire to have it more, To plague me as it did before." The Colour of Ink in Writings.—My attention was called to this subject some years ago by an attempt made in a judicial proceeding to prove that part of a paper produced was written at a different time than the rest, because part differed from the rest in the shade of the ink. The following conclusions have been the result of my observations upon the subject: 1. That if the ink of part of a writing is of a different shade, though of the same colour, from that of the other parts, we cannot infer from that circumstance alone that the writing was done at different times. Ink taken from the top of an inkstand will be lighter than that from the bottom, where the dregs are; the deeper the pen is dipped into the ink, the darker the writing will be. 2. Writing performed with a pen that has been used before, will be darker than that with a new pen; for the dry residuum of the old ink that is encrusted on the used pen will mix with the new ink, and make it darker. And for the same reason— 3. Writing with a pen previously used will be darker at first than it is after the old deposit, having been mixed up with the new ink, is used up. Philadelphia. Literary Parallels.—Has it ever been noticed that the well-known epitaph, sometimes assigned to Robin of Doncaster, sometimes to Edward Courtenay, third Earl of Devon, and I believe to others besides: "What I gave, that I have," &c., has been anticipated by, if not imitated from, Martial, book v. epigr. 42., of which the last two lines are: "Extra fortunam est, quicquid donatur amicis; Quas dederis, solas semper habebis opes." The English is so much more terse and sententious, besides involving a much higher moral signification, that it may well be an original itself; but in that case, the verbal coincidence is striking enough. Latin Verses prefixed to Parish Registers.—On a fly-leaf in one of the registers of the parish of Hawsted, Suffolk, is the following note in the handwriting of the Rev. Sir John Cullum, the rector and historian of the parish:
Can any of your correspondents contribute other examples? Napoleon's Bees (Vol. vii., p. 535.).—No one, I believe, having addressed you farther on the subject of the Napoleon Bees, the models of which are stated to have been found in the tomb of Childeric when opened in 1653, "of the purest gold, their wings being inlaid with a red stone, like a cornelian," I beg to mention that the small ornaments resembling bees found in the tomb of Childeric, were only what in French are called fleurons (supposed to have been attached to the harness of his war-horse). Handfuls of them were found when the tomb was opened at Tournay, and sent to Louis XIV. They were deposited on a green ground at Versailles. Napoleon wishing to have some regal emblem more ancient than the fleur-de-lys, adopted the fleurons as bees, and the green ground as the original Merovingian colour. This fact was related to me as unquestionable by Augustin Thierry, the celebrated historian, when I was last in Paris. University Club. |
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