[Under this heading we propose to give such Minor Queries as we are able to reply to at once, but which are not of a nature to be answered with advantage in our Notices to Correspondents. We hope by this means to economise our space.]

[The anecdote told by Lord Campbell (but much better by Lord Eldon himself in Twiss's Life of the great Chancellor), does not refer to the late Duke of Norfolk, but to his predecessor Charles (the eleventh duke), who was a Protestant. The late duke never sat in parliament till after the Relief Bill passed. In 1824 a Bill was passed to enable him to exercise the office of Earl Marshal without taking certain oaths, but gave him no seat in the House. We may as well add, that Lord Eldon's joke must have been perpetrated—not on the bringing up of the Bill, when the duke was not in the House—but on the occasion of the Great Snoring Bill being reported (April 2, 1811), when the duke appears to have been present.]

[The authorship of this little poem has at times excited a good deal of attention. It has been attributed, on no very sufficient grounds, to Dr. Joshua Webster, M.D.; but from the Gentleman's Magazine, vol. lxx., p. 41., it appears that it is the entire production of the Rev. Thomas Moss, minister of Brierly Hill and Trentham, in Staffordshire, who wrote it at about the age of twenty-three. He sold the manuscript of that, and of several others, to Mr. Smart, printer, in Wolverhampton, who, from the dread which Mr. Moss had of criticism, was to publish them on this condition, that only twenty copies should have his name annexed to them, for the purpose of being presented to his relations and friends.]

[The allusion is to a puzzle for children—often used by grown children—which consists of a series of iron rings, on to or off which a loop of iron wire may be got with some labour by those who know the way, and which is very correctly designated a tiring-iron.]