BRONTOSAURI EXISTENCE.

ELIZABETHAN GUESSES.

Sheppard, has some rather cryptic allusions, not yet cleared up. He makes quite obvious references in his catalogue of poets to Spenser and to Sidney, and says, after paying tribute to this latter idol of all England :

SEARCH for possible survival of the Bron-A MAUSOLEAN LAMENT,' 1651, by Samuel tosaurus 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, according to Foote's " Author," was older than the

creation.

:

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.'

6

66

66

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 Nor-
mandy,' or of the better known Morti-
meriados,' 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 a
"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 Shep-
pard's clumsy praise. Bibliographically,
also, Daniel follows Sidney even more
closely than Drayton does. Sidney's first
(posthumous) publications appeared in 1590
and 1591; Daniel's in 1592; Drayton's ín
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.

or pseudonymous? (I write away from libraries.) If so, the passage is no longer obscure.

Sheppard goes on :

And after him a swain arose

In whom sweet Ovids Spirit chose
For to reside: he sang of Love,

How Cupid Ladies hearts can move;

(A reader pricks up his ears; for this is exactly the way in which people long ago were wont to talk of Shakespeare ! But the sequence takes a new turn) :

And each [eke] how large the Continent
Of Arcadie is in exteut.

He prais'd his Maker in his Layes,
And from a King receiv'd the Bayes.
Apparently, we have stumbled upon a
poet laureate. This at once cuts out Chap-
man, and the wandering of one's mind
towards his Ovids Banquet of Sence,' and
the "hymnes" with which he began and
ended his long career. The amatory yet pious
subject of Sheppard's reference is this time,
I think, really Drayton. Hardly could this
ill-expressed stanza fit that other laurelled
head, Father Ben's, whose secretary Shep-
pard was at one time, unless his many
'Masques' justify the mention of Arcady,
and Drayton's Nimphidia' does not.
sacred verse the latter author's sup-
pressed Harmonie of the Church will
pass muster;
two Idea'

while

the

6

For

groups of poems may perhaps justify the bringing in of "sweet Ovid's Spirit" by the

ears.

THE markings on the stone entablature to which MR. LEONARD C. PRICE refers in his question at 12 S. v. 293 suggest that he has alighted upon one of the many job-lots which were ruthlessly dispersed in the great sale that marked the downfall of the ambition of Child, the sometime autocrat of the East India Company (Sir Henry Yule "christened Josia, not says Child was once dubbed Josias, or Josiah) who was "the Satrap of the Indies." In his unbestowed a great deal of trouble and he finished History of England Lord Macaulay evidently intended much more upon this remarkable personage, who, as he says, "attained such ascendancy in the East India House that soon many of the most important posts, both in Leadenhall Street and in the factories of Bombay and Bengal were filled by his kinsmen and creatures." Beginning as a merchant's apprentice and office-sweeper, Child had peddled obscurely in marine stores, when, about 1655, he is seen engaged at Portsmouth in furnishing stores for the Navy. Macaulay leaves Josia" fighting with unbroken spirit for the maintenance of the seriously threatened monopoly of the East India Company against all "interlopers," and very frankly a troublesome House of expressing for Commons the bitterest contempt. guided by my instructions," writes Child to the Agents of the Company, 66 and not by the nonsense of a few ignorant country gentlemen who have hardly wit enough to know nothing at all about questions of manage their own private affairs, and who trade." The laws of England were, in the Satrap's opinion, “a heap of nonsense," compiled by these rural percan be none other than Sir William Davenant, sons "who hardly know how to make whom the Roundheads had this very laws for the good government of their moment (1651) in prison, where he was own families, much less for the regulapluckily finishing his admired Gondibert.' tion of companies and foreign commerce Next in merit to Davenant, Sheppard

66

Daniel, Harington, Drayton, make an oddly assorted trio. If Sheppard intends, as we suspect, to commemorate these, he is honouring the bookish heroes of his earliest youth, and of the generation just before him. He proceeds to laudation of contemporaries and co-Royalists. Sucklin," according to this bard, rivals Beaumont and Fletcher. We all think well nowadays of Suckling's happy and delicately slap-dash genius, but would hardly seat him among the divinities &S a writer of plays. Davenant is, to Sheppard, worth all his forerunners rolled into one: he is the "first-prefer'd of Apollo." Surely

-a Shepheard cag'd in stone
Destin'd unto destruction,

66

notion a

places Shirley, as he does again on p. 39 modern!

which

"Be

sounds strangely

THE SUPER-NABOB OF WANSTEAD.

Sir J. Child, for whom, of course, a "coat was soon found, became the supernabob of what had once been part of the great Forest of Essex, and had spent a large portion of his great fortune upon the construction of a lordly palace and pleasaunce when he was visited by John Evelyn on March 15, 1683. The entry in the Diary under date March 16 is :

"I went to see Sir Josiah Child's prodigious cost in planting walnut trees about his seate, and making fish ponds, many miles in circuit, in Epping Forest, in a barren spot, as oftentimes these suddenly monied men, for the most part, seate themselves. He, from a merchant's apprentice and management of the East India Company's Stock, being ariv'd to an Estate ('tis said) of £200,000, and lately married his daughter to the Eldest Sonn of the Duke of Beaufort, late Marquis of Worcester, with £50,000 portional present, and various expecta

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 satire in the story of Miss Kilmansegg was

SHARPHAM

AT FIELDING'S ANCESTORS 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.

The Davidges were a family of merchants settled for a century or more at Bridport 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 he inherited from his father was mingled with another kind of blood (yeoman and commercial) derived from his mother..