February, 1848, requesting his acceptance of a copy of Junius Identified, which I thought he might not have seen; and having called his attention to my name at the end of the preface, I begged he would, when opportunity offered, correct his error in having attributed the work to Mr. Dubois. I was satisfied with his lordship's reply, which was to the effect that he was ashamed of his mistake, and would take care to correct it. No new edition of that series of the Lives of the Chancellors, which contains the "Life of Lord Loughborough," has since been published. The present edition is dated 1847.
R.J. says further, that "the late Mr. George Woodfall always spoke of the pamphlet as the work of Dubois;" and that Sir Fortunatus Dwarris states, "the pamphlet is said, I know not with what truth, to have been prepared under the eye of Sir Philip Francis, it may be through the agency of Dubois." If Junius Identified be alluded to in these observations as a pamphlet, it would make me doubt whether R.J., or either of his authorities, ever saw the book. It is an 8vo. vol. The first edition, containing 380 pages, was published in 1816, at 12s. The second edition, which included the supplement, exceeded 400 pages, and was published in 1818, at 14s. The supplement, which contains the plates of handwriting, was sold separately at 3s. 6d., to complete the first edition, but this could not have been the pamphlet alluded to in the preceding extracts. I suspect that when the work is spoken of as a pamphlet, and this if often done, the parties thus describing it have known it only through the medium of the critique in the Edinburgh Review.
Mr. Dubois was the author of the biography of Sir Philip Francis, first printed in the Monthly Mirror for May and June, 1810, and reprinted in Junius Identified, with acknowledgment of the source from which it was taken. To this biography the remarks of Sir Fortunatus Dwarris are strictly applicable, except that it never appeared in the form of a pamphlet.
30. Upper Gower Street, Sept. 7. 1850.
FOLK LORE
Spiders a Cure for Ague (Vol. ii., p. 130.).—Seeing a note on this subject reminds me that a few years since, a lady in the south of Ireland was celebrated far and near, amongst her poorer neighbours, for the cure of this disorder. Her universal remedy was a large house-spider alive, and enveloped in treacle or preserve. Of course the parties were carefully kept in ignorance of what the wonderful remedy was.
Whilst I am on the subject of cures, I may as well state that in parts of the co. Carlow, the blood drawn from a black cat's ear, and rubbed upon the part affected, is esteemed a certain cure for St. Anthony's fire.
Funeral Superstition.—A few days ago the body of a gentleman in this neighbourhood was conveyed to the hearse, and while being placed in it, the door of the house, whether from design or inadvertence I know not, was closed before the friends came out to take their places in the coaches. An old lady, who was watching the proceedings, immediately exclaimed, "God bless me! they have closed the door upon the corpse: there will be another death in that house before many days are over." She was fully impressed with this belief, and unhappily this impression has been confirmed. The funeral was on Saturday, and on the Monday morning following a young man, resident in the house, was found dead in bed, having died under the influence of chloroform, which he had inhaled, self-administered, to relieve the pain of toothache or tic-douloureux.
Perhaps the superstition may have come before you already; but not having met with it myself, I thought it might be equally new to others.
Sheffield.
Folk Lore Rhymes.—
"Find odd-leafed ash, and even-leafed clover,
And you'll see your true love before the day's over."
If you wish to see your lover, throw salt on the fire every morning for nine days, and say—
"It is not salt I mean to burn,
But my true lover's heart I mean to turn;
Wishing him neither joy nor sleep,
Till he come back to me and speak."
"If you marry in Lent,
You will live to repent."
EMENDATION OF A PASSAGE IN THE "TEMPEST."
Premising that I should approach the text of our great poet with an almost equal degree of awful reverence with that which characterises his two latest editors, I must confess that I should not have the same respect for evident errors of the printers of the early editions, which they have occasionally shown. In the following passage in the Tempest, Act i., Scene 1., this forbearance has not, however, been the cause of the very unsatisfactory state in which they have both left it. I must be indulged in citing at length, that the context may the more clearly show what was really the poet's meaning:—
"Enter FERDINAND bearing a Log.
"Fer. There be some sports are painful; and their labour
Delight in them sets off; some kinds of baseness
Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters
Point to rich ends. This my mean task
Would be as heavy to me, as odious; but
The mistress, which I serve, quickens what's dead,
And makes my labours pleasures: O! she is
Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed;
And he's composed of harshness. I must remove
Some thousands of these logs, and pile them up,
Upon a sore injunction: My sweet mistress
Weeps when she sees me work; and says such business
Had never like executor. I forget:
But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours;
Most busy lest when I do it."
Mr. Collier reads these last two lines thus—
"But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours;
Most busy, least when I do it."
with the following note—
"The meaning of this passage seems to have been misunderstood by all the commentators. Ferdinand says that the thoughts of Miranda so refresh his labours, that when he is most busy he seems to feel his toil least. It is printed in the folio 1623,—
'Most busy lest when I do it,'
—a trifling error of the press corrected in the folio 1632, although Theobald tells us that both the oldest editions read lest. Not catching the poet's meaning, he printed,—
'Most busy-less when I do it,'
and his supposed emendation has ever since been taken as the text; even Capell adopted it. I am happy in having Mr. Amyot's concurrence in this restoration."
Mr. Knight adopts Theobald's reading, and Mr. Dyce approves it in the following words:—
"When Theobald made the emendation, 'Most busy-less,' he observed that 'the corruption was so very little removed from the truth of the text, that he could not afford to think well of his own sagacity for having discovered it.' The correction is, indeed, so obvious that we may well wonder that it had escaped his predecessors; but we must wonder ten times more that one of his successors, in a blind reverence for the old copy, should re-vitiate the text, and defend a corruption which outrages
