uillotine made _M. de Warville_ anxious to get rid of his
aristocratic pretensions, he confessed (in those same _Memoires_) that his
father kept a cook's shop in the town of Chartres, and was so ignorant that
he could neither read nor write. I need not add, that his having had a
landed property to justify, in any way, the son's territorial appellation,
was a gross fiction.

C.

"_Le Compere Mathieu_" (Vol. vi., pp. 11. 111. 181.).--On the fly-leaf of
my copy (three vols. 12mo., Londres, 1766) of this amusing work, variously
attributed by your correspondents to Mathurin Laurent and the Abbe du
Laurens, is written the following note, in the hand of its former
possessor, Joseph Whateley:

"Ecrit par Diderot, fils d'un Coutelier: un homme tres licentieux, qui
ecrit encore plusieurs autres Ouvrages, comme La Religieuse, Les Bijoux
mechant (_sic_), &c. Il jouit un grand role apres dans la Revolution.

"J. W."

By the way, A. N. styles it "a not altogether undull work." May I ask him
to elucidate this phrase, as I am totally at a loss to comprehend its
meaning. "Not undull" must surely mean _dull_, if anything. The work,
however, is the reverse of dull.

WILLIAM BATES.

Birmingham.

_Etymology of "Awkward"_ (Vol. viii., p. 310.--H. C. K. has probably given
the true derivation of this word, but he might have noticed the {481}
singularity of one Anglo-Saxon word branching off into two forms,
signifying different ways of acting wrong; one, _awkward_, implying
ignorance and clumsiness; the other, _wayward_, perverseness and obstinacy.
That the latter word is derived from the source from which he deduces
_awkward_, can, as I conceive, admit of no doubt.

J. S. WARDEN.

_Life and Death_ (Vol. ix., p. 296.).--What is death but a sleep? We shall
awake refreshed in the morning. Thus Psalm xvii. 15.; Rom. vi. 5. For the
full meanings, see these passages in the original tongues. Sir Thomas
Browne, whose _Hydriotaphia_ abounds with quaint and beautiful allusions to
this subject, says, in one place, "Sleep is so like death, that I dare not
trust him without my prayers:" and he closes his learned treatise with the
following sentence:

"To live indeed is to be again ourselves; which being not only a hope,
but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in St.
Innocent's churchyard as in the sands of Egypt; ready to be anything in
the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as the