reat collection of platitudes:--

"_Lord Smart._ Well, but after all, Tom, can you tell me what is
Latin for a goose?

"_Neverout._ O, my Lord, I know that; why, Brandy is Latin for a
goose, and _Tace_ is Latin for a candle."

H. B. C.

_Members for Durham--why none prior to_ 1673-4 (Vol. ii., p.
8.).--Because Durham was an episcopal palatine, which had jurisdictions,
and even, in olden times, a Parliament of its own. Several bills were
brought in between 1562 and 1673, to give M.P.'s to both county and
city; but an act was only passed in the latter year. The first writ was
moved, it is said, in 1675; but the first return is dated in Whitworth,
1679. (Oldfield's _Parl. Hist._, iii. 425.)

C.

"_A Frog he would_," _&c._--I am in my sixth decade, and pretty far on
in it too; and I can recollect this jingle as long as I can recollect
anything. It formed several stanzas (five or six at least), and had {46}
its own tune. There was something peculiarly attractive and humorous to
the unformed ear and mind in the ballad, (for as a ballad it was sung,)
as I was wont to hear it. I can therefore personally vouch for its
antiquity being half a century. But, beyond this, I must add, that my
early days being spent in a remote provincial village (high up the
Severn), and the ballad, as I shall call it, being _universally known_,
I cannot help inferring that it is of considerable antiquity. Anything
of then recent date could hardly be both generally known and universally
popular in such a district and amongst such a people. Whether it had a
local origin there or not, it would be difficult to say but I never
heard it spoken of as having any special application to local persons or
affairs. Of course there are only two ways of accounting for its
popularity,--either its application, or its jingle of words and tune. If
I may venture a "guess," it would be, that it had originally a political
application, in some period when all men's minds were turned to some one
great politico-religious question; and this, not unlikely, the period of
the Cavaliers and Roundheads. We know how rife this kind of warfare was
in that great struggle. Or again, it might be as old as the Reformation
itself, and have a reference to Henry the Eighth and Anna Boleyn.

"The frog he would a-wooing go,
Whether his mother would let him or no,"

would not inaptly represent the "wide-mouthed waddling frog"
Henry--"mother church,