kind to us, as children. My
mother, who is an octogenarian, remembers him well, and says he always took
a nosegay, tied to the top of his cane, every day to Sir Joseph Banks.

JULIA R. BOCKETT.

Southcote Lodge, near Reading.

_The Waistcoat bursted, &c._ (Vol. ii., p. 505.).--The general effect of
melancholy: digestion is imperfectly performed, and melancholy patients
generally complain of being "blown up." BODVAR'S "blowing up," on the
contrary, is the mere effect of the generation of gases in a dead body,
well illustrated by a floating dead dog on the river side, or the bursting
of a leaden coffin.

H. W. D.

_Love's Labour's Lost_ (Vol. iii., p. 163.).--Your correspondent has very
neatly and ably made out how the names of the ladies ought to have been
placed; but the error is the poet's, not the printer's. It is impossible to
conceive how, in printing or transcribing, such a mistake should arise; the
names are quite unlike, and several lines distant from one another. Such
forgetfulness is not very uncommon in poets, especially those of the
quickest and liveliest spirit. It is the old mistake of Bentley and other
commentators, to think that whatever is wrong must be spurious. These, too,
we must recollect, are fictitious characters.

C. W. B.

* * * * *

Miscellaneous.

NOTES ON BOOKS, SALES, CATALOGUES, ETC.

Agreeing with Mr. Lower, that they who desire to know the truth as to the
earlier periods of our national history, will do wisely to search for it
among the mists and shadows of antiquity, and rather collect it for
themselves out of the monkish chronicles than accept the statements of
popular historiographers, we receive with great satisfaction the addition
to our present list of translations of such chronicles, which Mr. Lower has
given us in _The Chronicle of Battel Abbey from 1066 to 1176, now first
translated, with Notes, and an Abstract of the subsequent History of the
Establishment_. The original Chronicle, which is preserved among the
Cottonian MSS., though known to antiquaries and historians, was never
committed to the press until the year 1846, when it was printed by the
_Anglia Christiana Society_ from a transcript made by the late Mr. Petrie.
Mr. Lower's translation has been made from that edition; and though
undertaken by him as an illustration of local history, will be found well
deserving the perusal of the general reader, not only from the light it
th