erving in Normandy in 1436, were "Wm. Pistail--R. Bardolf." Query, Were
these common English names, or did these identical canoniers transmit a
traditional fame, good or bad, to the time of Shakspeare, in song or
story?

If this is a well-known Query, I should be glad to be referred to a
solution of it, if not, I leave it for inquiry.

G.H.B.

EPIGRAM FROM BUCHANAN.

Doletus writes verses and wonders--ahem--When there's nothing in
_him_, that there's nothing in _them_.

J.O.W.H.

* * * * *

QUERIES.

CALVIN AND SERVETUS.

The fate of Servetus has always excited the deepest commiseration. His
death was a judicial crime, the rank offence of religious pride,
personal hatred, and religious fanaticism. It borrowed from superstition
its worst features, and offered necessity the tyrant's plea for its
excuse. Every detail of such events is of great interest. For by that
immortality of mind which exists for ever as History, or through the
agency of those successive causes which still link us to it by their
effects, we are never separated from the Past. There is also an
eloquence in immaterial things which appeals to the heart through all
ages. Is there a man who would enter unmoved the room in which
Shakspeare was born, in which Dante dwelt, or see with indifference the
desk at which Luther wrote, the porch beneath which Milton sat, or Sir
Isaac Newton's study? So also the possession of a book once their own,
still more of the MS. of a work by which great men won enduring fame,
written in a great cause, for which they struggled and for which they
suffered, seems to efface the lapse of centuries. We feel present before
them. They are before us as living witnesses. Thus we see Servetus as,
alone and on foot, he arrived at Geneva in 1553; the lake and the little
inn, the "Auberge de la Rose," at which he stopped, reappear pictured by
the influence of local memory and imagination. From his confinement in
the old prison near St. Peter's, to the court where he was accused,
during the long and cruel trial, until the fatal eminence of Champel,
every event arises before us, and the air is peopled with thick coming
visions of the actors and sufferer in the dreadful scene. Who that has
read the account of his death has not heard, or seemed to hear, that
shriek, so high, so wild, alike for mercy and of dread despair, which
when the fire was kindled burst above through smoke and flame,--