Another advertisement indicates a toilet article now out of fashion: 

“To be Sold by Peter Lynch, near Mr. Rutgers Brewhouse, very good Orange Butter, it is excellent for Gentlewomen to comb up their Hair with, it also cures Children’s sore Heads.”

The next sounds quite as odd: 

“James Munden Partner with Thomas Butwell from London, Maketh Gentlewomens Stays and Childrens Coats in the Newest Fashion, that Crooked Women and Children will appear strait,” Same paper, date February, 1735.

It is a curious fact that the deaths at that time, both in the New York and New England papers, were announced not by the names of the deceased, but by the churches to which they belonged.  For example:  “Buried in the city last week, viz., Church of England 26, Dutch 24, Lutheran 2, French 1, Presbyterians 3.  The number of Blacks we refer till Next Week.”—­New England Weekly Journal, Nov. 1, 1731.  Sometimes the number is recorded as four or five, or even less:  therefore the record must be very imperfect, and there seems to have been no notice taken of those who were not buried from any church.

M.H.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

    Dante and his Circle; with the Italian Poets preceding him. 
    Edited and translated in the original Metres by Dante Gabriel
    Rossetti.  Revised and rearranged edition, Boston:  Roberts
    Bros.

Dante is so great a figure in Italian literature that he hides from sight the host of minor poets who preceded him, and throws his own contemporaries so into the shade that we are apt to think that Italian poetry began with him, and that its second exponent is Petrarch.  Such a view is to be regretted, not only because it overlooks much that is in itself valuable, but because it attributes to a period of slow development a phenomenal character.  There were many poets worth listening to before the great Florentine wrote the New Life or the Divine Comedy, and many whom he listened to and praised, although his prophetic foresight told him that he would one day bear their glory from them.

It was to make us acquainted with these forgotten singers that Mr. Rossetti wrote some years ago his charming book. The Early Italian Poets, which, after being long out of print, he now presents to us in a revised and rearranged edition.  The author’s wish is not merely to give us a glimpse of the quaint conceits of a school that continued in Italy the waning influence of the Troubadours, but to open to us the intimate social life of the literary men of that period as reflected in their vague Platonic rhapsodies, their friendly letters, their jests and quarrels, their joy and sadness.  Interwoven with all this are stately canzoni, and dainty sonnets full of quaint conceits, like that wherein Jacopo da Lentino (1250) sings Of his Lady in Heaven: