L.S.

The Frozen Horn.—­Perhaps it is not generally known that the writer of Munchausen’s Travels borrowed this amusing incident from Heylin’s {263} Mikrokosmos.  In the section treating of Muscovy, he says:—­

“This excesse of cold in the ayre, gave occasion to Castilian, in his Aulicus, wittily and not incongruously to faine that if two men being smewhat distant, talke together in the winter, their words will be so frozen that they cannot be heard:  but if the parties in the spring returne to the same place, their words will melt in the same order that they were frozen and spoken, and be plainly understood.”

J.S.

Salisbury.

Inscription from Roma Subterranea.—­If you deem the translation of this inscription, quoted in Lord Lindsay’s fanciful but admirable Sketches of the History of Christian Art, worth a place among your Notes, it is very heartily at your service.

  “Sisto viator
  Tot ibi trophaea, quot ossa
  Quot martyres, tot triumphi. 
  Antra quae subis, multa quae cernis marmora,
  Vel dum silent,
  Palam Romae gloriam loquuntur. 
  Audi quid Echo resonet
  Subterraneae Romae! 
  Obscura licet Urbis Coemetria
  Totius patens Orbis Theatrium! 
  Supplex Loci Sanetitatem venerare,
  Et post hac sub luto aurum
  Coelum sub coeno
  Sub Roma Romam quaerito!”

Roma Subterranea, 1651, tom. i. p. 625.

(Inscription abridged.)

  Stay, wayfarer—­behold
  In ev’ry mould’ring bone a trophy here. 
  In all these hosts of martyrs,
  So many triumphs. 
  These vaults—­these countless tombs,
  E’en in their very silence
  Proclaim aloud Rome’s glory: 
  The echo’d fame
  Of subterranean Rome
  Rings on the ear. 
  The city’s sepulchres, albeit hidden,
  Present a spectacle
  To the wide world patent. 
  In lowly rev’rence hail this hallow’d spot,
  And henceforth learn
  Gold beneath dross
  Heav’n below earth,
  Rome under Rome to find!

F.T.J.B.

Brookthorpe.

Parallel Passages.—­

“There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked, from cieled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like men.”—­Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying, chap. i. sect. 1. p. 272. ed.  Edin.

“Here’s an acre sown indeed With the richest royalest seeds, That the earth did e’er suck in, Since the first man dyed for sin:  Here the bones of birth have cried, Though gods they were, as men they died.”  F. BEAUMONT

M.W. 
Oxon.

A Note on George Herbert’s Poems.—­In the notes by Coleridge attached to Pickering’s edition of George Herbert’s Poems, on the line—­