“Before concluding this subject, justice demands that the manner in which Sir Herbert Taylor and Sir Henry Wheatley conduct the Royal correspondence, should not pass unnoticed; for, doubtless, a share of the praise which has been here expressed of their Master’s decision and promptness, is due to them, and more especially for the extreme courtesy with which their letters are written.”

We had before heard the fact of the King’s extraordinary punctuality in signing papers, with this addition, that when they are more than ordinarily numerous, the Queen sits at the table with her Royal husband, lays the papers before him, and when signed, removes and arranges them, like a secretary.

Learned “Ladies."—­Mr. Murphy used to relate the following story of Foote’s, the heroines of which were the ladies Cheere, Fielding, and Hill, the last the widow of the celebrated Dr. Hill.  He represented them as playing at “I love my love with a letter;” Lady Cheere began, and said, “I love my love with an N because he is a Night;” Lady Fielding followed with “I love my love with a G, because he is a Gustis;” and “I love my love with an F,” said Lady Hill, “because he is a Fizishun.”  Such was the imputed orthography of these learned ladies.—­Taylor’s Records.

Den.—­The names of places ending in den, as Biddenden, are perhaps not generally known to signify the situation to be in a valley, or near woods.

J.E.J.

* * * * *

Mock-heroics.—­Cowper, in one of his letters to Joseph Hill, reminds his friend of the following mock-heroic line, written at one of their convivial meetings, called the Nonsense Club—­

  “To whom replied the Devil, yard-long-tail’d;”

And adds, “there never was anything more truly Grecian than that triple epithet; and were it possible to introduce it either into the Iliad or Odyssey, I should certainly steal it.”  This of course was written in jest; and had the translator been disposed to exemplify his own pleasantry, he might have found an opportunity in the well-known line of the sixth book of the Iliad—­

  [Greek:  Aideomas Troas ai Troadas elkesipeplous.]

  I dread the Trojan ladies, yard-long-tail’d;

Of which Pope makes this sweeping periphrasis—­

  “And Troy’s proud dames, whose garments sweep the ground.”

E.B.I.

* * * * *

Burton Ale.—­Many of our readers may recollect the dispute, about three years since, between the Burton Ale brewers and the Useful Knowledge Society, when the excellence of the ale was proved to be the result of the hard water of which it was manufactured flowing over a limestone rock.  A chemist was dispatched to Burton, and the settlement of the matter assumed the importance of a discovery; though in the last century this fact was ingeniously explained by Dr. Darwin, in a letter to Mr. Pilkington, upon the supposition that some of the saccharine matter in the malt combines with the calcareous earth of hard waters, and forms a sort of mineral sugar, which, like true sugar, is convertible into spirits.