It might suit Mulgrave’s purpose afterwards to claim a share in this production; but the evidence, as far as I am acquainted with it, seems all against it.  There may be much evidence on the point with which I am not acquainted, and perhaps some of your readers will be so good as to point it out to me.  The question is one that I am, at this moment, especially interested in.

THE HERMIT OF HOLYPORT.

* * * * *

MINOR QUERIES.

AEneas Silvius (Pope Pius II.).—­A broadsheet was published in 1461, containing the excommunication and dethronement of the Archbishop and Elector Dietrich of Mayence, issued and styled in the most formidable terms by Pius II. This broadsheet, consisting of eighteen lines, and printed on one side only, appears from the uniformity of its type with the Rationale of 1459, to be the product of Fust and Schoeffer.

No mention whatever is made of this typographical curiosity in any of the standard bibliographical manuals, from which it seems, that this broadsheet is UNIQUE.  Can any information, throwing light upon this subject, be given?

QUERIST.

November, 1850.

“Please the Pigs” is a phrase too vulgarly common not to be well known to your readers.  But whence has it arisen?  Either in “NOTES AND QUERIES,” or elsewhere, it has been explained as a corruption of “Please the pix.”  Will you allow another suggestion?  I think it possible that the pigs of the Gergesenes (Matthew viii. 28. et seq.) may be those appealed to, and that the invocation may be of somewhat impious meaning.  John Bradford, the martyr of 1555, has within a few consecutive pages of his writings the following expressions: 

“And so by this means, as they save their pigs, which they would not lose, (I mean their worldly pelf), so they would please the Protestants, and be counted with them for gospellers, yea, marry, would they.”—­Writings of Bradford, Parker Society ed., p.390.

Again: 

    “Now are they willing to drink of God’s cup of afflictions, which He
    offereth common with His son Christ our Lord, lest they should love
    their pigs with the Gergenites.” p. 409.

Again: 

“This is a hard sermon:  ‘Who is able to abide it?’ Therefore, Christ must be prayed to depart, lest all their pigs be drowned.  The devil shall have his dwelling again in themselves, rather than in their pigs.” p. 409.

These, and similar expressions in the same writer, without reference to any text upon the subject, seem to show, that men loving their pigs more than God, was a theological phrase of the day, descriptive of their too great worldliness.  Hence, just as St. Paul said, “if the Lord will,” or as we say, “please God,” or, as it is sometimes written, “D.V.,” worldly men would exclaim, “please the pigs,” and thereby mean that, provided it suited their present interest, they would do this or that thing.