W.G.S.

Parallel Passages.—­A correspondent in Vol. i., p. 330, quoted some parallels to a passage in Shakspeare’s Julius Caesar.  Will you allow me to add another, I think even more striking than those he cited.  The full passage in Shakspeare is,

  “There is a tide in the affairs of man,
  Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. 
  Omitted, all the voyage of their lives
  Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

In Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, book 2, occurs the following:—­

“In the third place, I set down reputation because of the peremptory tides and currents it hath, which, if they be not taken in due time, are seldom recovered, it being extreme hard to play an after game of reputation.”

E.L.N.

Gray’s Ode.—­In return for the information about Gray’s Ode, I send an entertaining and very characteristic circumstance told in Mrs. Bigg’s (anonymous) Residence in France (edited by Gifford):—­

    “She had a copy of Gray when she was arrested in the Reign
    of Terror.  The Jacobins who searched her goods lighted on the
    line—­

      ‘Oh, tu severi religio loci,’

    and said, ’Apparemment ce livre est quelque chose de
    fanatique.’”

My informant tells me that the monk he saw was the same as the one mentioned by your correspondent, and that he had a motto from Lord Bacon over his cell.

C.B.

The Grand Style.—­Is it not extremely probable that Bonaparte plagiarised the idea of the centuries observing the French army from the pyramids from these lines of Lucan?—­

    “Saecula Romanos nunquam tacitura labore, Attendunt,
    oevumque sequens speculatur ab omni Orbe ratem.”—­Phars.
    viii. 622.

One of the recent French revolutionists (I think Rollin) compared himself with the victim of Calvary.  Even this profane rant is a plagiarism.  Gracchus Baboeuf, who headed the extreme republican party against the Directory, exclaimed, on his trial, that his wife, and those of his fellow-conspirators, “should accompany them even to Calvary, because the cause of their punishment should not bring them to shame.”—­Mignet’s French Revolution, chap. xii.

J.F.  BOYES.

Hoppesteris.—­The “shippis hoppesteris,” in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, 2019., is explained by Tyrwhitt to mean dancing, and that in the feminine—­a very odd epithet.  He tells us that the corresponding epithet in Boccaccio is bellatrici.  I have no doubt that Chaucer mistook it for ballatrici.

C.B.

Sheridan’s Last Residence (Vol. i., p. 484.).—­I wonder at any doubt about poor Sheridan’s having died in his own house, 17.  Saville Row.  His remains, indeed, were removed (I believe for prudential reasons which I need not specify) to Mr. Peter Moore’s, in Great George Street; but he was never more than a temporary, though frequent visitor at Mr. Moore’s.