dead, whereby you see Death expects no Complement, otherwise he would certainly have kept it at the Staff's End, with a kind of Hollander's austerity." [Sir Th. Wentworth to Sir H. Wotton, Nov. 8. 1617, Strafford's Letters and Despatches, vol. i. p. 5.]

C. P. PH***.

Brother Jonathan.

—Why is, and when first was, this fraternal cognomen bestowed upon the United States of America? Is it strictly applicable to the whole of the Union, or only to those states which were settled and peopled by the Puritan fathers?

HENRY CAMPKIN.

Authorship of the "Groves of Blarney."

—Can any one inform me when, and by whom, the ludicrous ballad, entitled the Groves of Blarney, was composed, and where it may be found. Everybody knows the lines which describe "Cupid and Venus and old Nicodemus, all standing out in the open air."

E. V.

Carnaby.

—What is the derivation and meaning of this word, as the name of a square or street?

ARUN.

Death of Death's Painter.

—Most persons have heard of the story of an Italian painter who embodied the idea of Death on the canvass so truthfully, that the contemplation of it caused his own death. I always thought it was fabulous, till I met with it in the translation of Vasari's Lives of the Painters, vol. ii. p. 305., now being published in Bohn's Standard Library. The name of Fivizzano is there given to the painter, and the following epigram is said to have been inscribed beneath the picture:—