space of three or four dayes it dyed. And within two or three dayes after, another Calfe was taken in such sorte that it turned round about, and did goe as if the backe were broken. Then was I wished to burne it, and I carried the Calfe to burne it, and after it was burned, I was taken with paynes and gripings, and soe continued in such sort, untyll shee came to my House; whereupon I did earnestly chide her, and said I would beate her, and that daye, I prayse God, I was restored to my former health."

H. E.

THE LATE SIR JOHN GRAHAM DALYELL, BARONET, OF BINNS, N.B.

This learned and accomplished gentleman was born in 1776. He was educated for the Scottish bar, to which he was called in the year 1797. Within a year or two after he was enrolled as a member of the Faculty, he produced his first quarto, Fragments of Scottish History. This was followed, in the year 1801, by a collection of Scottish Poems of the Sixteenth Century, in two octavo volumes. In 1809 appeared a Tract chiefly relative to Monastic Antiquities, with some Account of a recent Search for the Remains of the Scottish Kings interred in the Abbey of Dunfermline, the first of four or five thin octavos, in which Mr. Graham Dalyell called attention to those ecclesiastical records of the north, so many of which have since been printed by the Bannatyne, Maitland, and Spalding Clubs, under the editorial care of Mr. Cosmo Innes. A later and more laborious work was his Essay on the Darker Superstitions of Scotland; a performance which embodies the fruit of much patient study in rare and little read works, and affords many curious glimpses of the popular mythology of the north. The long list of the productions of Sir John Graham Dalyell closes with his Musical Memoirs of Scotland, published little more than a twelvemonth ago. The deceased baronet was distinguished also by his acquaintance with mechanical science, and still more by his knowledge of Natural History. Of the zeal with which he prosecuted this last pursuit, he has left a signal monument in his Rare and Remarkable Animals of Scotland. Sir John succeeded to the family title and estates, as sixth baronet, on the death of his elder brother, Sir James Dalyell, on February 1, 1841. He had previously been advanced to the honours of knighthood, by patent under the Great Seal, in the year 1836. He had been for some time in infirm health, and died at his residence, Great King Street, Edinburgh, on May 17, 1851, in his seventy-fourth year. Dying unmarried, he is succeeded by his younger brother, now Sir William Cunningham Cavendish Dalyell, of Binns, baronet, Commander R.N., Royal Hospital, Greenwich.

ABERDENIENSIS.

APPROPRIATION OF A THOUGHT—OLDHAM, DRYDEN, AND BYRON.—THE STATE OF MIND IN THE PROGRESS OF COMPOSITION.

Dryden, alluding to his work:

"When it was only a confused mass of thoughts tumbling over one another in the dark; when the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and there either to be chosen or rejected by the judgment."—Dedication to the Rival Ladies.

Lord Byron's appropriation of the same idea:

Had Oldham or Dryden the prior claim to the thought? Byron derived his plagiarism from D'Israeli, "On the Literary Character" (vol. i. p. 284., 1828), where Dryden's Dedication to his Rival Ladies is quoted, and not from the Dedication itself, as the Retrospective Review imagined (vol. vii. p. 158.), "by levying contributions in the most secret and lonely recesses of our literature."

JAMES CORNISH.

THE "EISELL" CONTROVERSY.

When Polonius proposed to use the players according to their desert, Hamlet rebuked him with "Much better man! use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity!" I do not think it necessary to notice that what is merely coarse and vulgar in an unprovoked attack upon myself, feeling that I have no right to expect the man who has no consideration for his own dignity to think of mine. But when an attempt is made to sow dissension between me and those whose opinions I value, and whose characters I esteem, I feel that in justice to myself and in satisfaction to them, a few words are not out of place.

Some few of your readers may have seen a pamphlet in reply to MR. SINGER, on the meaning of eisell and from certain insinuations about "pegs and wires," and a "literary coterie," it might be supposed that there existed some other bond for the support of "NOTES AND QUERIES" than a common object affords. I wish then to inform such of them as may not happen to belong to the "coterie" in question (which I suppose exists somewhere—perhaps holds a sort of witch's-sabbath on some inaccessible peak in the pamphleteer's imagination), that I have never, to my knowledge, even seen either MR. SINGER or the editor of "NOTES AND QUERIES;" and that, so far from meaning offence to the angry gentleman who seems disposed to run-a-muck against all who come in his way, I actually supposed all meant in good part, and characterised his remarks as "pleasant criticism."

From an apparent inability, however, of this pamphleteer to distinguish between pleasantry and acrimony, he has attempted to fix on me offences against others when I have ventured to dissent from their conclusions. All I can say is, that I have never written anything inconsistent with the very high respect I feel for the abilities and the great services rendered by the gentlemen I have had occasion to allude to.

Dire is the wrath of the pamphleteer that he should have been charged by MR. SINGER with "want of truth." That gentleman doubtless saw what I did not, the implied insinuation—since burst into full flower—about a "coterie." Yet the candid controversialist, now, after due deliberation, insinuates that a "canon of criticism," which I ventured to suggest, and at which he now finds it convenient to sneer, was remembered for the purpose of "bolstering up" MR. S