The following communications have reached us since the publication of our remarks on the proposed Monumentarium Anglicanum (No. 73. p. 217. et seq.). They serve to show how much interest the subject has excited among those best qualified to judge of the great utility of some well-organised plan for the preservation of a record of our still existing monuments.

Mr. Dunkin's letter (which was accompanied by a copy of the prospectus issued by him in 1844) claims precedence, as showing the steps which that gentleman has already taken. It is a communication highly creditable to his exertions in the cause, but does not alter our views as to the practicability of any successful attempt to accomplish this object by individual exertion.

In No. 73. Vol. iii. of "Notes and Queries" you have honoured me by an allusion to the Monumenta Anglicana I have in the press, as "a plan which would have your hearty concurrence and recommendation, if it were at all practicable; but which must fail from its very vastness." It may be so; but the motto of my family is Essayez. Every "gigantic scheme" must have a commencement, and this "scheme," I am perfectly aware, is one "that no individual, however varied in attainments and abilities, could without assistance hope to achieve." My father, upwards of half a century since, commenced collecting mortuary memorials; many of the monuments from which he copied the inscriptions have since been destroyed by time, and many, very many, more by the ruthless innovations of beautifying churchwardens. These "very vast" collections—the labour of a life—however, only form a portion of the materials I now posses; for since I issued my prospectus in 1844, I have received many thousands of inscriptions and rubbings of brasses from clergymen and others; and I trust I shall be favoured with still further assistance, as in all cases where information is rendered, the source whence derived shall be most thankfully and freely acknowledged.

The plan I have adopted with regard to arrangement is to folio each page three times, viz., i. each parish by itself; ii. each county; iii. alphabetically; so that each parish can be considered complete in itself; each county can be bound up by itself; or the whole alphabetically, gazetteer-wise.

The index will be also in three divisions,—i. general; ii. names of places; iii. names of persons.

With regard to the number of volumes,—I need not say that that is entirely in nubibus. My impression is limited to seventy-five copies, the same as my father's Oxfordshire, with which it corresponds in size.

I should have preferred seeing the government performing the task of preserving manuscripts of all existing monuments; but it is the fashion in Britain for government to leave all apparently national undertakings to individual exertion. I will here conclude with a quotation from the report I have just published of the Transactions at the Congress of the British Archæological Association held in Worcester:

"Lamentation is, however, worse than useless: the spirit of the age forbids all idle mourning. If we would awaken a sympathy and interest in our pursuits, we must gird up our loins like men, and be doing, and that right earnestly; for it is hopeless any longer waiting for the government, as a 'Deus ex machina,' to help us to rescue our antiquities from destruction."

Alfred John Dunkin.

Our next is from a correspondent (who has favoured us with his name) who proposes a scheme almost more extensive than that advocated by Mr. Dunkin, but who differs from that gentleman by recognising the necessity of combined endeavour to carry it out.

A few years since I propounded a scheme for an Ecclesiologicon Anglicanum, or record of the history, not only architectural and monumental, but also local and traditional, of every parish in England. Though I had long conceived such a design, I must confess myself indebted to some excellent remarks on the subject which appeared in the Ecclesiologist (New Series, No. x., April 1846). Fully aware that so stupendous a work could never be accomplished by any single individual, I compiled a prospectus of my design, and invited the co-operation of all antiquaries. I proposed to publish at intervals, and in alphabetical order, the parishes of every county, and by dividing the labour among different coadjutors, and giving to each a separate branch of inquiry, thereby insuring, by successive revisions, a certainty of correctness, I hoped to succeed in the undertaking. My project was, however, laid aside by reason of other engagements; but, as I still think it worthy of consideration, I have troubled you with these "Notes" in the hope that, by publication in your pages, they may be the means of suggesting to others interested in the matter the practicability of carrying them out. Though with no definite object in view, but with a presentiment of their after utility, I have, during many provincial campaigns, collected architectural notes, as well as genealogical memoranda, from the churches I have visited. To these, such as they are, any of your readers is welcome, for the purposes to which I have referred, and I know many who would gladly send their contributions to such an undertaking.

W. J. D. R.

Our next letter, though brief, is valuable as furnishing a case in point, to prove the practical utility which would result from the realisation of some well-considered scheme for the attainment of the great national object which we are advocating.

As an instance of the practical use of such a collection, let me inform your readers that in 1847, being engaged in an ejectment case on the home circuit, it became most important to show the identity of a young lady in the pedigree, the parish register of St. Christopher le Stocks only giving the name and date of burial. I found that when St. Christopher's was pulled down for the enlargement of the Bank of England, some kind antiquary had copied all the monuments. The book was found at the Herald's College; it contained an inscription proving the identity, and a verdict was obtained.

J. S. B.

Our last communication is, we have reason to believe, from an active and zealous Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, who would heartily co-operate in carrying out the practical suggestions thrown out in his letter.

In Vol. iii, p. 218., you suggest that the Society of Antiquaries is the body which should undertake the task of forming a record of existing monuments in churches. Entirely agreeing in the opinion you have expressed, I would venture to offer some remarks on the subject. The undertaking is a vast and laborious one, and can only be effected by great subdivision of labour.

That the Society of Antiquaries is the fittest agent for the work, I think admits of little doubt; its Fellows are widely spread throughout the country. In every neighbourhood may be found one or more gentlemen able and willing to give their aid, and to excite others to assist. The Archæological Institute and the British Archæological Association would doubtless add the weight of their influence, and the personal assistance of their members.

The clergy throughout the country would be able and willing labourers; and surely these conjoined forces are adequate to the occasion.

One consideration suggests itself, viz., whether the record be confined to monuments in churches, or whether it should be extended to those in churchyards? I think it should be so extended, partially—that is, that all the monuments in churches should be given; and such of the monuments in churchyards as, upon a careful inspection, may appear to be in any way worthy of preservation. We do not perhaps want the ten thousand "afflictions sore" which ten thousand John Smiths are stated to have "long time bore."

The inscriptions in churches should be accompanied with rubbings of all brasses; and, as far as possible, with drawings of the most interesting monuments.

I am satisfied the thing can be done, if it be undertaken with prudence, and continued with energy. The copies should be certified by the signature of the person making them, and they should all be transcribed on paper of the same description, so that they might be bound in volumes.

The expense would probably be considerable, because in some instances paid labour might be requisite; but it would be as nothing compared with the magnitude and importance of the result; and if, as is probable, the Society of Antiquaries might hesitate at undertaking the whole charge, I doubt not that many would contribute towards it, and amongst them

Q. D.

A very slight consideration of the object which it is proposed to accomplish, and the means by which it can be attained, will show that it falls properly into three distinct operations, namely, Collection, Preservation, and Publication.

The first and most important is, the Collection of Materials. In this, it is obvious, the co-operation of individuals well qualified for the work may be secured in all parts of the country, provided some well-defined plan of operation is furnished for their guidance, by some recognised centre of union. A Committee of the Society of Antiquaries, who should well consider and determine upon some uniform plan of recording the inscriptions, &c., is clearly the body who, from their position, could most effectually, and with the greatest propriety, issue such circulars. That the Antiquaries would in this receive the support of both the Archæological Societies, there cannot, of course, be any doubt.

And as we have in the Society of Antiquaries a machinery already established for the proper collection of the materials, so we have an existing and most appropriate place for their preservation in the British Museum, where they may be consulted at all times, by all parties, with the greatest facility, and free of charge.

These two great points, then, of Collection and Preservation, it is clear may be attained at an expense so inconsiderable, compared with the benefits to be gained from their accomplishment, that we cannot believe in their failure from want of funds.

For the accomplishment of the third great end, that of Publication, there is no existing machinery. But let the work of collection and preservation be once fairly entered upon—let it be seen how valuable a collection of materials has been gathered ready to the hand of a Society which should undertake its publication, and there need be little fear that from the supporters of the various Antiquarian, Archæological, and Publishing Societies, now spread throughout the country, there would be found plenty of good men and true ready to lend their aid to the printings and publishing of the Monumentarium Anglicanum.

But as the first step is Collection—and that step is the one in which the Society of Antiquaries can best move, we trust that the present year, in which this Society celebrates the centenary of its chartered existence, will be signalised by its promotion of such a Record of Existing Monuments as is here proposed; which cannot be otherwise regarded—(and we use the words of the Society's Charter)—than as "good, useful, honest, and necessary for the encouragement, advancement, and furtherance of the study and knowledge of Antiquities and the History of this Country."

Notes

ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHAUCER, NO. IV

The Pilgrimage to Canterbury.

"Whanne that April with his shoures soteThe droughte of March hath perced to the rote,And bathed every veine in swiche licourOf which vertue engendred is the flour;When Zephyrus eke with his sote bretheEnspired hath in every holt and hetheThe tendre croppes—and the yonge SonneHath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne; * * * *Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages— * * * * * * * *Befelle, that in that seson, on a day."—Prologue.

I quote these lines because I wish to show that Tyrwhitt, in taking them as indicative of the very day on which the journey to Canterbury was performed, committed a great mistake.

The whole of the opening of the prologue, down to the line last quoted, is descriptive, not of any particular day, but of the usual season of pilgrimages; and Chaucer himself plainly declares, by the words "in that seson, on a day"—that the day is as yet indefinite.

But because Tyrwhitt, who, although an excellent literary critic, was by no means an acute reader of his author's meaning, was incapable of appreciating the admirable combination of physical facts by which Chaucer has not only identified the real day of the pilgrimage, but has placed it, as it were, beyond the danger of alteration by any possible corruption in the text, he set aside these physical facts altogether, and took in lieu of them the seventh and eighth lines of the prologue quoted above, which, I contend, Chaucer did not intend to bear any reference to the day of the journey itself, but only to the general season in which it was undertaken.

But Tyrwhitt, having seized upon a favourite idea, seems to have been determined to carry it through, at any cost, even at that of altering the text from "the Ram" into "the Bull:" and I fear that he can scarcely be acquitted of unfair and intentional misquotation of Chaucer's words, by transposing "his halfe cours" into "half his course," which is by no means an equivalent expression. Here are his own words:

"When he (Chaucer) tells us that 'the shoures of April had perced to the rote the drought of March' (ver. 1, 2.), we must suppose, in order to allow due time for such an operation, that April was far advanced; while, on the other hand, the place of the sun, 'having just run half his course in the Ram' (ver. 7, 8.), restrains us to some day in the very latter end of March. This difficulty may, and, I think, should, be removed by reading in ver. 8. the Bull, instead of the Ram. All the parts of the description will then be consistent with themselves, and with another passage (ver. 4425.), where, in the best MSS., the eighte and twenty day of April is named as the day of the journey to Canterbury."—Introductory Discourse.

Accordingly, Mr. Tyrwhitt did not hesitate to adopt in his text the twenty-eighth of April as the true date, without stopping to examine whether that day would, or would not, be consistent with the subsequent phenomena related by Chaucer.

Notwithstanding Tyrwhitt's assertion of a difficulty only removable by changing the Ram into the Bull, there are no less than two ways of understanding the seventh and eighth lines of the prologue so as to be perfectly in accordance with the rest of the description. One of these would be to suppose the sign Aries divided into two portions (not necessarily equal in the phraseology of the time), one of which would appertain to March, anal the other to April—and that Chaucer, by the "halfe cours yronne," meant the last, or the April, half of the sign Aries. But I think a more probable supposition still would be to imagine the month of April, of which Chaucer was speaking, to be divided into two "halfe cours," in one of which the sun would be in Aries, and in the other in Taurus; and that when Chaucer says that "the yonge Sonne had in the Ram his halfe cours yronne," he meant that the Aries half of the month of April had been run through, thereby indicating in general terms some time approaching to the middle of April.

Both methods of explaining the phrase lead eventually to the same result, which is also identical with the interpretation of Chaucer's own contemporaries, as appears in its imitation by Lydgate in the opening of his "Story of Thebes:"

"Whan bright Phebus passed was the Ram,Midde of Aprill, and into the Bull came."

And it is by no means the least remarkable instance of want of perception in Tyrwhitt, that he actually cites these two lines of Lydgate's as corroborative of his own interpretation, which places the sun in the middle of Taurus.

I enter into this explanation, not that I think it necessary to examine too curiously into the consistency of an expression which evidently was intended only in a general sense, but that the groundlessness of Tyrwhitt's alleged necessity for the alteration of "the Ram" into "the Bull" might more clearly appear.

I have said that Tyrwhitt was not a competent critic of Chaucer's practical science, and I may perhaps be expected to point out some other instance of his failure in that respect than is afforded by the subject itself. This I may do by reference to a passage in "The Marchante's Tale," which evinces a remarkable want of perception not only in Tyrwhitt, but in all the editors of Chaucer that I have had an opportunity of consulting.

The morning of the garden scene is said in the text to be "er that dayes eight were passed of the month of Juil"—but, a little further on, the same day is thus described:

"Bright was the day and blew the firmament,Phebus of gold his stremes doun hath sentTo gladen every flour with his warmnesse;He was that time in Geminis, I gesse,But litel fro his declinationIn Cancer."

How is it possible that any person could read these lines and not be struck at once with the fact that they refer to the 8th of June and not to the 8th of July? The sun would leave Gemini and enter Cancer on the 12th of June; Chaucer was describing the 8th, and with his usual accuracy he places the sun "but litel fro" the summer solstice!

Since "Juil" is an error common perhaps to all previous editions, Tyrwhitt might have been excused for repeating it, if he had been satisfied with only that: but he must signalise his edition by inserting in the Glossary attached to it—"Juil, the month of July," referring, as the sole authority for the word, to this very line in question of "The Marchante's Tale!"

Nor does the proof, against him in particular, end even there; he further shows that his attention must have been especially drawn to this garden scene by his assertion that Pluto and Proserpine were the prototypes of Oberon and Titania; and yet he failed to notice a circumstance that would have added some degree of plausibility to the comparison, namely, that Chaucer's, as well as Shakspeare's, was a Midsummer Dream.

It is, perhaps, only justice to Urry to state that he appears to have been aware of the error that would arise from attributing such a situation of the sun to the month of July. The manner in which the lines are printed in his edition is this:—

"ere the dayis eightWere passid, er' the month July befill."

It is just possible to twist the meaning of this into the eighth of the Kalends of July, by which the blunder would be in some degree lessened; but such a reading would be as foreign to Chaucer's astronomy as the lines themselves are to his poetry.

A. E. B.

Leeds, April 8. 1851.

THE ACADEMIES OF SIR FRANCIS KYNASTON AND SIR BALTHAZAR GERBIER

Among the many interesting associations connected with old Covent Garden and its neighbourhood, we ought not to overlook Sir Francis Kynaston's "Museum Minervæ."

In the year 1635, King Charles the First granted his letters patent to Sir Francis Kynaston, "Esquire of the body to his Majesty," whereby a house in Covent Garden, which Sir Francis had purchased, and furnished with books, manuscripts, musical and mathematical instruments, paintings, statues, antiques, &c., was appropriated for ever as a college for the education of the young, nobility, and others, under the name of the "Museum Minervæ." Sir Francis Kynaston was made the governor with the title of "regent;" Edward May, Thomas Hunt, Nicholas Phiske, John Spidell, Walter Salter, Michael Mason, fellows and professors of philosophy and medicine, music, astronomy, geometry, languages, &c. They had power to elect professors also of horsemanship, dancing, painting, engraving, &c.; were made a body corporate, were permitted to use a common seal, and to possess goods and lands in mortmain. (Pat. 11 Car. pt. 8. No. 14.) In the following year, 1636, was published, dedicated to the "Regent and Professors," The Constitutions of the Museum Minervæ; giving an Account of an Academy for teaching chiefly Navigation, Riding, Fortification, Architecture, Painting, and other useful Accomplishments.

The "Museum" seems to have been highly patronised, for we find that on the 27th February, 1635 (the year of its foundation), Prince Charles, the Duke of York, and the Lady Mary their sister, honoured it with their presence to witness a masque, entitled "Corona Minervæ," which was written and prepared for the occasion by Sir Francis Kynaston. This masque was, I believe, printed in the year of its production, but I do not find it mentioned in the last edition of the Biographia Dramatica.

Mr. Cunningham, in his Handbook of London, mentions (p. 42.) that

"Sir Francis Kynaston, the poet, was living in Covent Garden in 1636, on the east side of the street towards Berrie" (Bedfordbury).

And again, in his notice of Bedford Street (p. 44.), he says, Sir Francis resided "on the west side in 1637." Both these entries refer to the same residence—a noble mansion, built in the year 1594, which, after being inhabited by several important families, finally passed into the possession of Sir Francis Kynaston, who altered and adapted it (rebuilding some portions) as the college of the "Museum Minervæ." The ground plan, which is now before me, exhibits a well-arranged and commodious building with two fronts, one in what is now Bedfordbury, and the other (probably added by Sir Francis) in the street now called Bedford Street. The building, when Sir Francis Kynaston purchased it in 1634, stood in the centre of a large garden. The surrounding streets,—King Street, New Street, Bedford Street, Chandos Street, Henrietta Street, and Bedfordbury, were not commenced building until the year 1637.

The "Museum Minervæ" is not named in Mr. Cunningham's excellent Handbook; but when we take into consideration the enormous amount of information required for a work of the kind, we ought not to blame the author for a few trifling omissions.

Sir Balthazar Gerbier, an enterprising projector of the same century, by profession a painter and an architect, but now scarcely remembered as either, seems to have imitated the "Museum Minervæ" in an academy opened at Bethnal Green in 1649. Here, in addition to the more common branches of education, he professed to teach astronomy, navigation, architecture, perspective, drawing, limning, engraving, fortification, fireworks, military discipline, the art of well speaking and civil conversation, history, constitutions and maxims of state, and particular dispositions of nations, "riding the great horse," &c. Once in each week, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Sir Balthazar gave a public lecture gratis on the various sciences. The lectures were generally advertised in the Perfect Diurnal, and a few curious specimens of these advertisements may be seen in Lysons' Environs of London, ed. 1795, vol. ii. p. 30.

Balthazar Gerbier was born at Antwerp about 1591, came young into England, and was a retainer of the Duke of Buckingham as early as 1613. Upon the accession of Charles the First, he was employed in Flanders to negociate privately a treaty with Spain. In 1628 he was knighted at Hampton Court; and, as he says himself in one of his books, was promised by the king the office of surveyor-general of the works, after the death of Inigo Jones. In 1637 he was employed in some private transactions of state; and on the 13th of July, 1641, he took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, having a bill of naturalisation. In 1648 he appears to have projected the above-named academy, the failure of which very soon happened. Sir Balthazar then went to America, where he seems to have been very ill treated by the Dutch, and narrowly escaped with his life. He afterwards returned to England, and designed the triumphal arch for the reception of Charles the Second. He died at Hempsted-marshal, in 1667, whilst engaged in superintending the mansion of Lord Craven, and was buried in the chancel of that church.

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Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851

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