"At a City dinner, so political that the three Consuls of France were drunk, the toast-master, quite unacquainted with Bonaparte, Cambacères, and Lebrun, hallooed out from behind the chair, 'Gentlemen, fill bumpers! The chairman gives the Three per Cent. Consols!'"
In Merrie England in the Olden Time, vol. ii. p. 70. (published ten years before), will be found the following note:
"This eminent professor (toast-master Toole), whose sobriquet is 'Lungs,' having to shout the health of the 'three present Consuls,' at my Lord Mayor's feast, proclaimed the health of the 'Three per Cent. Consols!'"
The latter version is the correct one. It was the three foreign Consuls who were present among this annual gathering of grandees that was given; not Bonaparte, Cambacères, and Lebrun. The after-dinner organ of Toole might easily, on hearing the toast, mistake "present" for "per cent.," and "Consuls" (in the City, too) for "Consols."
A Subscriber.Queries
WOLVES NURSING CHILDREN
At the meeting of the Cambrian Archæological Society, Lord Cawdor in the chair, I read a letter on this subject from the resident at Lucknow, Colonel Sleeman, to whom India is indebted for the suppression of Thuggee, and other widely extended benefits. Though backed by such good authority, the letter in question was received with considerable incredulity, although Colonel Sleeman represents that he has with him one of these wolf-nurtured youths.
Since reading the letter, I have received from the Colonel's brother a more full account, printed in India, and containing additional cases, which I should have no objection to print in the pages of "N. & Q." In the meantime, further information from Indian experience, where mothers so often expose their children, would be thankfully received.
I appended my letter, for want of a better opportunity, and at the request of several members, to a paper on the doctrine of the Myth, read at the time; observing, that if the account is credible, perhaps Niebuhr may have been precipitate in treating the nurture of the founders of Rome as fabulous, and consigning to the Myth facts of infrequent occurrence. There is both danger and the want of philosophy in rejecting the marvellous, merely as such.
Nor is the invention of Lupa, for the name of the mother of the Roman twins, by any means satisfactory. May not the mysteries of Lycanthropy have had their origin in such a not infrequent fact, if Col. Sleeman may be trusted, as the rearing of infants by wolves?
Gilbert N. Smith.The Rectory, Tregwynfrid, Tenby, S. W.
"THE LUNEBURG TABLE."QUEEN ELIZABETH'S LOVE OF PEARLS
In the Travels of Hentzner, who resided some time in England in the reign of Elizabeth, as tutor to a young German nobleman, there is given (as most of your readers will doubtless remember) a very interesting account of the "Maiden Queen," and the court which she then maintained at "the royal palace of Greenwich." After noticing the appearance of the presence-chamber,"the floor, after the English fashion, strewed with hay,"the writer gives a descriptive portrait of her Majesty. He states,
"Next came the Queen, in her sixty-fifth year, as we were told, very majestic; her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled; her eyes small, but black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow, and her teeth black (a defect the English seem subject to, from their too great use of sugar). She had in her ears two pearls, with very rich drops.2 She wore false hair, and that red."