drama, angling, &c., are here to be met with); A. Iredale, Torquay; Taylor & Son, Northampton, (including classics, curious and out-of-way volumes, topography, &c.); J. Grant, George IV. Bridge, Edinburgh (including some important new remainders of Scottish literature); T. Gladwell, Goswell-road, E.C.; J. Hitchman, Cherry-street, Birmingham (including a rare first edition of Dugdale's "Warwickshire," the Musical Antiquarian Society's publications, &c.); Reeves & Turner, 196, Strand, W.C. (including copies of Calvin's works, the Chetham Society's publications, &c.); Mayer & Müller, Berlin; and Albert Cohn, Berlin.

THE Royal Archæological Institute has definitely fixed the last week in July and the first week in August for this year's Congress, which is to be held at Derby, under the presidency of Lord Carnarvon. Among the patrons of the Congress are the Dukes of Norfolk, Rutland, and Devonshire, the Bishops of Lichfield and Southwell, Lords Hartington, Vernon, and Scarsdale, and Bishop Abraham. Mr. Beresford-Hope, M.P., will preside over the architectural section, the Dean of Lichfield over the historical, and the Rev. Dr. Cox over the antiquarian. On Tuesday, July 28, the members of the Institute will be publicly received by the Mayor and Corporation of Derby and by the local archæological and natural history society; and in the afternoon Kedleston Church and Hall will be visited. Wednesday, the 29th, will be devoted to Norbury House, Ashbourne, and Tutbury Castle, Church, and earthworks; Thursday, to Chesterfield and Hardwicke Hall; Friday, to Bakewell, Haddon Hall, and Youlgreave Church; and Saturday to Dale Abbey, Sawley, Breadsall, and Morley. On Monday, August 3, an excursion will be made to Repton, with its church, school, and priory, as well as to Breedon Priory and Melbourne Church. On Tuesday, the 4th, the party will go by railway to Chapel-en-le-Frith, and drive thence to Castleton, Peak Castle, and Tideswell. On Wednesday, the 5th, they will go by rail to Hassop, from which place they will drive to Padley, Carls Wark, and Hathersage. A temporary museum will be opened at the Free Library, Derby, rooms in which will be placed every evening at the disposal of the sectional meetings. On the evening of Thursday, the 30th, there will be a conversazione, given by Lord Percy and the other members of the Council, at the Free Library, for which a large number of invitations will be issued to the gentry of the neighbourhood. The Mayor of Derby has undertaken the office of chairman of the local committee, and the excursion arrangements will be under the management of the secretàries of the institute, Messrs. Hellier Gosselin and St. John Hope.

The

ON Friday evening, June 5, the Society of Bibliopoles, who quaintly call themselves "Ye Sette of Odd Volumes," dined together at Freemasons' Tavern, Great Queen-street, the President, his "Oddship," Mr. James R. Brown, occupying the chair. Later in the evening the president and Mrs. Brown gave a conversazione, at which some rare and fine editions of early-printed books, mediæval manuscripts, and autographs were exhibited by Mr. Bernard Quaritch, the librarian to the Sette. catalogue of these treasures, like the programme of "The Odd Volumes " themselves, is an exquisite specimen of antique printing. The earliest MS. exhibited was a copy of "Cicero de Amicitiâ," written on vellum, probably in one of the French Abbeys in the middle of the ninth century. Later were several specimens of "Hora," the "Roman de la Rose," the Romance of King Arthur and the Quest of the Holy Grail;" and perhaps the finest, although the latest, was "The Chronicle of the Dukes of Normandy and Kings of England," about 1480, a folio volume enclosed in a

red morocco case; it fetched 51,000 francs at the sale of the Didot library. With these were other examples of English, Italian, and Flemish art of the fifteenth cenury, including the illuminated Prayer Book of John Talbot, the great Earl of Shrewsbury, whose name is so familiar to the readers of Shakespeare. Next came a poem in the autograph of Robert Burns, "The Brigs of Ayr," occupying seven pages of folio foolscap, and handsomely bound in morocco. The rest of the catalogue was made up of some forty "printed books of remarkable character and value," and therefore appropriate to the Society or "Sette" of " Odd Volumes." The most highly estimated book exhibited, at least in money value (for it was priced at £5,250), was one of the seven known copies of the Fust and Schoeffer Psalter. This, the second book printed with a date, issued from the press in 1457-9. It is the first work in which large capital letters printed in colours were employed, and the book is interesting as an example of an art disused, almost after its invention, until our own days.

Antiquarian Correspondence.

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CARLYLE'S NASEBY RELICS.

SIR, Carlyle, writing in his "Cromwell" of the fight of Naseby, quaintly mentions "two ancient grinder teeth, dug lately from that ground. . . Sound effectual grinders, one of them very large; which ate their breakfast on the fourteenth morning of June two hundred years ago, and, except to be clenched once in grim battle, had never work to do more in this world!" It may interest your readers to know that one of these "ancient grinders" is now in the cabinet of Mr. S. C. Tite, of Towcester, a well-known local antiquary. He has also a bullet from the same field. Cards are attached to the relics, bearing the following inscriptions in Carlyle's handwriting :"Jaw-tooth dug from a burial-mound (near Cloisterwell) on Naseby battlefield, on the 23rd Septr., 1842, by Ed. Fd., and sent to me 4 days (seal) after. Given to Mr. Wake. 23 Jany., 1854.-T. C."

Blackheath.

"Bullet found on Naseby battle-field. Has been in my possession above 10 years. 23 Jany., 1854.T. C."

(seal)

JOHN ALT PORTER.

GEORGE ELIOT AND GAINSBOROUGH. SIR,-Eminent authors, by the magic of their genius, have given lustre to localities previously comparatively unknown, unvalued, and unloved, except by the few hundreds who claim the town or neighbourhood as their native place. Some time ago the World newspaper had the following paragraph on the supposed scenes of George Eliot's novels: "The scenes of George Eliot's earlier stories are laid for the most part in Warwickshire and Derbyshire. The Mill on the Floss,' however, is an exception. It is not, I believe, generally known that the town called St. Ogg's in this novel, and where most of the action takes place, is Gainsborough, an old-fashioned country town in Lincolnshire, while the 'Floss' is the river Trent itself, where it broadens out towards the

Humber and the sea." Shakespeare, Scott, Burns, Wordsworth, Southey, and others pre-eminent in the literary world, have thrown the glamour of romance around many an otherwise lowly and sequestered spot; therefore, I think, Lincolnshire generally, and Gainsborough in particular, should feel honoured by the preference and prominence which one of the most gifted writers of modern times-alas! now no more-has given to the "old-fashioned country town" by the Trent. Years ago I was struck with the similitude of George Eliot's scenes to the well-remembered localities of my boyhood; and the more I read of her works, the more I felt assured she must, at some time, have been intimately acquainted with Gainsborough and its surroundings. The following quotation from the opening chapter of "The Mill on the Floss" will unfold a scene easily recognised by anyone familiar with that ancient town St. Ogg's (Gainsborough): "A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. On this mighty tide the black ships-laden with fresh-scented fir planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of coal-are borne along to the town of St. Ogg's, which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river bank, tinging the water with a soft purple hue under the transient glance of this February sun. Far away on each hand stretch the rich pastures, and patches of dark earth, made ready for the seed, of broad-leaved green crops, or touched already with the tint of the tender-bladed autumn-sown corn. There is a remnant still of the last year's golden clusters of beehive ricks rising at intervals beyond the hedgerows; and everywhere the hedgerows are studded with trees. The distant ships seem to lift their masts, and stretch their red-brown sails close among the branches of the spreading ash. I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge. Above all, they (the Tulliver children) loved the great Floss (the Trent), along which they wandered with a sense of travel, to see the rushing spring-tide, the awful Eagre, come up like a hungry monster: these (the trees, the field, and the river), would always be just the same to them. Tom thought that people were at a disadvantage who lived on any other spot on our globe; and Maggie, when she read about Christiana passing the river over which there was no bridge,' always saw the Floss between the green pastures by the Great Ash." Again : "In order to see Mr. and Mrs. Glegg at home, we must enter the town of St. Ogg's, that venerable town with the red fluted roofs and broad warehouse gables, where the black ships unlade themselves of their burthens from the far north, and carry away in exchange the precious inland product, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces which my refined readers have doubtless become acquainted with through the medium of the best classic pastorals.

"It is one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature, as much as the nests of the bower-birds, or the winding galleries of the white ants: a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp on the hill-side, and the long-haired sea kings came up the river and looked with fierce eager eyes at the fatness of the land.

"It is a town 'familiar with long-forgotten years.' The shadow of the Saxon hero-king still walks there fitfully, reviewing the scenes of his

youth and love-time, and is met by the gloomier shadow of the dreadful heathen Dane, who was stabbed in the midst of his warriors by the sword of an invisible avenger, and who rises on autumnal evenings like a white mist from the tumulus on the hill, and then hovers in the court of the old hall by the river-side-the spot where he was thus miraculously slain in the days before the old hall was built. It was the Normans who began to build that fine old hall, which is like the town, telling of the thoughts and hands of widely-sundered generations; but it is all so old that we look with loving pardon at its inconsistencies, and are well content that they who built the stone oriel, and they who built the Gothic façade of the finest small brickwork, with the trefoil ornament, and the windows and battlements defined with stone, did not sacrilegiously pull down the ancient half-timbered body, with its oak-roofed banqueting hall.

"But older even than this old hall is perhaps the bit of wall now built into the belfry of the parish church, and said to be a remnant of the original chapel dedicated to St. Ogg, the patron saint of this ancient town."

I do not remember in any of the histories of Gainsborough mention being made of the above "bit of wall;" but whether there is such an antique relic of ancient Gainsborough or not, there is little doubt from the foregoing description that St. Ogg's is Gainsborough, and the 'Floss,' "with the rushing spring-tide, the awful Eagre," is the Trent, for it is pretty well authenticated that here the noble Saxon Alfred wooed and won Elswitha, the accomplished daughter of Ethelred; that here Sweyne, the fierce Danish king, or chieftain, was slain, and buried beneath the tumulus on Thonock Hill, and the description of the "old hall" is a piece of word-painting perfect in its verisimilitude. "The Mill on the Floss" abounds with names which to residents of Gainsborough who are no longer young, will be "familiar as household words "-Spouncer, Garnett, Spray, Partridge, Gibson, Torry, Brumby, Winship, &c., while scattered throughout the volumes of "Middlemarch," "Felix Holt," &c., are the names of Peacock—a medical practitioner, a person of the same name and profession being long resident at Gainsborough-Crowder, Rann, Roe, Satchell, Taft, Mills, Tomlinson, and Casson. The signs of the taverns are also familiar, such as "The Anchor," where that "briny chap" named Salt could generally be found fraternising with kindred spirits hailing from the great maritime town of "Mudport" (Hull), whence steamers ran to St. Ogg's-as they yet do to Gainsborough-daily; the Marquis of Granby," the "Cross Keys," the "Red Lion," and "Seven Stars," were, and are, all well-known places of refreshment for man and horse in Gainsborough. Again, in the description of the fancy fair held at the Old Hall, "All well-drest St. Ogg's and its neighbourhood were there; and it would have been worth while to come, even from a distance, to see the fine Old Hall, with its open roof and carved oaken rafters and oaken folding-doors, and light shed down from a height on the manycoloured show beneath a very quaint place, with broad faded stripes on the walls, and here and there a show of heraldic animals of a bristly, long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of a noble family once the seigniors of this now civic hall." It was here that Stephen Guest, the young wharfinger and banker, a rival for the love of Maggie Tulliver, went on along the passage to one of the rooms at the end of the building which were appropriated to the town library;" the said Stephen Guest again meeting Maggie at the dance at "Park House," a very familiar name to the denizens of Gainsborough.