149. LONDON, FEBRUARY 19, 1921. plays (A Woman is a Weathercock' and Amends for Ladies'), in the parts of 'The Fatal Dowry' written by him, and in all CONTENTS.-No. 149. the work here assigned to him on other NOTES:-Nathaniel Field's Work in the "Beaumont and internal evidence-is the free use of rimed Fletcher" Plays, 141 - Hazebrouck, 143-Among the couplets, not only at the ends of scenes as Shakespeare Archives: Master John Bretchgirdle, 146Hogle Grodeles"-A Coachman's Epitaph-" Counts of commonly in the dramatic work of the the Holy Roman Empire," 148 Limmig," Earl of period-but interspersed with the blank Chester: Lymage, co. Hants-The Albert Memorial, verse. This feature makes it easy to disHyde Park-Dickens, Mrs. Blimber, and Colley Cibber, tinguish him from Massinger or Fletcher, QUERIES:-Skelton of Hesket and Armathwaite Castle, both of whom are sparing in the use of Cumberland-Arms: Identification Sought-John Crook, rime, but is useless as a means of distinQuaker Portrait Wanted-John Bear, Master of the Free School at Ripon.--Volunteering in "The Forties," guishing between Field and Beaumont, since 150-Early History of the Scottish and Irish Gael-"The Beaumont also introduces rimed couplets in Sword of Bannockburn "-Hawke Family-Wilson, the his blank verse. "Ranger of the Himalayas "-Innys Collection of MapsField's style has indeed Phaestos Disk-American Customs: A Long Gracemuch in common with that of Beaumont Bonté, 151-Embroidered Bible. 1660: Stewart: Beales and it is therefore not surprising to find Dr. Robert James Culverwell-John Barne--Heraldic that Beaumont has been credited with work Arms Wanted-Route through Worcestershire -- Archbishop John Williams' "Manual," 152. written by Field. This mistake has been made both by Boyle and by Fleay. Speaking of what he calls Boyle's "absurd theory that Beaumont contributed certain scenes Chron. Eng. Drama,' i. p. 205) observes that to The Knight of Malta,' Fleay ('Biog. Boyle "is, as I have frequently pointed out, incapable of distinguishing Field's work from Beaumont's." But Boyle's error is a venial one compared with that of Fleay, who has actually made use of a work of Field's to establish the canon for Beaumont's verse. Of "The Four Plays in One' REPLIES:-St. Thomas's Day Custom, 152-The Pancake Bell-Grey in sense of Brown-Hamiltons at Holyrood, 154-Edward Booty-Representative County Libraries: Public and Private-Shilleto, 155-Col. Owen Rowe Lamb in Russell Street, 156-To outrun the Constable" Book of Common Prayer The Green Man, Ashbourne, 157-Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon-Books on Eighteenth Century Life-Old Song Wanted-Roger Mompesson Tobacco: "Bird's Eye," 158 Snuff: Prince's Mixture"-London Coaching and Carriers Inns in 1732, 159. NOTES ON BOOKS:-The Tempest: being the First Volume of a New Edition of the Works of Shakespeare' The Composition of the Saxon Hundred in which Hull chester.' Notices to Correspondents. Notes. NATHANIEL FIELD'S WORK IN THE 'BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER "PLAYS. THOUGH it has with good cause been suspected that Nathaniel Field had a hand in some of the plays printed in the Beaumont and Fletcher folios, and portions of certain plays have (more or less tentatively) been assigned to him by different critics, there is no general agreement either as to the identity of the plays in which he collaborated, or the extent of his contributions to them. It is not strange that this should be sc, since Field is not a writer whose work can easily be recognized. He does not, like Massinger, constantly repeat himself, nor has he, like Fletcher, strongly marked metrical peculiarities. The most distinctive characteristic of Field's verse-a charac "the shares of Beaumont and Fletcher are singularly independent and the marked difference of their metrical forms afforded me the startingpoint for the separation of all these [Beaumont and Fletcher] plays in 1874, which was till then regarded universally as an insoluble problem." The two first "Triumphs" of 'The Four Plays in One,' assumed by Fleay to be by Beaumont, are Field's, as I hope shortly to prove. Fortunately for Fleay, however, the metrical styles of these two authors are so similar that the value of his conclusions has not seriously been affected by his choice of these "Triumphs as the standard for Beaumont's verse. The other plays of the Beaumont and Fletcher folios in which Field collaborated are The Queen of Corinth,' Acts III. and IV., of which are his, and The Knight of Malta,' of which he wrote Acts I. and V. There is no evidence to connect Field with the authorship of any of these plays, but such as can be obtained by comparing them with his acknowledged works, 'A Woman is a Weathercock' and 'Amends for Ladies,' and his share of 'The Fatal Dowry,' written share of 'The Fatal Dowry is Act II., Act III. sc. i., after the second entry of Novall Junior, and Act IV. sc. i. As the assignment of these parts of the play to him has hitherto rested chiefly upon evidence of a negative kind, having been arrived at by subtracting the scenes that clearly show the more easily recognizable hand of Massinger, it is desirable that I should give some positive evidence of his authorship of the parts of this play referred to before I proceed to assign to him plays, or portions of plays, of which external proof of his authorship is lacking. First, then, at the beginning of Act II. sc. i. we have the word "practic No autumn nor no age ever approach This heavenly piece; which Nature having wrought, She lost her needle, and did then despair Ever to work so lively and so fair! while in IV. i. Aymer begs Novall Junior to put his looking-glass aside lest," Narcissuslike," he should dote upon himself and die ....and rob the world Of Nature's copy, that she works form by. No doubt hyperbolical speeches not much differing from these may be found in Massinger, but they are particularly characteristic of Field, who has two references to Nature's fashioning of men in each of his independent plays. With the above passages we may compare Pendant's adulatory speech addressed to Count Frederick in A Woman is & Weathercock,' I. ii. :- Nature herself, having made you, fell sick In love with her own work, and can no more Make man so lovely, being diseased with love. Count Frederick mildly protests :-- Pendant, thou'lt make me dote upon myself. and Pendant replies: Narcissus, by this hand, had far less cause. If my lord deny, they deny; if he affirm, they affirm: they skip into my lord's cast skins some twice a year, &c. and in A Woman is a Weathercock,' II. i., and a little later on, when Malotin says to Pendant, when asked by Mistress Wagtail Pontalier : Dare these men ever fight on any cause? Pontalier replies :— Oh. no! 'twould spoil their clothes, and put their bands out of order. The third is in IV. i. where Aymer, who has been roughly handled by Romont, exclaims: Plague on him, how he has crumpled our bands! These allusions point clearly to Field, in there are two more allusions of the same kind-one in whose Amends for Ladies how he came by his good clothes, replies : By undoing tailors; and then my lord (like a snake) casts a suit every quarter, which I slip into. Again in IV. i. Aymer says of Novall Junior : - But not a word of it :-'tis fairies' treasure, I see you labour with some serious thing, These are, so far as I have noticed, the only explicit allusions to this belief in the Elizabethan drama, though Shakespeare glances at it in The Winter's Tale,' III. iii. This is fairy gold, boy," says the Shepherd to the Clown, when he discovers the gold left by the sea-shore, "and 'twill prove so; up with't, keep it close.....We are lucky; boy; and to be so still requires nothing but secrecy." This brief examination of 'The Fatal Dowry' will, I hope, satisfy the reader that it is possible to detect Field's hand in his anonymous work, or work of his that has been assigned to others, from its connexions with his acknowledged writings. 66 Before I attempt to do this, it will be well to add a few words as to Field's vocabulary as displayed in the three plays to which his name is attached. It is not very distinctive. It is true that he has a few quite uncommon Latinisms, but they are of little use to us in this investigation, since scarcely any of them are used more than once. Pish" and "hum (or "humh," as the folio usually prints it) are characteristic interjections of his. Other noticeable words are continent or "continence" (four times in the three plays), "importune (three times), "innocency (four times) and "integrity (four times). I draw attention to these words merely because they are characteristic words that one may expect to find in Field, and do not suggest that some, perhaps most, of them are not occasionally used by one or other of the other authors of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays. Continent," importune and innocency are the more valuable. I may note also "transgress" (used once in Amends for Ladies) because it is of comparatively infrequent occurrence in these plays, and therefore affords slight corroborative evidence of Field's authorship where there are other suggestions of his hand. Generally with regard to the weight to be attached to words such as these words that are charac 66 in a play are obviously of little or no value, the presence of several much increases their importance, though in all cases they need the support of other evidence. H. DUGDALE SYKES. Enfield. (To be continued.) HAZEBROUCK. (See ante, p. 121.) HAZEBROUCK'S record during the war earned for the town the Croix de Guerre. The citation, dated Oct. 31, 1919, was in the following terms :— bardement par avions et pièces à longue portée. "Ville soumise pendant quatre ans au bomA tenu jusqu'au bout avec une froide tenacitéA deux reprises sous la menace de la pression de l'ennemi a gardé son calme, accueillant réfugiés et blessés, leur prodiguant ses soins." At the outbreak of hostilities the town. was occupied for a fortnight by a regiment of French reservists, but on the invasion of the Départment du Nord on Aug. 20, the troops retired, and Hazebrouck was left. without defence. A few days later refugees from Belgium, both civil and military,. began to arrive, quickly followed by French civilians from the invaded districts. In one day-Aug. 25, 1914-no fewer than 2,000 Belgians entered the town, and during the months and years that followed Hazebrouck was ever ready to extend its hospitality to its neighbours from over the border. In recognition of these services the King of the Belgians has lately conferred the Order of Leopold upon the Mayor of Hazebrouck as representative of the town.. "Flamands de France," said the Belgian Vice-consul in conferring the decoration, vous avez reçu fraternellement les Flamands de Belgique, je vous remercie de tout cœur!" For all these refugees, both French and Belgian, Hazebrouck set to work in August, 1914, to crganize relief, and became eventually a kind of rail-head for charitable works connected with the war. For two months the tide of battle passed Hazebrouck by, but on Oct. 8, about 9 o'clock in the evening, when the town was occupied by a single troop of French cavalry, enemy scouts, creeping along the line of railway, reached the station and even penetrated to the square in front, from where they fired into the town killing three civilians and five 66 66 a Apr. 12, the order was given in Hazebrouck for the total and immediate evacuation of the town, and the next day saw everything abandoned under the saddest and most lamentable conditions. The inhabitants were dispersed to the four corners of France. The Mayor, Abbé Lemire, was the last to leave the town, and eventually installed the mairie in the village of St. Martin d'Ecublei, in the Department of the Orne, at which place the children of the Warein Orphanage at Hazebrouck had previously found refuge. From April to September, 1918, Hazebrouck was left to the mercy of the German guns, but the enemy, though at one time within a distance of 6 kilometers, never was able to reach the town. Immediately prior to the renewal of the bombardment in March, 1918, the civilian population of Hazebrouck had been reduced to about 3,000, and of these 61 were killed and 150 wounded. On Oct. 1, 1918, the Mayor once more took possession of the Hôtelde-Ville, and during the autumn the inhabitants began to return. Out of 3,334 houses, 229 were wholly destroyed, and nearly 2,000 were more or less damaged. Friday, information reached the Mayor that the authorities must be ready to receive 15,000 German troops by 10 o'clock the following morning (Saturday, Oct. 10), and during the same day the French cavalry retired. On Saturday at the appointed hour the Mayor, Abbé Lemire, waited at the Hotel-de-Ville to receive the enemy, but the day drew to a close without incident. Believing Hazebrouck to be occupied by French troops the. Germans had avoided the town, which remained undefended the whole of that and the following day. It was, however, on the evening of Sunday, Oct. 11, that the British Third Corps completed its detrainment at St. Omer and was being moved to Hazebrouck, where it remained throughout Oct. 12. From that time onward, until the close of the war, Hazebrouck was a British town." When the enemy was pushed back to the other side of Armentières, and the line became more or less stabilized, Hazebrouck experienced a period of comparative quiet. The German lines were some 25 kilometers to the east and the inhabitants began to feel that their worst days were over. Works of charity multiplied. Danger was apprehended only Once again, after an interval of over from the air. Then, after two-and-a-half three hundred years and as the result of acts years of this comparatively uneventful life, of war, Hazebrouck stands at the beginning began a period more difficult and more full of a new period in its history. On January of anguish than that of 1914. The first 30, 1921, a local census showed the bombardment by long-range guns took population to be 16,468. The plans for place on July 31, 1917. But the shelling reconstruction comprise much more than was intermittent and long intervals elapsed a mere rebuilding of destroyed property between the bombardments. The worst of and include a scheme for the extension and these occurred on Dec. 13-14, when 120 industrial development of the town. In shells (380 m., or 15 in. diam.) fell into the modern times two events stand out in Hazetown doing great damage to property and brouck's history. At the end of the eightkilling fifteen civilians, among whom were eenth century the Revolution raised the the curé and two assistant priests of the town to its present position of chef-lieu, or Church of St. Eloi. After this, except for capital of an arrondissement, and half-aa serious air attack in January, Hazebrouck century later the coming of the railway was left alone till Mar. 16, 1918, when the made it not only a centre of administration long-range guns began their work again, but also to some extent of commerce and and from that time forward the bombard-industry. A third period is now looked ment was more or less continuous, though the number of shells that fell in any one day was sometimes small. Then in April came the burst through at Armentières, and the Battle of the Lys, which in one of its aspects was known in France as the Battle for Hazebrouck.* On the night of Friday, forward to when Hazebrouck shall become the veritable industrial capital of middle Flanders, linked up with Dunkerque, the capital of maritime Flanders, on the one hand, and Lille, capital of the Department, on the other. Hazebrouck has been for long an important railway centre, lying as it does on the main line between Calais and Lille and at the junction of five other lines, which connect it with Dunkerque, Béthune, and the towns on the Lys, as well as with Belgium. Yet, notwithstanding these advantages the town, so far, has scarcely become the place of importance that its change d'âme. Et quelle âme plus grande que celle du pays de Flandre?" A writer in a Hazebrouck newspaper has put the case thus : En "Notre belle langue flamande, qui nous est si. utile pour apprendre le Hollandais, l'Anglais l'Allemand, est méprisée; elle est bannie de nos écoles. Et pourtant il nous manque des diplomates, des officiers, des agents commerciaux capables de défendre nos intérêts dans les pays étrangers, où l'usage de notre langue serait si précieux And in the Chamber of Deputies, the Abbé Lemire, who has represented Hazebrouck in M. Dumazet sees in the use of the Flemish Parliament since 1893,* used these words language and the fostering of local patriot-on Oct. 4, 1919, in pleading for the preservaism, a danger to the greater idea of national- tion of the native language in Alsace and ism. He joins issue with the Abbé Lemire, Lorraine :who in pleading for the encouragement of the Flemish tongue has drawn a comparison between Flanders and Brittany and Provence. There exists in the region a "Comité Flamand de France whose chief object it is to maintain the Flemish language and customs and to keep alive the sentiment of the "petite patrie. Opponents of this movement, like M. Dumazet, reject the comparison with Brittany and Provence as a false one, as neither Breton nor Provençal speech has any idiom in common with a foreign tongue, whereas Flemish, they maintain, is a foreign language akin to German. Notwithstanding the purity of motive of the Comité Flamand and its supporters M. Dumazet maintains that the movement tends in the long run to work against national interests :- 'La question du flamand, si délicate en Belgique, ne semble pas aussi dangereuse en France. Les 200,000 flamands de France sout des Français de cœur. Ils ne demandent qu'une chose, garder leur langue. Le flamand est menacé par le courant de centralisation de ces cinquante dernières années. Il est cependant urgent de la Je suis moi-même d'un pays où deux langues vivent côte à côte, la langue flamande et la langue française, juxtaposées depuis Louis XIV. Flandre l'expérience de tous les jours nous apprend qu'il ne faut point froisser les populations losqu'elles parlent en flamand. en ayant l'air de les mépriser et de les soupçonner, Il ne faut point céder à la tentation de croire que quiconque se sert d'une autre langue que la langue nationale dit quelque chose contre la patrie.' may be That Hazebrouck is essentially a Flemish town is at once impressed on the mind of the visiting stranger by the names on the shop-signs and in the columns of the local newspapers. A few surnames taken at random from these sources quoted: Baelden, Bèhaghe, Boddaert, Boerez, Boorteel, Bossus, Brouckaert, Butstraen, Cauwel, Cleenewerck, Drynckebier, Everaere, Everwyn, Faes, Gaeymaey, Geloen, Gobrecht, Haese, Houcke, Huyghe, Itsweire, Kieken, Lestaevel, Leuwers, Mantez, Nieuwjaer, Ochart, Ooghe, Pauwels, Rebbelynck, Schoonheere, Schotte, Serlooten, Spas, Ternynck, Tiberghein, Vancauwemberghe, Vandamme, Vanderboogaerde, Vandevelde, Vanderberghe, Vanhoutte, Vanhove, Van-poucke, Verstaevel, Verwaerde, Waelés, Warein, Wyart, and Wyckaert. The name of the curé-doyen of St. Eloi, killed in the bombardment of December, 1917, was Dehandschoewercker. At Hazebrouck the communal fête, which falls on the Sunday after the Assumption, is known as the Ducasse, and the Sunday following is the raccroc de la ducasse.' And so also in the other towns and villages of the region. 66 * Abbé Lemire ewas elected for the arrondissement of Hazebrouck, under the old system of single-member constituencies, at every Election from 1893 to 1914. Under the new system of modified scrutin de liste, in the general election of November 1919, he headed the list of successful candidates of the Fédération Républicaine, in the |