prevented by the inhabitants, they apprehending that the ground over which a king passed was for ever after to become a public road. The king, incensed at their proceedings, sent from his court, soon afterwards, some of his servants to inquire of them the reason of their incivility and ill-treatment, that he might punish them. The villagers hearing of the approach of the king's servants, thought of an expedient to turn away his majesty's displeasure from them. When the messengers arrived at Gotham, they found some of the inhabitants engaged in endeavouring to drown an eel in a pool of water; some were employed in dragging carts upon a large barn, to shade the wood from the sun: and others were engaged in hedging a cuckoo, which had perched itself upon an old bush. In short, they were all employed upon some foolish way or other, which convinced the king's servants that it was a village of fools. "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”—This saying is from Sterne's Sentimental Journey. He, however, takes it from the French: "A brebis tondue, Dieu mesure le vent." It appears to be of some antiquity, as it is to be found in somewhat different versions in a collection of proverbs published in 1594"Dieu mesure le froid à la brebis tondue, Dieu donne le froid selon la robbe." Cæsar's wife must be above suspicion.-The origin of this proverb may be found in Plutarch (Julius Cæsar, cap. 10), or in the following passage from Suetonius (Jul. Cæs. 74):— The name of Pompeia, the wife of Julius Cæsar, having been mixed up with an accusation against P. Clodius, her husband divorced her; not, as he said, because he believed the charge against her, but because he would have those belonging to him as free from suspicion as from crime. SONG BY SIR JOHN SUCKLING. The following verses are contained in a small quarto MS. Collection of English Poetry, in the handwriting of the time of Charles I. They are much in Suckling's manner, and in the MS are described as SIR JOHN SUCKLING'S VERSES. I am confirm'd a woman can Then straight she's of another mind; Yet still I'll love the fairsome (why?— When I am sad, to sing a song; Then hang me, Ladies, at your door, I'll give my fancy leave to range I'll court you all to serve my turn, But with such flames as shall not burn; If e'er I doat upon you more. DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. In reference to the discovery of America by Madoc, Seneca shadows forth such a discovery:-— Venient annis sæcula seris Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum Medea, act ii. ad finem, v. 375. "A vaticination," says the commentator, "of the Spanish discovery of America." The probability of a short western passage to India is mentioned in Aristotle de Cœlo, ii., near the end. AN OLD-WORLD VILLAGE. Years hence, in the time of Mr. Macaulay's New Zealander, when the great Holyhead Road is good pasture, and Cary has sensitive commentators, I don't imagine that the precise locality of Newton Prodgers will be settled without inkshed. It is the very height of improbability that any reader of " N. & Q.," unless he is a taxman, ever went there; still less, having done so once, that he would be desirous of enjoying the felicity twice, for the road to Newton Prodgers is not only not the road to any other place whatsoever, but is moreover the true and only genuine site of the stupendous adventure of the Manchester Bagman, which the Yankees have appropriated with characteristic coolness, and pitched somewhere or other down in Alabama. The thing itself actually occurred to a respectable farmer of our village, no way connected with the public press, who set to work one fine morning to dig out a riding whip, the tip of which he saw sprouting out of the middle of the road. After an hour's hard digging he came to a hat, and under that, to his intense horror, was a head belonging to a body in a state of advanced suffocation. Assistance was procured, and after several hours of unremitting exertion, worthy of Agassiz or Owen, the entire organism of a bagman was developed. "Now, gentlemen," said the exhumed commercial to his perspiring diggers, who of course concluded their labors finished, "now, gentlemen, you've saved my life; and now, for God's sake, lend a hand to get out my mare!" I am aware that at first sight this anecdote appears to tell against our village; but then everybody knows it is the busi ours. ness of the Little Pudgington folks to mend these roads, and not We never have repaired them, and it is not very likely we shall begin now, for we have a religious antipathy to all innovation, especially when it is likely to touch the rates. In M'Adam's time, when the aforesaid Little Pudgington folks were going to bring the branch turnpike through a corner of Newton Prodgers, we rose as one man, called a public meeting, and passed a resolution expressing strong abhorrence of French principles; and we have not degenerated, for it is only the other day since we thrashed the surveyors of the "Great Amalgamated Central." Search the whole county, and I doubt if you find such another respectable old-fashioned place. When I get out at the Gingham Station, and mount for Newton, after an absence in town, I feel I am stepping back two centuries, and am quite disappointed next morning that the postman don't deliver a Mercurius Politicus with the latest intelligence of his Majesty's forces in the north, and the last declaration of his Majesty's affectionate Parliament. It is true we have no resident clergyman or squire either since the last Prodgers was cleaned out at Crockford's; but then, by way of set-off, we haven't a school or a sanitary law in the parish; no spelling-books to put improper notions into the people's heads; and as for pig legislation, I should just like to see them try it on at Newton Prodgers, that's all. Our village is not one of those rural paradises which the adventurous explorer might discover among the properties at the Adelphi, nor one of Mr. James's receptacles for benighted horsemen, not even one of Miss Mitford's charming villages-all gables and acacia-nor any thing, in short, but a plain average parish of the Bedford Level, still in a state of refreshing pastoral simplicity, or, as our radical paper perversely has it, "frightfully neglected condition." We have a church, green, and stocks in tolerable repair. A green is always the germ of the Saxon thorpe, no matter where found-Schleswig, Kent, Massachusetts, Austra lia, or New Zealand. In our village, as in most others of our country side, it is called the Cross Hill, and there are yet the steps and part of the shaft of the cross, which no doubt stood there long before the church was thought of, and formed the nucleus of the village. On the left of the cross is the well, the "town well," so called to distinguish it from the "holy well,” which is nearer the church, and probably supplied the piscina and font. Opposite the stocks there, with the portentous effigy of an owl in extremis, is the Red Eagle, much noted for superlative October; and farther on, at the corner, is the less aristocratic Chequers, where they brew beer very small indeed, which, as I once heard a habitué plaintively asseverate, "wets where it goes and no farther. Three roads branch out of the Cross Hill, one to the church, and two to outlying homesteads. And now the reader knows as much of Newton Prodgers as I do. When I first knew Newton Prodgers, old John Gibbs was the great man for burning Guys and keeping up the old Christmas customs. He was the OLDBUCK of Newton-the OLDBUCK without the Prætorium-the fogie without the ghastly tie. On working days Jack was not to be distinguished from his laborers; but on Sundays, when he donned his black velvet smalls and leather leggings all tied in true-lovers' knots, he looked a "warm "man every inch of him. It was a treat to see him lead his dame up the aisle of the church, and to watch his demeanor during the sermon, trying to look as though he understood it. John was by no means partial to literature, and his reading was wholly confined to the Family Bible, and the enlivening feats of the "Seven Champions," of which honest John swallowed every morsel-the dragon included. Upon scientific subjects generally, Master Gibbs was very considerably behind the age. His notions of cosmogony and planetary affairs were opposed to those of Humboldt and Herschel, presenting indeed many points of remarkable similarity to the Ptolemeian doctrines of my friend Moravanjee, who |