NOTES.

There has recently emerged into notice, from her hiding-place in one of the outskirts of London, an ancient woman whose surroundings forcibly illustrate the persevering vitality of even the insanest forms of religious belief. Joanna Southcott and her fanaticisms we are apt to associate with Dr. Faustus, alchemy, and persons and things of that kind, as belonging to an age with which we have no personal concern. Yet this is a mistake. The followers of the fatidical Joanna may still be counted by thousands in Great Britain, particularly in its metropolis; and their acknowledged head, in strict accordance with the fitness of things, is a woman. She is a very old woman, too, her age symbolizing, perhaps, the longevity to which her crazy superstition is destined. Elizabeth Peacock is the name of this relic of the past. For many years she itinerated as a preacher, and at the great age of one hundred and three her health is still vigorous. Modern priestesses, however, not unlike the prophets of antiquity, are subject to be scanted of due honor, or, at all events, of what is more essential than this as contributing to keep soul and body from parting company prematurely. The fact of her being in a state of destitution was notified not long ago to the magistrate of the Lambeth police-court, and that unappreciative functionary, while consenting to subscribe, with others, for her relief, openly expressed his conviction that she would be best off in the workhouse. Altogether, the old creature is a bit of a curiosity. She has had three husbands, and the last of them, whom she married in 1852, killed himself only the other day, possibly from finding the twofold burden of domestic predication and a helpmeet of five score too much for his nerves. If sane, the ungrateful fellow ought, in all reason, to have had the grace to survive her; for when he undertook matrimony, as he had nothing to turn his hand to, she instructed him herself in the art and mystery of cooperage. At that time, so robust a specimen of anility was she, she could pitch an empty cask across the street, and her credulity is as strong at this moment as her arm was of yore. We conclude, from her story, that the proper stuff for making prophetesses of the baser sort has, even in our day, only to be looked for to be discovered.

Our countrymen have lately learned to admire, in its Western transformation, the extremely clever Rubáiyát of Omer Khayyám. And they are certainly much in the right in so doing. The sterling merits of the Persian original are preserved with striking fidelity in the English version of the poem, which, for the rest, has gone far to prove that the acceptableness among us of Oriental poetry may depend very largely on the skill with which it is transplanted into our language. The translator of the Rubáiyát is Mr. Edward FitzGerald, of Woodbridge in Suffolk. Mr. FitzGerald's ancient family one may learn all about from Burke's Landed Gentry, and that he was born in 1809, and that he married Lucy, daughter of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where among his contemporaries and friends were the present poet-laureate and Mr. Spedding, the editor of Bacon. The London Catalogue names three works as by Mr. FitzGerald. These, as we find from inspection of the works themselves, are as follows: 1. Euphranor, a Dialogue on Youth, 1851 (it reached a second edition, increased by an Appendix, in 1855); 2. Polonius: A Collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances, 1852; 3. Six Dramas of Calderon, 1853. These dramas are translations, in prose and verse, of The Painter of his Own Dishonor, Keep your Own Secret, Gil Perez the Gallician, Three Judgments at a Blow, The Mayor of Zalamea, and Beware of Smooth Water. In none of these volumes, however, except the last is there any indication of its authorship but there Mr. FitzGerald's name is given in full. The date of his metrical translation of Salámán and Absál, from the Persian, we are not at this moment, able to specify. Add, as printed by him, but not published, two other small volumes of translations—one, of the Agamemnon of Æschylus; and the other, of two of Calderon's plays, Life is a Dream and The Wonderful Magician. Finally, we have to mention an unprinted verse-translation, The Bird Parliament, from the Persian Mantiq-ut-tair by Attár. Mr. Allibone knows nothing of Mr. FitzGerald, and he is similarly passed over in silence by the compiler of Men of the Time. Everything that he has produced is uniformly distinguished by marked ability; and, such being the case, his indifference to fame, in this age of ambition for literary celebrity, is a phenomenon which deserves to be emphasized.