_Dr. South_ v. _Goldsmith, Talleyrand, &c._ (Vol. vi., p. 575. Vol. vii., p. 311.).--One authority has been overlooked by MR. BREEN, which seems as likely as any to have given currency to the saying, viz. Dean Swift. In _Gulliver's Travels_ (1727), Voyage to the Houyhnhnms, the hero gives the king some information respecting British ministers of state, which I apprehend in Swift's day was no exaggeration. The minister, Gulliver says, "applies his words to all uses except to the indication of his mind." It must be confessed, however, that this authority is some seven years after Dr. South. C. MANSFIELD INGLEBY. Birmingham. _Foucault's Experiment_ (Vol. vii., p. 330.).--The reality of the rotation, and the cause assigned to it by Foucault in his experiment, is now admitted without question by scientific men. But in measuring the amount of the motion of the pendulum, so many disturbing causes were found to be at work, that the numerical results have not been obtained as yet with exactness. The best account is, perhaps, the original one in the _Comptes Rendus_. Mr. Foucault has lately invented an instrument founded on a similar principle, to find the latitude of a place. ELSNO. _Passage in "Locksley Hall"_ (Vol. vi., p. 272.; Vol. vii., pp. 25. 146.).--Of these three commentators neither appears to me to have hit Tennyson's meaning, though CORYLUS has made the nearest shot. I ought to set out by confessing that it was not originally clear to myself, but that I could not for a monument doubt, when the following explanation was suggested to me by a friend. The "curlews" themselves are the "dreary gleams:" the words are what the Latin Grammar calls "duo substantiva ejusdem rei." I take the meaning, in plain prose to be this: "The curlews are uttering their peculiar cry, as they fly over Locksley Hall, looking like (to me, the spectator) dreary gleams crossing the moorland." I could supply A. A. D. with several examples _in English_, from my commonplace-book, of the "bold figure of speech not uncommon in the vivid language of Greece;" and among the rest, one from Tennyson himself, to wit: "Now, scarce three paces measured from the mound, We stumbled on a stationary _voice_," &c. But I doubt whether the poet had those passages in his thought, when he penned the opening of his noble poem "Locksley Hall." Of course I do not _know_, any more than A. A. D., and the rest; and I suppose we shall none of us get any enlightenment "by authority." HARRY LEROY TEMPLE.