"The Palimpsest Manuscript, in which I discovered these fragments of a very ancient copy of the Iliad of Homer, formed a part of the library of the Syrian convent of St. Mary Deipara, in the Valley of the Ascetics, or the Deserts of Nigritia. On the first page of the last leaf the following notice occurs: 'This volume of my Lord Severus belongs to the reverend and holy my Lord Daniel, Bishop of the province of Orrhoa (Edessa), who acquired it from the armour of God, when he was down in the province of the city of Amida, for his own benefit, and that of every one that readeth it. But under the curse of God is he whosoever steals it, or hides or removes it ... or tears, or erases, or cuts off this memorial from it, for ever. And through our Lord Jesus Christ may he who readeth it pray for the same Daniel, that he may find mercy in the day of judgment! Yea, and Amen, and Amen. And upon the sinner who wrote it, may there be mercy in the day of judgment! Amen. But at the end of his life he bequeathed it to this sacred convent of my Lord Silas, which is in Tarug (a city of Mesopotamia), for the sake of the remembrance of himself and of the dead belonging to him. May the Lord have mercy upon him in the day of judgment! Amen. Whosoever removeth this volume from this same convent, may the anger of the Lord overtake him in both worlds to all eternity! Amen.'" ANON. In some of Dugdale's MS. volumes in this College is the following, written by himself: "Maledictus sit qui abstulerit." THOMAS W. KING, YORK HERALD. College of Arms. * * * * * THE DRUMMER'S LETTER. (Vol. vii., p. 431.) Mr. Forbes rightly describes the Drummer's Letter in the _Sentimental Journey_ as "not only correctly but elegantly written." There is, moreover, in two or three places, a play upon words, which indicates an intimate acquaintance with the idiomatic turns of the language. But all these circumstances are, to my mind, only so many grounds for the belief that the French of the letter is not Sterne's. If we are to judge of Sterne's French from the samples to be met with in _Tristram Shandy_ and the _Sentimental Journal_, there is ample evidence that his knowledge of that language was somewhat superficial. I shall give a few examples. Your readers are familiar with the incident in _Tristram Shandy_, where the Abbess and Margarita, having occasion to make use of two very coarse and indecent expressions, resort to the ludicrous expedient of splitting them in two, each pronouncing a separate syllable. Those words are scandalously common in the mouths of Frenchmen; and yet Sterne seems so little aware of the correct spelling of them, that he makes the poor nuns give utterance to two words, one of which, "bouger," means "to move," and the other, "fouter," is unknown to the French language.