_Brissot de Warville_ (Vol. ix., p. 335.).--Brissot's _Mémoires_ is a very common book in the original, and has gone through several editions. The passage quoted by N. J. A. was only an impudent excuse for an impudent assumption. Brissot, in his early ambition, wished to pass himself off as a gentleman, and called himself _Brissot de Warville_, as Danton did D'Anton, and Robespierre de Robespierre; but when these worthies were endeavouring to send _M. de Warville_ to the scaffold as an aristocrat, he invented this fable of his father's having some landed property at _Ouarville en Beauce_ (not Beance), and that he was called, according to the custom of the country, from this place, where, it seems, he was put out to nurse. When the dread of the guillotine made _M. de Warville_ anxious to get rid of his aristocratic pretensions, he confessed (in those same _Mémoires_) that his father kept a cook's shop in the town of Chartres, and was so ignorant that he could neither read nor write. I need not add, that his having had a landed property to justify, in any way, the son's territorial appellation, was a gross fiction. C. "_Le Compère Mathieu_" (Vol. vi., pp. 11. 111. 181.).--On the fly-leaf of my copy (three vols. 12mo., Londres, 1766) of this amusing work, variously attributed by your correspondents to Mathurin Laurent and the Abbé du Laurens, is written the following note, in the hand of its former possessor, Joseph Whateley: "Ecrit par Diderot, fils d'un Coutelier: un homme très licentieux, qui écrit encore plusieurs autres Ouvrages, comme La Religieuse, Les Bijoux méchant (_sic_), &c. Il jouit un grand rôle après dans la Révolution. "J. W." By the way, A. N. styles it "a not altogether undull work." May I ask him to elucidate this phrase, as I am totally at a loss to comprehend its meaning. "Not undull" must surely mean _dull_, if anything. The work, however, is the reverse of dull. WILLIAM BATES. Birmingham. _Etymology of "Awkward"_ (Vol. viii., p. 310.--H. C. K. has probably given the true derivation of this word, but he might have noticed the {481} singularity of one Anglo-Saxon word branching off into two forms, signifying different ways of acting wrong; one, _awkward_, implying ignorance and clumsiness; the other, _wayward_, perverseness and obstinacy. That the latter word is derived from the source from which he deduces _awkward_, can, as I conceive, admit of no doubt. J. S. WARDEN. _Life and Death_ (Vol. ix., p. 296.).--What is death but a sleep? We shall awake refreshed in the morning. Thus Psalm xvii. 15.; Rom. vi. 5. For the full meanings, see these passages in the original tongues. Sir Thomas Browne, whose _Hydriotaphia_ abounds with quaint and beautiful allusions to this subject, says, in one place, "Sleep is so like death, that I dare not trust him without my prayers:" and he closes his learned treatise with the following sentence: