"The giants of Guildhall, thank heaven, yet defend their charge: it only remains to wish that the citizens may take example by the fate of Holmeby, and not expose them to an attack to which they will assuredly be found unequal. It is not altogether owing to their wisdom that this has not already taken place. For twenty years they were chained to the car of a profligate buffoon, who dragged them through every species of ignominy to the verge of rebellion; and their hall is even yet disgraced with the statue of a worthless negro-monger, in the act of insulting their sovereign with a speech of which (factious and brutal as he was) _he never uttered one syllable_." ... "By my troth, captain, these are very bitter words." But Gifford was _generally_ correct in his assertions; and twenty-two years after _his_ note, I made the following one:-- "It is a curious fact, but a true one, that Beckford _did not utter one syllable of this speech_. It was penned by Horne Tooke, and by his art put on the records of the city and on Beckford's statue, as he told me, Mr. Braithwaite, Mr. Seyers, &c., at the Athenian Club. "ISAAC REED. "See the _Times_ Of July 23. 1838, p. 6." The worshipful Company of Ironmongers have _relegated their_ statue from their hall to a lower position: but it still disgraces the Guildhall, and will continue to do so, as long as any factious demagogue is permitted to have a place among its members. L.S. _The Frozen Horn._--Perhaps it is not generally known that the writer of _Munchausen's Travels_ borrowed this amusing incident from Heylin's _Mikrokosmos_. In the section treating of Muscovy, he says:-- "This excesse of cold in the ayre, gave occasion to _Castilian_, in his _Aulicus_, wittily and not incongruously to faine that if two men being smewhat distant, talke together in the winter, their words will be so frozen that they cannot be heard: but if the parties in the spring returne to the same place, their words will melt in the same order that they were frozen and _spoken_, and be plainly understood." J.S. Salisbury. _Inscription from Roma Subterranea._--If you deem the translation of this inscription, quoted in Lord Lindsay's fanciful but admirable _Sketches of the History of Christian Art_, worth a place among your Notes, it is very heartily at your service. "Sisto viator Tot ibi trophÊa, quot ossa Quot martyres, tot triumphi. Antra quÊ subis, multa quÊ cernis marmora, Vel dum silent, Palam RomÊ gloriam loquuntur. Audi quid Echo resonet SubterraneÊ RomÊ! Obscura licet Urbis Cœmetria Totius patens Orbis Theatrium! Supplex Loci Sanetitatem venerare, Et post hac sub luto aurum Coelum sub coeno Sub Rom‚ Romam quÊrito!" _Roma Subterranea_, 1651, tom. i. p. 625. (Inscription abridged.)