King's Lynn. * * * * * Minor Notes. _Note for the Topographers of Ancient London, and for the Monasticon._-- "Walter Grendon, Prior of the hospital of St John of Jerusalem, acknowledges to have received, by the hands of Robert Upgate and Ralph Halstede,--from Margaret, widow of S^r John Philippott K^t,--Thomas Goodlak and their partners,--4 pounds in full payment of arrears of all the rent due to us from their tenement called Jesoreshall in the city of London. "Dated 1. December, 1406." From the original in the Surrenden collection. L. B. L. _Gray and Burns._-- "Authors, before they write, should read." So thought Matthew Prior; and if that rule had been attended to, neither would Lord Byron have deemed it worth notice that "_the knell of parting day_," in Gray's Elegy, "was adopted from Dante;" nor would Mr. Cary have remarked upon "this plagiarism," if indeed _he_ used the term. (I refer to "NOTES AND QUERIES," Vol. iii., p. 35.) The truth is, that in every good edition of Gray's _Works_, there is a note to the line in question, _by the poet himself_, expressly stating that the passage is "_an imitation of the quotation from Dante_" thus brought forward. I could furnish you with various _notes_ on Gray, pointing out remarkable coincidences of sentiment and expression between himself and other writers; but I cannot allow _Gray_ to be a plagiary, any more than I can allow _Burns_ to be so designated, in the following instances:-- At the end of the poem called _The Vision_, we find-- "And like a passing thought she fled." In _Hesiod_ we have-- "[Greek: ho d' eptato hoste noema.]"--_Scut. Herc._ 222. Again, few persons are unacquainted with Burns's lines-- "Her 'prentice han' she tried on man, An' then she made," &c. In an old play, _Cupid's Whirligig_ (4to. 1607), we read-- "Man was made when Nature was but an apprentice, but woman when she was a skilful mistress of her art." Pliny, in his _Natural History_, has the pretty notion that "Nature, in learning to form a lily, turned out a convolvulus." VARRO. _Richard III., Traditional Notice of._--I have an aunt, now eighty-nine years of age, who in early life knew one who was in the habit of saying: "I knew a man, who knew a man, who knew a man who danced at court in the days of Richard III." Thus there have been but three links between one who knew Richard III. and one now alive. My aunt's acquaintance could name his three predecessors, who were members of his own family: {207} their names have been forgotten, but his name was Harrison, and he was a member of an old Yorkshire family, and late in life settled in Bedfordshire. Richard died in 1484, and thus five persons have sufficed to chronicle an incident which occurred nearly 370 years since.