but, on the contrary, they are the owners of some of the most valuable, salubrious, and picturesque purlieus of the forest. With regard to the name "fengfield," although I am pretty familiar with the records of the forest extant for the last five hundred years past, I do not remember that it is ever so named or spelt in the muniments of the manor or forest. It is so written by Risdon, and in some few other documents entitled to little weight, and from which no safe inference can be drawn. Whatever be the etymological origin of the term, it should be assumed as indisputable by any one who may hereafter exercise his ingenuity or his fancy upon it, that the four most prominent {356} incidents to the tenure are--1. payment of fines; 2. situation in an ancient vill; 3. attendance on the lord's court; 4. enjoyment of certain rights of common. It may be that neither the _fine_ nor the _vill_ forms a component part of the name; but K. need have no scruple in believing that an abbreviated Latin or "legal term" (invented, of course, by the stewards or bailiffs of the lord) may have become naturalised among those of the inhabitants of the Moor whom it concerns. The tenants or retainers of a manor have no alternative but to submit to any generic name by which the steward may please to distinguish them. Thus the "priors" and "censors" of Dartmoor forest are content to be called by those names, because they were designated as "prehurdarii" and "censarii" in the court rolls some hundred years ago. The tenants of a certain lordship in Cornwall know and convey their tenements by the name of _landams_ to this day, merely because the stewards two hundred years ago, when the court rolls were in Latin, well knowing that _landa_ was the Latin for _land_, and that transitive verbs in that language require an accusative case, recorded each tenant as having taken of the lord "unam landam, vocatam Tregollup," &c. Indeed so easily does a clipt exotic take root and become acclimated among the peasantry of the Moor, whose powers of appropriation are so much disparaged by the sceptical doubts of K., that since the establishment of local courts the terms _fifa_ and _casa_ have become familiar to them as household words and the name and uses of that article of abbreviated Latinity called a '_bus_ are, as I am credibly informed, not unknown to them. E. SMIRKE. * * * * * Replies to Minor Queries. _Newburgh Hamilton_ (Vol. iii, p. 117).--In Thomas Whincop's _List of Dramatic Authors_, &c., the following notice of Hamilton occurs:-- "Mr. Newburgh Hamilton. A Gentleman, who I think was related to, at least lived in the family of Duke _Hamilton_; he wrote two Plays, called