332

NOTES AND QUERIES

September, 1970

rebalemem above.

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synthetical. [O.E.D. 3. 1838—.] 1798 Names are usually distinguished into uniElem. Crit. Philos. 15. There are vocal and equivocal. Univocal are those
analytical and synthetical judgments a which in the same train of discourse signify
priori.
always the same thing.
ROLAND HALL.
tautology. [O.E.D. 1579—.] 1574 tr.
University of York.
Ramus" Logike 10. In so doing thou playest
the Sopbistes parte, . . . and shalt be compelled to use tautalogies and vaine repetiPOE'S USE OF THE NAME
tions.
ERMENGARDE IN " ELEONORA "
tetralemma. [O.E.D. Tetra-. 1867—.]
1837/8 SIR WM. HAMILTON Logic (1860) I. T ATE in the year 1841, in the annual
entitled The Gift . . . for 1842, appeared
352. If it has three, four, or five members,
it is called trilemma {tricornis), tetralemma the tale " Eleonora ". Before the end of
(quadricornis), pentalemma {quinquecornis). 1841, Poe had caused it to be reprinted in
tollent, a. [O.E.D. Logic, rare 1837/8.] five different journals in its original form
1770 tr. Wolf's Logic 87. The Tollent mode. and, with several revisions, he reprinted it
topical. [O.E.D. f2. 1594—.] 1588 himself in the Broadway Journal of 1845.
The theme of metempsychosis links it closely
FRAUNCE Lawiers Log. 6a. Topicall, or
Dialecticall they will haue to bee a severall with such earlier famous tales as " Morella "
and " Ligeia ", with the latter of which there
kinde of Logike by probable argumentes.
unartificial, a. [O.E.D. 1591—.] 1574 tr. is a significant parallel which has not reRamus' Logike -65. The argumete unartifi- ceived attention; the names of the second
ciall or without arte is an argumente which mate of the narrator in both are obviously
prouethe or disprouethe not of his owne Saxon in provenance and are derived also
from novels by Sir Walter Scott. Both also
nature.
a contra; st with the dark, more exotic
undetermined. [O.E.D. 3. 1611—.] 1573 suggest
and
mysterious
beauty of the first woman in
LEVER Arte of Reason 85. As, some men
the
narrator's
love
Ligeia is indeed an
are learned: or else it hath no signe at all, enchantress whose life.
comes into the
and 9then it is called an undetermined shew- pentagonal bedroom spirit
to take over the body
say: as, man is mortal].
of " the fair-haired, blue-eyed Lady Rowena
universe {of discourse). [O.E.D. Uni- Trevanion of Tremaine ". Professor Mabverse. 2.6. 1881—.] 1846 D E MORGAN On bott has certified to the magic implications
the Syllog. (1966) 2. What we may pro- of the pentagonal shape and the obvious
perly (inventing a new technical name) call borrowing from lvanhoe, in Selected Poetry
the universe of a proposition, or of a name. and Prose of . . . Poe (New York, 1951), p.
1847 D E MORGAN Formal Logic ii. 38. In 114. May I mention that no one seems to
order to express this, let us say that the have noted that while Tremaine is a name
whole idea under consideration is the from either a work by Scott {The Bridal of
universe (meaning merely the whole of Triermain, a romance of love and magic) or
which we are considering parts), iv. 55. by Coleridge {Christabel, 1. 407, also about
By the universe of a proposition, I mean witchcraft), Trevanion is clearly the name of
th whole range of names in which it is Byron's grandmother. Poe's keen interest in
expressed or understood that the names in Byron can be easily documented (see my
the proposition are found. 1854 BOOLE article on his " Sonnet—To Zante" in
Laws of Tht. 42. Now, whatever may be Comparative Literature Studies, v, 303-315).
the extent of the field within which all the
But Ermengarde, the name of the second
objects of our discourse are found, that field girl in the later tale is more baffling. I know
may properly be termed the universe of of only one attempt to discover the source
discourse.
and meaning, that of Sam S. Baskett in " A
univocal, a. [O.E.D. l.b. 1656—.] 1599 Damsel with a Dulcimer " in the May, 1958,
BLUNDEVIL Logike 15. What is predication
issue of Modern Language Notes, pp. 332vniuocall? It is when the generall kinde is 338, and I cannot at all agree with his view
spoken of his especiall kinds [etc.]. 1656 tr. that Poe must have known the name to be
Hobbes' Elem. Philos. I ii. §12. (1839) 22. rooted in an Old German word, " ermen "
meaning " universal " or " immense ". It is
* showsay ( = proposition) not in O.E.D.: see doubtful that Poe knew modern German
WILLICH

September, 1970

NOTES AND QUERIES

M. F. A. Husbands, although the less
familiar work by M. Rogers, The Waverley
Dictionary (Chicago, 1885; 2nd ed.), p. 272,
does furnish it. I assume, of course, that
although the situation and characteristics of
the Lady Eveline suggested those of the
second mate in Poe's tale, " Eleonora ", he
preferred to transfer to her the more characteristically Saxon name of the great-aunt
Ermengarde. This was just the sort of
adaptation that Poe liked to practice, and he
would probably have regarded the then
widespread knowledge of Scott's novel as
assisting in appreciative apprehension of his
own story.
B R PoLLIN.
Bronx Community College of the
City University of New York.
THACKERAY AT THE DERBY,
1845
A MANUSCRIPT which has recently
come to light in New Zealand gives a
glimpse of Thackeray's Derby Day in 1845.
It is the London journal of Edward Jerningham Wakefield, son of Gibbon Wakefield,
who as a young man of 25 had just returned
from a four-year sojourn in New Zealand,
and was savouring the life of the capital.
Thackeray exploits his Derby Day experiences in several ways. In Pendennis, he
makes the festival the occasion for a dramatic confrontation of the chief characters
(Chapter 58); in Vanity Fair, that "jolly"
sporting parson Bute Crawley " gave the
odds of 100 to 1 (in twenties) against
Kangaroo, who won the Derby" (Chapter
11). In The Newcomes (Chapter 24), Clive
is involved in a brawl, "coming from the
Derby once—a merry party—and stopped on
the road from Epsom in a lock of carriages,
during which the people in the carriage ahead
saluted us with many vituperative epithets,
and seized the heads of our leaders—Clive in
a twinkling jumped off the box, and the next
minute we saw him engaged with a halfdozen of the enemy."
This last episode is partly based on
Thackeray's own adventure at the Kennington (Vauxhall) Turnpike bottleneck, "half
way to Epsom". which he described to
Richard Bedingfield (Cassell's Magazine, n.s.
ii (1870), 29), when "the carriage in which
my friends and I went . . . nearly upset a
costermonger in his cart . . . He came after
us the whole way, and uttered a volley of

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well, as his misprint of " lieden" for
" leiden" in " Von Kempelen and His
Discovery " shows; it is unbelievable that he
could have known Old German.
He could, however, easily have known
Scott's novel, The Betrothed, the first of the
two novels published in Tales of the Crusaders in 1825 (for Poe's familiarity with Scott's
works see my Dictionary of Names and
Titles in Poe's Collected Works [New York,
1968] pp. 82-83). Ermengarde is the name
of the ancient Lady of Baldringham, proud
of her Saxon identity, who requires her
great-niece Eveline, the heroine of the book,
to confront the " Bahr-geist" of the wronged
Saxon woman Vanda in the haunted room
of Ermengarde's castle. Eveline, having
been recenty pledged to her rescuer, the
heroic but markedly older nobleman, Hugo
de Lacy, Constable of Chester, although she
is tacitly in love with bis young nephew, has
come to her great-aunt, Ermengarde, to
settle her feelings about the troth. Ermengarde greets her with a reference to her blue
eyes, which betray her Saxon origin, despite
her darker Norman hair (The Betrothed
[Edinburgh, 1834], p. 178). The ghost in the
chamber of the Red-Finger haunts only
members of the family who are expected to
meet her in a night-time vigil. Scott provides
passages about the link between spirits and
the real world that remind us of both of
Poe's tales (The Betrothed, pp. 196 and 214);
the conclusion (p. 468) presents a spectral
vision of grace and comfort to the blessed
Eveline much like that of Eleonora herself,
when visiting Ermengarde in Poe's tale. The
parallel of the suggested ocular contrast of
the two mates, carried into " Eleonora"
from " Ligeia ", is more fully developed in a
passage of the 1841 version, dropped from
that of 1845, which is usually used for
modern reprints. Harrison gives it in his
notes to the Complete Works (IV, 315): " I
looked down into the blue depths of her
meaning eyes, and I thought only of them,
and of her." All the other attributes mentioned are the same for the two women;
obviously we were originally to have the
Ligeia-Rowena contrast for this tale as well.
The clue in the name used by Scott in his
popular novel, The Betrothed, might have
appeared to Poe students earlier, had not
the name been inexplicably omitted from
the widely used Dictionary of the Characters
in the Waverley Novels (London, 1910), by

333