The Book of Sun-dials
By Mrs. Alfred Gatty [Margaret Scott Gatty], 1809-1873,
Enlarged and re-edited by H. K. F. Eden [Horatia Katharine Frances Gatty], 1846-1945, and Eleanor Lloyd, 1844-1919. London: George Bell & Sons, 1900. Fourth edition.

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THE BOOK OF SUN-DIALS
Fugit Hora Ora

THE BOOK OF SUN-DIALS

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Nicholas Kratzer
from the Portrait by Holbein in the Louvre

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THE BOOK OF
SUN-DIALS

ORIGINALLY COMPILED BY THE LATE
MRS. ALFRED GATTY

NOW ENLARGED AND RE-EDITED BY
H. K. F. EDEN AND ELEANOR LLOYD

LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS

MDCCCC

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Original edition published 1872.
Second edition, revised, 1889.
Third edition, enlarged, 1890.
Fourth edition, re-arranged and enlarged, 1900.

CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

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[ORIGINAL DEDICATION]

TO THE DEAR HUSBAND
TO WHOM I AM INDEBTED FOR THE BEST HAPPINESS OF
THE HOURS OF EARTHLY LIFE,
AND WITH WHOM I HOPE TO SHARE THE EXISTENCE
IN WHICH
TIME SHALL BE NO MORE,
I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME,
IN THE COMPILATION OF WHICH HE HAS TAKEN SO GREAT
A PART AND INTEREST.
M. G.

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PREFACE

THE original edition of this Book of Sun-dials was written by my Mother, Mrs. Alfred Gatty. It was published in 1872, only a year before her death; but she had begun the work many years previously, whilst she was still unmarried, and living with her father, the Rev. Alexander J. Scott, D.D., Vicar of Catterick.

During the last few years of her life she was unable to travel much, owing to illness, but the number of her dials continued to increase, thanks to the kindness of friends, who sent additions to her unique collection from different parts of the world.

In Mrs. Gatty's Preface she specially mentioned one dear friend, "without whom it is probable that the work would never have appeared — Miss Eleanor Lloyd. To her the reader is indebted for by far the greater number of the continental mottoes, and for much of the pleasant notices which accompany them, as well as for general, unwearied enthusiasm in her researches. Being an artist too, she has adopted the habit which we ourselves had pursued, for so many years, and made sketches of all the dials she saw, both at home and abroad."

These introductory details will explain a further quotation from Mrs. Gatty's words:

"The present collection of dials, with their mottoes, was begun about the year 1835. Perhaps the presence of a curious old dial over our church porch (Catterick), with something like a punning motto, Fugit hora, ora, may have had somewhat to do with originating the idea. Also at the home of some dear friends, a few miles off, the porch of their picturesque little church (Wycliffe) on the banks of the Tees, bore another inscription, Man fleeth as a shadow. A third motto surmounted an archway in a stable-yard (Kiplin), Mors de die accelerat. A fourth was over the door of a cottage in a village (Brompton-on-Swale), bearing the warning words, Vestigia nulla retrorsum, which shone out in gold and colour amidst evergreens. Here lived the venerable sister of a canon of Lincoln, which may perhaps account for the presence of the dial. A fifth looked out from the depths of pyracanthus on a house

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at Middleton-Tyas, hinting to callers not to waste the precious hour, with its Maneo nemini; while last, and not least in our esteem, stood the touching inscription, Eheu, fugaces! on a pillar dial outside the drawing-room at Sedbury Hall, Yorkshire, where it betokened the scholarly character of the hospitable owner. These six mottoes (all, somewhat remarkably, in one neighbourhood) made an admirable beginning of a list which soon swelled to twenty or thirty pages by taking a wide circuit, and with the assistance of the contributions of friends. And thus the matter went on from more to more; but the great impulse was given when the friend alluded to in the preface, undertook to collect in the south of France and Italy, a fair field indeed and one even yet imperfectly explored. As to these dial mottoes, there are perhaps as many differences of opinion, as there are differences of character, in those who read them. We, who have studied them for so many years, feel with Charles Lamb, that they are often "more touching than tombstones," while to other people they seem flat, stale, and unprofitable. One correspondent describes them as a 'compendium of all the lazy, hazy, sunshiny thoughts of men past, present, and in posse,' and says, 'the burden of all their songs is a play upon sunshine and shadow.' But this is no fair description; the poet's words:

'Liberal applications lie
In art as nature,'

have never been more fully realized than in the teachings which have arisen from dials, as we trust the following pages will prove beyond a doubt. So far from the burden of all their songs being a play upon sunshine and shadow, one of the most fertile subjects of thought is the sun's power, as being his own timekeeper, which he certainly is, whilst the mottoes constantly assert the fact.

"The sun describes his own progress on the dial-plate as clearly as he paints pictures on the photographer's glass — human art assisting in both cases. Solis et artis opus, says the dial in a street at Grasse, near Cannes — somewhat baldly, perhaps. More refined is the Non sine lumine of Leadenhall Street; and perhaps higher still the Non nisi coelesti radio, of Haydon Bridge. Non rego, nisi regar is the modest avowal of another dial in a street at Uppingham, acknowledging itself to be but an instrument governed by an overruling power. And these are but a few of the many 'applications' the poet speaks of."

After my mother's death (1873) Miss Eleanor Lloyd and I continued to collect notes on dials, with the result that in 1889 we published a second edition of the book nearly twice as large as the first. This was followed, in 1890, by a reprint, to which new mottoes and other

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matter were added; but as these had to take the form of Addenda the arrangement was not satisfactory, and we are glad now to be able to bring out a new book in which the materials have been entirely re-arranged and classified. Miss Eleanor Lloyd has accomplished nearly the whole of this task of reconstruction, and a large number of new mottoes are also due to her diligent research. She discovered that whilst Mrs. Gatty was making her collection, a similar one was being gathered together in France, unknown to her, by the Baron Edmond de Rivière, and published at intervals in the "Bulletin Monumental de la Société Française pour la conservation des monuments," under the title of "Devises Horaires." This collection included several mottoes copied by M. G. de Vallier, and published in the "Revue de Marseille et Provence," 1875.

That the Baron was not acquainted with "The Book of Sun-dials," is evident from the fact that it contained several French mottoes which are not given by him, and that he mentions no English dial except the one at Kirkdale. The papers on "Devises Horaires" were followed by a collection made by Dr. A. Blanchard entitled "L'Art populaire dans le Briançonnais," and published in the "Bulletin de la Société des Etudes des Hautes Alpes." A great number of the additional mottoes in the present volume have been drawn from these sources. The writers in most cases gave the localities where they had seen the mottoes inscribed; many of them are in French. I have also taken about fifty Italian and Latin ones from another source, an interesting MS. notebook on dialling, "Notizie Gnomoniche," which Mr. Lewis Evans recently bought in Italy. The notes and diagrams are very elegantly penned, but the writer's name does not appear; only the initials, D. D. G., and the date 1761. It is not stated whether the mottoes were copied from dials, or merely suggested as suitable inscriptions, but some of them are taken from the Italian poets, so I have decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and to insert them in the Book.

Many of the early writers on dialling, Johannes Paduani, Seb. Münster, and others, give lists of suitable mottoes; and in books of emblems and devices, such as Père le Moyne's "L'Art des Devises" (1688), the dial, and the lessons to be drawn from it, are constantly found; but if all of these were to be added the list would be endless. Want of space likewise makes it impossible to give a quaint letter of seventeenth century date, written by the Norman poet Garaby de La Luzern to the Comte de Matignon, who had asked him to write mottoes for four sun-dials which were being erected on the Comte's stables, at the Château de Torigny. The letter was guoted by Baron

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de Rivière in his "Devises Horaires;" he did not know whether the inscriptions had been put up, but stated that there are no traces of sun-dials left now at the château.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, one William Rhodes, a tobacconist and pewterer, was living in Liverpool, and he possessed several works on the art of dialling, by Fale, De la Hire, and others, which he annotated in his own writing with mottoes from dials. He bought Fale's work in 1802, but the copy had belonged, in 1675, to "Thomas Skelson," who had copied into it from Lilly's "Merlini Anglici for 1650," some curious astrological calculations as to "whether King Charles y^e first should live or Dye; being Friday y^e 19th of January 1648-9." It is rather curious that an exact science such as mathematics should have been often associated with superstitions.

In a paper on Manx sun-dials, which was read by Miss A. M. Crellin in 1889, before the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society, she gave a short account of a dial maker named Ewan Christian. He made a dial at Kirk Michael (see No. 1330), and lived at Lewaigue. Miss Crellin says he was "commonly known by the name of 'Kione Prash,' or Brass Head, and was perhaps so named from the colour of his hair, or he may have been Ewan Prash from the metal that he worked in." Another possibility is that he earned the title from the story told of him, that "like Roger Bacon he attempted to make a brazen head, which having uttered the words, Time is, Time was, Time is past, fell to pieces."

The descriptions of remarkable dials without mottoes, which in previous editions were given partly in the "Introduction" and partly in "Further Notes," have now been re-arranged and placed together. So many discoveries of these sculptured stones have been made of late years, since the attention of archæologists was directed to them, that it has been possible to gather a considerable amount of information, both as to early dials and to the more beautiful and elaborate works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This part of the book has therefore been re-written and greatly enlarged, and the dials arranged to some extent in chronological order, or otherwise with regard to their different types. It would have been impossible to bring the Book of Sun-dials abreast with the archæological knowledge of the day without the help of those who had personally examined the dial stones, and this has been most kindly and freely given. Miss Eleanor Lloyd, who is mainly responsible for this part of the work, joins with me in especially thanking Thomas Ross, Esq., F.S.A. (Scotland), to whom we owe the greater part of the notices of Scottish dials, as well as the drawings

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which accompany them. For descriptions and figures of other early dials we are indebted to the late Sir Henry Dryden, Bart., F.S.A., Robert Blair, Esq., F.S.A., Christopher Markham, Esq., F.S.A., W. G. Collingwood, Esq., C. Hodges, Esq., the Rev. H. Lang, and many others.

A new and most valuable addition to this edition is the Chapter on Portable Dials, by Lewis Evans, Esq., F.S.A. Many of the illustrations are drawn from specimens in his own magnificent collection. Portable dials form a complete group, and it is a great advantage to have them described by a master-pen. The few specimens that were mentioned in previous editions have now been included in Mr. Evans' chapter.

The short article on the Construction of simple forms of dials has been revised by the writer, J. Wigham Richardson, Esq.

For the translations of the Latin and Greek, French and Italian mottoes added to this edition, we are indebted to Professor Robinson Ellis, Maurice L. Waller, Esq., C. E. Noel James, Esq., W. Dewar, Esq., and B. B. Dickinson, Esq. Mr. Waller has had the further difficult task of interpreting some extracts from Nicholas Kratzer's MS. work on Dialling, to which we had access, through the courtesy of the Rev. Thomas Fowler, D.D., President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and F. Madan, Esq., of the Bodleian Library.

Very grateful thanks are also due to those who have helped us by supplying information, or by lending blocks of illustrations, especially to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle, the Council of the Yorkshire Archæological Society, the East Riding Antiquarian Society, Messrs. Macmillan and Co., Mr. W. Mark of Northampton, Messrs. F. Barker and Co. (12, Clerkenwell Road, London), the late Chancellor Ferguson, F.S.A., and the editor of "The Wilts Archæological and Natural History Society's Magazine." We have also to thank Miss Adeline Illingworth for her sketches, and last, though not least, Miss Margaret A. Meyler, without whose valuable aid in verifying references and correcting inaccuracies I could not have completed my share of the Book. She has further assisted me by making the Index.

HORATIA K. F. EDEN.

June 30th, 1900.

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CONTENTS

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LIST OF PLATES

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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