allery, so that he could not get a servant to enter
it after eight o'clock at night; that the door of one of his chambers
was nailed up, because there went a story in the family that a butler
had formerly hanged himself in it; and that his mother, who lived to a
great age, had shut up half the rooms in the house, in which either her
husband, a son, {143} or daughter had died. The knight seeing his
habitation reduced to so small a compass, and himself in a manner shut
out of his own house, upon the death of his mother ordered all the
apartments to be flung open, and exorcised by his chaplain, who lay in
every room one after another, and by that means dissipated the fears
which had so long reigned in the family."

The practice of shutting up rooms in which members of the family had died
was retained up to the end of the last century. I learn from a friend that,
in a country house in the south of England, his mother's apartment,
consisting of a sitting-room, bed-room, and dressing-room, was closed at
her death in 1775. The room in which his grandfather had died in 1760 was
likewise closed. These four rooms were kept locked up, with the shutters
shut, till the year 1793, when the next owner came into possession, who
opened them, and caused them to be again used. Probably other cases of the
same sort may be known to your correspondents, as having occurred in the
last century; but the custom appears to be now extinct.

L.

_Standfast's Cordial Comforts._--I have lately procured a copy of an
interesting book, entitled

"A Little Handful of Cordial Comforts: scattered throughout several
Answers to Sixteen Questions and Objections following. By Richard
Standfast, M.A., Rector of Christ Church in Bristol, and Chaplain in
Ordinary to King Charles II. Sixth Edition. Bristol, 1764. 18mo. pp.
94."

Can any of your readers give me further particulars of Mr. Standfast, or
tell me where to find them? In what year was the work first published? It
was reprinted in Bristol in 1764, "for Mr. Standfast Smith, apothecary,
great-grandson of the author." Has any later edition appeared?

ABHBA.

_"Predeceased" and "Designed."_--J. Dennistoun, in his _Memoirs of the
Dukes of Urbino_, ii. p. 239., says--

"His friend the cardinal had lately predeceased him."

Can any of your readers give me an instance from any one of our standard
classical authors of a verb active "to decea