re at what time, and under what circumstances, blue was
substituted for the old favourite green?

HENRY H. BREEN.

St. Lucia.

_Descendants of Judas Iscariot._--In Southey's _Omniana_ is the following:

"It was believed in Pier della Valle's time that the descendants of
Judas still existed at Corfu, though the persons who suffered this
imputation stoutly denied the truth of the genealogy."

Is anything farther to be met with on this curious subject?

G. CREED.

_Parish Clerks and Politics._--In _Twenty-six Psalms of Thanksgiving and
Praise, Love and Glory, for the use of a Parish Church_ (Exon., And. Brice,
1725), the rector (who compiled it), among other reasons for omitting all
the _imprecatory_ Psalms, says,--

"Lest a parish clerk, or any other, should be whetting his _spleen_, or
obliging his _spite_, when he should be entertaining his devotion."

That such practices were indulged in, we have the farther evidence of
Bramston the satirist:

"Not long since _parish clerks_, with saucy airs,
Apply'd _King David's Psalms_ to _state-affairs_."[3]

Can any readers of "N. & Q." point out examples of such misapplication?

J. O.

[Footnote 3: _The Art of Politicks, in imitation of Horace_, 1729, with a
hybrid portrait of Heidegger, the _arbit. elegant._ of his day.]

"_Virgin Wife and widowed Maid._"--Whence come the words "Virgin wife and
widow'd maid," quoted, apparently, by Liddell and Scott in their Greek
Lexicon, s.v. [Greek: aparthenos], as a rendering or illustration of Hec.
610.?

"[Greek: Numphen t' anumphon, parthenon t' aparthenon]."

ANON.

"_Cutting off the little heads of light._"--Perhaps you or one of your
correspondents would help me to the whereabouts of some thoughtful lines
which I recently came across, in a volume which I accidentally took up, but
the name of which has completely skipped my memory.

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The lines referred to typified Tyranny under the form of the man who puts
out the gas-lights at dawn: "Cutting off the little heads of light which
lit the world." I am not sure of the rhythm, and so have put the lines like
prose; but they wind up with a fine analogy of the sun in all its glory
bursting on the earth, and putting the proceedings of the light
extinguisher utterly to nought.

A. B. R.

_Medal of Sir Robert Walpole._--On a brass medal, without date, rather
larger than half a crown, are these effigies.

On one side the devil, horned and ta