first of August; so called, as some will have it, because lambs then grow out of season, as being too big. Others derive it from a Saxon word, signifying "loaf-mass," because on that day our forefathers made an offering of bread made with new wheat.

On this day the tenants who formerly held lands of the cathedral church in York, were bound by their tenure to bring a lamb alive into the church at high mass.

Lamoignon, Chretien Francis de, marquis of Baville, and president of the parliament of Paris, was born in 1644. His father would not trust the education of his son to another, but took it upon himself, and entered into the minutest particulars of his first studies; the love of letters and a solid taste were the fruits the scholar reaped from this valuable education. He learned rhetoric in the Jesuits college, made the tour of England and Holland, and returned home the admiration of those meetings regularly held by persons of the first merit at his father's house. The several veral branches of literature were however only his amusement; the law was his real employ; and the eloquence of the bar at Paris owes its reformation from bombast and affected erudition to the plain and noble pleadings of M. Lamignon. He was appointed the king's advocate general in 1673; which he discharged until 1698, when the presidency of the parliament was conferred on him. This post he held nine years, when he was allowed to resign in favour of his eldest son: he was chosen president of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions in 1725. The only work he suffered to see the light was his Pleader, which is a monument of his eloquence and inclination to polite letters. He died in 1729.