[A reference to Richardson's _Dictionary_ will show that, however fond Thomson may have been of this word, it is not one peculiar to him. Whitehead says:
"To me 'twas given to wake _th' amusive_ reed,"
and Chandler, in his _Travels in Greece_, speaks of the wind "murmuring _amusively_ among the pines."]
_Belfry Towers separate from the Body of the Church._--At Mylor, near Falmouth, there is an old tower for the bells (where they are rung every Sunday), separate from the church itself, which has a very low tower. Are there many other instances of this? I do not remember to have seen any.
[If our correspondent will refer to the last edition of the _Glossary of Architecture_, s. v. _Campanile_, he will learn that though bell towers are generally attached to the church, they are sometimes unconnected with it, as at Chichester cathedral, and are sometimes united merely by a covered passage, as at Lapworth, Warwickshire. There are several examples of detached bell-towers still remaining, as at Evesham, Worcestershire; Berkeley, Gloucestershire; Walton, Norfolk; Ledbury, Herefordshire; and a very curious one entirely of timber, with the frame for the bells springing from the ground, at Pembridge, Herefordshire. At Salisbury a fine early English detached campanile, 200 feet in height, surmounted by a timber turret and spire, stood near the north-west corner of the cathedral, but was destroyed by Wyatt.]
_An Easter-day Sun._--In that verse of Sir John Suckling's famous _Ballad upon a Wedding_, wherein occurs the simile of the "little mice," what is the meaning of the allusion to the Easter-day sun?--
"But oh! she dances such a way, No sun upon an Easter-day Is half so fine a sight!"
[It was formerly a common belief that the sun danced on Easter-day: see Brand's _Popular Antiquities_, vol. i. p. 161. _et seq._ So general was it, that Sir Thomas Browne treats on it in his _Vulgar Errors_, vol. ii. p. 87. ed. Bohn.]
On reference to the Peerages of Sir Harris Nicolas and Wood, I feel no doubt that the father of Lord Spencer Hamilton, as TEE BEE remarks, was the fifth Duke of Hamilton, and not the third, as Collins (edition Brydges) states, who misled me. Perhaps the perplexity, if any, arose from Anne Duchess of Hamilton, the inheritress of the ducal honours by virtue of the patent of 1643, after the deaths of her father and uncle _s. p. m._, having obtained a _life dukedom_ for her husband, William Earl of Selkirk, and, subsequently to his decease, having surrendered all her titles in favour of their eldest son, James Earl of Arran, who was in 1698 made Duke of Hamilton, with the same precedency of the original creation of 1643, as if he had succeeded thereto.