_The Banking Company in Aberdeen, and the Bank of England._--The Banking Company in Aberdeen was established in the year 1767; and the following Note respecting it may be new to many of the readers of "N. & Q." This Company adopted the plan of using paper bearing in watermark a waved line, and the amount of the note expressed in words, along with the designation of the Company; but about the year 1805 a gentleman connected with Aberdeenshire brought this paper under the notice of the Bank of England, in consequence of which they adopted it, and procured an act of parliament to be passed prohibiting the use of paper so marked by any provincial bank.
_Which are the Shadows?_--In the notes to the beautiful poem _Italy_, by Samuel Rogers, published (I think) in 1830, the following occurs:--
"'You admire that picture,' said an old Dominican to me at Padua, as I stood contemplating a Last Supper in the refectory of his convent, the figures as large as life. 'I have sat at my meals before it for seven-and-forty years and such are the changes that have taken place among us; so many have come and gone in the time, that when I look upon the company there--upon those who are sitting at the table silent as they--I am sometimes inclined to think that we, and not they, are the shadows.'"
In the sixth volume of Lord Mahon's _History of England_, chap. lx. p. 498., we find this passage:
"Once as Sir David Wilkie (Mr. Washington Irving and myself being then his fellow-travellers in Spain) was gazing on one of Titian's master-pieces--the famous picture of the Last Supper in the refectory of the Escurial--an old monk of the order of St. Jerome came up, and said to him, 'I have sat daily in sight of that picture for now nearly three score years. During that time my companions have dropped off, one after another--all who were my seniors, all who were of mine own age, and many or most of those who were younger than myself; nothing has been unchanged around me except those figures, large as life, in yonder painting; and I look at them till I sometimes think that they are the realities, and we the shadows.'"
The great resemblance between these two passages is very striking; the latter only amplifies the former by very few words.