Note 17 — 116 ADAM BELL, CLIM OF THE CLOUGH, AND WILLIAM OF CLOUDESLY

Such as the penalty for missing, as above said; or Tell’s shooting at a hundred and twenty paces, and bearing Cloudesly’s name, William. If the coincidence as to the distance should be held to be very important, I, for one, should have no objection to admitting that this part of the ballad may be derived from the Tell story.

J. Grimm remarked in 1813, Gedanken über Mythos, Epos und Geschichte (Kleinere Schriften, IV, 77), that the similarity of the names Tell, Bell, Velent, Bellerophon (see a little further on, p. 21), could hardly fail to strike even a superficial observer, and also pointed to the identity of Tell’s and Cloudesly’s Christian name. In his Deutsche Mythologie, I, 317, ed. 1875, it is simply said that the surname Bell, as well as Cloudesly’s Christian name, is suggestive of William Tell.