Chapter IX: Part 9

A rather amusing incident occurred recently at a show in Paris, where the wonderful “Performing Fleas” were exhibited. One of the dear creatures, which acted as coachman to the great flea-coach, managed to hop off his box, and elected a rather stout lady, standing near, as his first resting-place. The proprietor of the show, who had spent much time and patience upon the education of his insect, was in despair, and the lady was asked if she would mind making a search for the missing pet. She accordingly retired to a private room, and in a few minutes returned triumphant, carefully holding the captive in the most approved style. She handed him to the showman, who started and changed color, and returning the flea to the lady remarked: “Je vous remercie, Madame, mais celle la est à vous, pas à moi!” (Thank you, Madame, but that’s not mine.)

_Business Economy_

Two commercial tourists, chancing to meet in an inn of a country town, began, after lighting their cigars, a dispute as to the relative extent of the business of their respective houses. One, zealous to prove the superiority of the establishment he represented, after enumerating extraordinary instances, reached the climax with the assertion that the business of his house was so extensive, that in their correspondence alone, it cost them over five hundred dollars a year for ink.

“Pooh, pooh,” said the other, “why, we save that much yearly by just omitting the _dots_ to the _i’s_ and the strokes to the _t’s_.”

_Completing an Unfinished Stanza_

It is related that Dr. Mansel, of Trinity College, Cambridge, by chance called at the rooms of a brother Cantab, who was absent, but had left on his table the opening of a poem, in the following lofty strain:

“The sun’s perpendicular rays
Illumined the depths of the sea.”

Here the flight of the poet, by some accident, stopped short, but Dr. Mansel, equal to the occasion, completed the stanza in the following facetious style:

“And the fishes, beginning to sweat,
Cried ‘Damn it,’ how hot we shall be.”

_Sonnet to a Cow_

Why cow, how canst thou be so satisfied?
So well content with all things here below?
So unobtrusive and so sleepy-eyed
So meek, so lazy, and so awful slow?
Dost thou not know that everything is mixed,
That naught is as it should be on this earth,
That grievously the world needs to be fixed,
That nothing we can give has any worth,
That times are hard, that life is full of care,
Of sin and trouble and untowardness,
That love is folly, friendship but a snare?
Prit, cow! this is no time for laziness!
The cud thou chewest is not what it seems!
Get up and moo! Tear ‘round and quit thy dreams!

_Xanthippe Vindicated_

The admirers of Sorosis have waited patiently for that sisterhood to discuss and vindicate the character of that long maligned and grossly misunderstood victim of history, Xanthippe. But Sorosis procrastinates, and fails to declare that Socrates would have tried any woman’s temper.

Xanthippe has been called a shrew, a harridan, a scold, a virago, a termagant. Her temper has been represented as hasty, and her poor, patient husband, Socrates, has commanded not only respect for his genius, but pity for his domestic woes. It is extraordinary that such a misconception of the facts arose. It is remarkable that hitherto not one apologist for Xanthippe has arisen.

But the champion of woman, of womanhood—yea, even of woman’s rights—cannot study the facts preserved in history concerning this ill-assorted pair without perceiving the gross injustice done to a simple-minded and worthy dame. Reduced to its simplest terms, our proposition is that Xanthippe lived and died a victim to the Socratic method.

Ladies, put yourselves in her place. Married to an ugly man in the bloom of her youthful beauty,—to a man conspicuously ugly, with a flat nose, thick lips, bulging eyes, so ugly that the handsome Alcibiades compared him to Silenus,—we see at the outset that it was clearly a _mariage de convenance_. Think of the discoveries the poor girl made after the wedding! Her homely husband refused to wear shoes or stockings when the courting days had passed. He not only never dressed for dinner, but even refused to change his clothes at all, day in and day out. Having once secured a housekeeper he rarely stayed at home, was constantly off in the city, loafing in the market-place, disputing with every comer. He had given up his trade as a sculptor as soon as he had her dowry to spend, and spent his time gadding about with young men and neglecting the proud, fair girl at home.

It was common talk that at the banquets, for which he forsook his home, he drank more than any one else present. The misguided man, moreover, seems to have had a devil, or demon, constantly instigating him to some singular deed or remark. No wonder Xanthippe’s beauty faded! No wonder that the being looked at askance at every meeting of the Society of Athenian Dames she attended resulted in her gradually isolating herself from social affairs! Confined to the narrow limits of her small home, soured by neglect, yet ever faithful to the satyr Socrates, who left home early and drank till the wee sma’ hours at night, it is evident that the trials she contended with were great. But, you say, she must, as a cultivated, ambitious woman, have greatly enjoyed and as greatly profited by the opportunities of converse, infrequent but priceless, with the great dialectician when he actually was in the bosom of his family. That is the very point at issue. Our contention is that Socrates’s conversation, if he conversed with his wife at all, was the very straw that broke the camel’s back. Imagine being kept awake every night, say from two to four by a husband, more or less the worse for wine, and obliged to converse with him in question and answer, and being constantly held down to rigid logical rules of expression! What woman could endure having to voice her complaints in logical phrase? How the war-horse of dialectics would snort in the excitement of battle at hearing the feminine argument “Because” advanced in answer to some impertinent question on his part.

It is undoubtedly true, and Plato incidentally corroborates it, that one day when Xanthippe was out of wood, and the week’s ironing was all waiting to be done, Socrates, in sheer laziness, and from no ascertainable motive but pure cussedness, stood still for twenty-four hours continuously. His apologist adds that he was entranced in thought, and a partial public has believed it. But tell me, oh twentieth century wife, what effect it would have had on your nerves and temper if your Thomas or Jack were to treat you so?

If he had only brought his friends home occasionally and brightened Xanthippe’s life somewhat in that way! Even the rough, uncouth Xenophon would have been better than nobody. But this garrulous Greek seems to have had no redeeming domestic features—unless we except what Xenophon records in his Memorabilia (II. 2) as to his admonishing his eldest son, Lamprocles, to be grateful to his mother, which was only decent in the old man, as we infer from the context that Xanthippe had furnished Lamprocles with liberal pocket-money.

We have a profound sympathy with Xanthippe. If she became a shrew, it was Socrates’s fault. But it does not appear that she ever failed in the great duties of womanhood. And it ill beseems either the man or his apologists to malign a hard-working, much-abused woman whose defects of temper were not congenital, but created and increased by this malicious maieutic philosopher himself.

_Democritus at Belfast_[3]

Tyndall, high perched on Speculation’s summit,
May drop his sounding line in Nature’s ocean,
But that great deep has depths beyond his plummet,
The springs of law and life, mind, matter, motion.

Democritus imagined that the soul
Was made of atoms, spheric, smooth and fiery;
Plato conceived it as a radiant whole—
A heavenly unit baffling man’s inquiry.

Indolent Gods, immeasurably bored,
Beyond the blast of Boreas and Eurus,
Too lazy Man to punish or reward,
Such was the heaven conceived by Epicurus.

If, as the wide-observant Darwin dreams,
Man be developed of the Ascidian, ·
Methinks his great deeds and poetic dreams
Scarce square with his molluscous pre-meridian.

But, even as Milton’s demons, problem tossed,
When they had set their maker at defiance,
Still “found no end, in wandering mazes lost,”
So is it with our modern men of science.

Still in the “Open Sesame” of Law,
Life’s master key professing to deliver,
But meeting with deaf ear or scorn-clenched jaw,
Our question, “Doth not law imply lawgiver?”

Betwixt the Garden and the Portico,
Thou vacillating servant, often flittest,
And when we seek the source of law to know,
Giv’st us a phrase, “survival of the fittest.”

Pray who may be the fittest to survive,
The spark of thought for coming time to kindle,
The sacred fire of science keep alive?—
Plato, Agassiz, Humboldt, Huxley, Tyndall?

If Tyndall’s last word be indeed the last—
Of Hope and Faith hence with each rag and tatter!
A black cloud shrouds our future as our past:
Matter, the wise man’s God; the Crowd’s—no Matter.

Footnote 3:

(See Report of Professor Tyndall’s Inaugural Discourse to the British
Association.)

_Christmas Chimes_

Little Penelope Socrates—
A Boston maid of four—
Wide opened her eyes on Christmas morn,
And looked the landscape o’er.
“What is it inflates my _bas de bleu_?”
She asked with dignity;
“’Tis Ibsen in the original;
Oh, joy beyond degree.”

Miss Mary Cadwallader Rittenhouse,
Of Philadelphia town,
Awoke as much as they ever do there,
And watched the snow come down.
“I’m glad that it is Christmas,”
You might have heard her say,
“For my family is one year older now
Than it was last Christmas day.”

’Twas Christmas in giddy Gotham,
And Miss Irene de Jones
Awoke at noon and yawned and yawned,
And stretched her languid bones.

“I’m sorry it is Christmas,
Papa at home will stay,
For ’Change is closed and he won’t make
A single cent to-day.”

Windly dawned the Christmas
On the city by the lake,
And Miss Arabel Wabash Breezy
Was instantly awake.
“What’s that thing in my stocking?
Well, in two jiffs I’ll know.”
And she drew a grand piano forth
From ’way down in the toe.

_The Nestling Shuttlecock_

The amusing verses of Peter Pindar (Dr. John Wolcot) on the King and the Apple Dumplings have been so much copied in school books and collections of humorous poetry that most readers are familiar with the monarch’s questioning:

“Strange I should never of a dumpling dream;
But Goody, tell me, where, where, where’s the seam?”
“Sir, there’s no seam,” quoth she, “I never knew
That folks did apple dumplings sew.”
“No?” cried the staring monarch with a grin,
“Then how the devil got the apple in?”

But Pindar’s “King of France and the Fair Lady” is seldom, if ever, found outside of his now scarce poetical works:

A king of France upon a day,
With a fair lady of his court,
Was pleased at battledore to play—
A very fashionable sport.

Into the bosom of this fair court dame,
Whose whiteness did the snow’s pure whiteness shame,
King Louis by odd mischance did knock
The shuttlecock.
Thrice happy rogue, upon the town of doves,
To nestle with the pretty little loves!
“Now, sire, pray take it out,” quoth she,
With an arch smile. But what did he?
What? what to charming modesty belongs!
Obedient to her soft command,
He raised it—but not with his hand!
No, marvelling reader, but the chimney tongs.

What a chaste thought in this good king;
How clever!
When shall we hear again of such a thing?
Lord! never.
Now were our princes to be prayed
To such an act by some fair maid,
I’ll bet my life not one would mind it;
But handy, without more ado,
The youths would search the bosom through,
Although it took a day to find it.

_Proverbial Philosophy in New Dress_

Teach not your parent’s parent to extract
The golden contents of the egg by suction.
The good old lady can the feat enact
Quite irrespective of your kind induction.

A member of the feathered federation,
A prisoner by your palm and digits made,
Is worth at least a couple of his brothers
Who in your leafy arbor seek the shade.

_Theory and Practice_

Doctor (to brother physician)—“Yes, sir, the sovereign remedy for all ills is fresh air and plenty of it. People don’t let enough air into their houses. Well, I must hurry off; I’m on an errand.”

Brother Physician—“Going far?”

Doctor—“No; only down to the hardware store to get half a mile of weather-strips.”

THE HITS OF THE SATIRISTS

_Thanks for Victory_

Mr. Punch mercilessly satirized the despatches of a great royal soldier, a religiously minded man, as follows:

By the blessing of God, my dear Augusta,
We’ve had again an awful buster.
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below;
Praise God from whom all blessings flow!

_Battle Prayer_

The following has been shrewdly suggested as a good form for a battle prayer:

O God, we who are about to plunge into battle pray Thee that Thou wilt be with us and so direct our guns that we may mow down the enemy like chaff. May we kill hundreds outright and maim many more, thereby causing gloom and desperation to settle upon the hearts and the hearthstones of our enemies.

O Thou God of Battles, enable us to make many widows and orphans; let there be hundreds of homes desolated; let there be devoted sons left to mourn the fathers that we shall kill; let there be distracted wives and mothers to cry unceasingly at the loss of the light of their homes and the support of their declining years.

O God, if there be good men on the other side who pray to Thee for success, turn Thou their prayers to empty words.

Let it be given to us to sink more skips and to cause more misery than our enemy, with all his striving, can do; and this we ask for the sake of Christ, who labored to bring peace and good-will to earth. Amen.

_Silly Newspaper Queries_

Those who are blessed with a keen sense of humor will appreciate the playful ridicule in a specimen letter published in the New York _Evening Post_:

“TO THE EDITOR:

Having for a long time been a reader of your valuable paper, I write to ask if you will have the kindness to inform me through the columns of the same who is the author of the following pathetic poem:

“‘Hard was he up;
And in the hardness of his upness
Stole a ham.

“‘Down on him swooped,
And swooping, up him scooped,
The minions of the law.’ NEPTUNE.”

Commenting upon this thrust at silly queries, the editor remarks: “It shows what a newspaper has practised upon it daily in one form or another; yet the writers of communications quite as absurd as the foregoing wear very solemn faces, and enter long complaints against the editors for declining to print queries which would merely make the public laugh, or may be answered by consulting the nearest dictionary, or are of no possible interest to anybody save the querist himself. A bit of satire like ‘Neptune’s’ is a word to the wise; we almost despair, however, of its producing any effect upon the foolish.”

_Puffery Extraordinary_

A manufacturer of patent medicines wrote to a friend living on a farm in the West for a good strong recommendation for his (the manufacturer’s) “Balsam.” In a few days he received the following:

“DEAR SIR,—The land composing my farm had hitherto been so poor that a Scotchman could not get a living off it, and so stony that we had to slice our potatoes and plant them edgeways, but hearing of your balsam, I put some on a ten-acre lot surrounded by a railroad fence, and in the morning I found that the rock had entirely disappeared, a neat stone wall encircled the field, and the rails were split into oven wood, and piled up systematically in my back-yard.

I put half an ounce into the middle of a huckleberry swamp; in two days it was cleared off, planted with corn and pumpkins, and a row of peach-trees in full blossom through the middle.

As an evidence of its tremendous strength, I would say that it drew a striking likeness of my eldest son out of a mill-pond, drew a blister all over his stomach, drew a load of potatoes four miles to market, and eventually drew a prize of ninety-seven dollars in a lottery.”

_Beaconsfield_

Among the abundant political satires aimed at Beaconsfield was the following, in which will be recognized his well-known passion for alliteration:

“I am the Peerless Premier,
’Tis mine to speak and yours to hear.
Intelligent England! now the time has come,
As all must own
And see,
When you must rally round Me and the Throne—
Particularly Me:
Or else the random rage of ruthless Rome,
The fickle falsehood of fair fawning France,
Bismarckian braggadocia from Berlin,
The mystic Muscovite’s most monstrous maw,
Home-Rulers hoarsely howling hideous humbug, where, smug
They batten on their melancholy isle,” etc.

_Burns’s Impromptu_

A specimen of Burns’s facility in impromptu satire, when provoked by anything which he considered mean, is one of the memories of Brownhill Inn. It is related that he was washing at the horse-trough, having apparently been drinking all night. Just then a black-coated parson, who had slept at the inn, came out and ordered his horse. Before he mounted he said to the hostler, taking fourpence out of his pocket, “You see, I ought to give you all this fourpence, but I shall want to pay threepence for the ferry hard by, so I can only give you a penny.” Burns, who had been looking on all the time, roared out,—

“Black’s your coat,
Black’s your hair,
And black’s your conscience, of which you’ve damned
little to spare.”

He then gave the hostler sixpence.

_The Prince Regent_

Byron’s “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” maintains its place in the forefront of commingled ridicule and censure, but nothing in that famous satire, or its sequel, “Hints from Horace,” approaches in caustic severity his castigation of that royal voluptuary, the Prince Regent, afterwards George IV. Byron chanced to see him standing between the coffins of Charles I. and Henry VIII., and thereupon penned the following epigram:

“Famed for contemptuous breach of sacred ties,
By headless Charles see heartless Henry lies;
Between them stands another sceptred thing;
It moves, it reigns, in all but name a king.
Charles to his people, Henry to his wife,
In _him_ the double tyrant wakes to life.
Justice and death have mixed their dust in vain,
Each royal vampire wakes to life again:
Ah, what can tombs avail? since these disgorge
The blood and dust of both to mould a _George_.”

_The American Eagle_

Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to his daughter, Mrs. Sarah Bache, written in the seventy-eighth year of his age, regrets, in a characteristic passage, that the bald eagle had been preferred to the turkey as the national emblem. “For my own part,” said he, “I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing-hawk; and when that diligent has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. With all this injustice he is never in good case, but, like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward; the little king bird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district. He is, therefore, by no means a proper emblem for the brave and honest Order of the Cincinnati of America, who have driven all the _King birds_ from our country; though exactly fit for that order of knights which the French call _Chevaliers d’Industrie_. I am, on this account, not displeased that the figure is not known as a bald eagle, but looks more like a turkey. For, in truth, the turkey is, in comparison, a much more respectable bird, and withal, a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours. He is besides (though a little vain and silly, ’tis true, but none the worse for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards, who should presume to invade his farm-yard with a red coat on.”

_The Drama as an Instrumentality_

The political satirical drama founded by Aristophanes was copied in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Greek comic poet introduced real characters on the stage for the purpose of satirizing them. His freedom and boldness in depicting corrupt men and corrupt measures were prominently shown in his caricature of the coarse and noisy Cleon, when that Athenian leader was at the height of his power and insolence. In a similar way the first Earl of Shaftesbury was assailed by Dryden in an opera entitled “Albion and Albanis.” “The subject of this piece,” as Baker says, in his “Biographica Dramatica,” “is wholly allegorical, being intended to expose Lord Shaftesbury and his adherents.” But there is a more violent and virulent satire upon the same individual in Otway’s play of “Venice Preserved.” In reference to the former, Baker quotes Dr. Johnson as truly describing those portions of the play, now never represented, and in which the leading character was Antonio, as “despicable scenes of vile comedy.” All the vices assigned to Antonio were intended to depict Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury; and it was on account of these very scenes that the play was a favorite with Charles II. Both political parties, at that period of English history, were merciless in their treatment of each other, and made use of the forms of a drama to gratify their detestation of their adversaries.

_Compliments to Boswell_

In a copy of Boswell’s “Tour to the Hebrides,” Horace Walpole wrote the following stinging lines:

“When Boozy Bozzy belched out Johnson’s Sayings,
And half the volume filled with his own Brayings,
Scotland beheld again before her pass
A Brutal Bulldog coupled with an Ass.”

_Forbidden Fruit_

Among the poems attributed to Lord Byron is one commencing with—

“What! the girl I adore by another embraced!”

Reference to the sentiments expressed in his poem “The Waltz” makes it probable that the lines came from his pen. The subject of waltzing serves as a reminder of an impromptu addressed by an indignant lover to his betrothed and her partner:

“You have brushed the bloom from the peach,
From the rose its soft hue.
What you’ve touched you may take,
Pretty waltzer, adieu.”

_A Statesman as a Scientist_

In the “Crotchet Castle,” published in 1831, is a merciless exposure of astonishing inaccuracies in some papers on scientific subjects, written by Lord Brougham for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Among the sarcastic thrusts is the following:

“I suppose the learned friend [Brougham] has written a sixpenny treatise on mechanics, and the rascals who robbed me have been reading it.

“_Mr. Crotchet_: Your house would have been very safe, doctor, if they had had no better science than the learned friend’s to work with.”

_Lardner’s Mistaken Prediction_

Few men have presented as prominent a target for irony as Dr. Dionysius Lardner, in view of his alleged statement, in 1836, that steam navigation for a voyage across the Atlantic was impracticable. What he said, according to the report of his address in the London _Times_, August 27, 1836, was that by collation of the amount of coal needed per horse-power, the speed obtainable, and the number of hours needed for the distance, no vessel could stow away enough coal to carry her through a voyage of three thousand miles, and that two thousand miles was the longest possible run. Brunel, the chief engineer of the Great Western Railway, pointed out an arithmetical error in the “demonstration” which vitiated the whole of it, and the learned doctor sat down suddenly without acknowledgment of his palpable error.

_The Lawyers and the Playwrights_

Samuel Hand, Esq., in the course of an address before the New York State Bar Association said, “It must be confessed that in modern times there has been strongly impressed upon the world’s imagination a dark view of the lawyer and his pursuits. Hear Ben Jonson describe us in the age of Shakespeare:

“‘I oft have heard him say how he admired
Men of your large profession, that could speak
To every cause, and things mere contraries,
Till they were hoarse again, yet all be law;
That with most quick agility, could turn
And return; make knots and undoe them;
Give forked counsel; take provoking gold
On either hand, and put it up; these men
He knew would thrive with their humility
And (for his part) he thought he would be blest
To have his heir of such a suffering spirit,
So wise, so grave, of so perplexed a tongue
And loud withal, that would not wag nor scarce
Lie still without a fee; when every word
Your worship but lets fall is a zecchin.’

“Turning to the contemporary dramatists, Boucicault and others, we find the advocate generally handsomely used, but the attorney most outrageously maltreated and abused. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine anything more revolting than the figure usually cut by a stage attorney. He is depicted as meanness itself—vulgar, impudent, prying, without modesty or veracity, to whom honor is nothing but a word, offering his person to be kicked and himself to be reviled, if, by that means, any money can be made. I do not know how it may be with others, but when this libel on us appears on the stage I can hardly keep my countenance. It is needless to say that, whatever else may be true of us, these disgusting pictures are not even good caricatures. They have not the merit of suggesting the reality. It is difficult to conjecture how they could have originated, or what circumstances retain them in dramatical composition, for they have not the most remote resemblance, even in caricature, to the real average attorney, either English or American.”

_Bancroft as a Historian_

In the Critical and Political Essays of Severn Teackle Wallis, in his day the leader of the Maryland bar, is a severe arraignment of Bancroft as a historian. Mr. Wallis charges the author of the “History of the United States” with such trespasses as “misstatement, omission, garbling, perversion, and suppression;” the indictment is sustained, and the conviction is complete. A single paragraph will serve as a specimen of his vigor.

“Every one who knows anything of our revolutionary history is aware of the feeling which from time to time was manifested in the Continental Army against some of the troops and officers from New England. The attempts of modern historians and lecturers in that quarter to conceal the traces and evade the justice of this feeling are equally notorious. The controversy between Lord Mahon and Mr. Sparks is familiar to our readers. Those who have taken the pains to read what Washington did actually think and write upon the subject will remember how often, in the bitterness and sadness of despair, and with the fierce indignation of his own burning and unselfish patriotism, he denounced the trading spirit, the littleness, the cowardice, the mean cabals and interests by which the troops in question so frequently imperilled the great cause. In the face of facts so generally known and incontestable, we confess our amazement at finding, on page 335 of the volume of his history now under review, the broad statement by Mr. Bancroft that ‘it was on the militia of these (the New England) States, that Washington placed his chief reliance.’ Nor is this inconceivable assertion guarded by qualifications of any sort, as to time, or place, or occasion. On the contrary, it is coupled with an observation ascribed to the British commander-in-chief, that the New England militia, ‘when brought into action, were the most persevering of any in all North America,’—the purpose of combining the two statements being, of course, to perpetuate it as a historical fact, attested by the heads of both armies, that the troops from New England were the right arm of the one and the terror of the other. It is the misfortune of criticism that its decorum has no language by which falsifications of the sort can be properly characterized. Happily, on the other hand, it is but seldom called to expose anything so gross. Mr. Bancroft did himself infinite injustice by not adding to it at once, that John Adams was the unswerving friend and stay of Washington in the dark hours of doubt; that the Declaration of Independence was signed in Boston, and the sword of Cornwallis surrendered on Bunker Hill.”

_Unsuspected Turns_

When Charles Lamb was invited, at a public dinner, to say grace, and responded with the remark, “Is there no minister present? Then let us thank God!” he was a satirist, and knew it. When a sheriff up in Vermont, in opening the county court, cried, “All persons having causes or matters pending therein, draw near, and they shall be heard, and God save the people!” he was a satirist and didn’t know it.

_Plain Speaking_

An elderly resident of a village in Western New York still tells with glee the story of his aspirations to become justice of the peace many years ago, when his youthful temper was not always under control. He says he went to the leader of the dominant party in the town, still well remembered for his prominence in that locality and with whom he was on familiar terms, and told him that he would like to get the nomination for justice of the peace. The answer he got, pronounced with great deliberation and dignity, was “A——, you are just as fit for justice of the peace as hell is for a powder house.”

_Stanhope_

Lord Chesterfield’s “Letters to his Son,” though unrivalled as models for epistolary style, have incurred strong reprehension on two grounds: first, because some of their maxims are repugnant to good morals; and, secondly, as insisting too much on manners and graces instead of more solid acquirements. What effect these lessons in the art of dissimulation, these precepts for uniting wickedness and the graces, had upon Philip Stanhope, for whom they were designed, may be inferred from the following stanzas:

“Vile Stanhope—Demons blush to tell—
In twice two hundred places
Has shown his son the road to hell
Escorted by the Graces;
But little did the ungenerous lad
Concern himself about them;
For base, degenerate, meanly bad,
He sneaked to hell without them.”

_Pens Dipped in Gall_

Theodore Hook declared that Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” was the most appropriate of titles, rattling off his criticism in the lines:

“For surely an age would be spent in the finding
A reader so weak as to pay for the binding.”

Erskine is the author of an ill-natured couplet concerning Sir Walter Scott’s “On Waterloo’s Ensanguined Field:”

“None by sabre or by shot
Fell half so flat as Walter Scott.”

Samuel Rogers, the London poet and banker, was the victim of a woman’s unsparing wit, when Lady Blessington wrote of his exquisitely illustrated “Italy” that “the work would surely have been dished had it not been for the plates.” Tom Moore once experienced a savage dislike for a cross-eyed woman, who was said to be a poetess, and sneeringly observed that “instead of her gazing at one muse at a time, she had an eye for the whole nine at once.” Garrick was a relentless critic of Sir John Hill, who was a doctor and dramatist:

“Thou essence of dock and valerian and sage
At once the disgrace and the pest of the age,
The worst that we wish thee for all thy sad crimes
Is to take thine own physic and read thine own rhymes.”

The great lake poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, were satirized by a cynical author, who wrote:

“They came from the lakes, an appropriate quarter
For poems diluted with plenty of water.”

It was one of Pope’s observations: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Swift, who was the keenest of English satirists, remarked in the same vein: “A man of business should always have his eyes open, but must often seem to have them shut.” Satire has its place, and the foibles of individuals and races may be dealt with most effectively at times with the pen dipped in gall, but in general its use is to be deplored, not alone in criticism, but in all the relationships of life.

_Samuel Rogers_

Captain Medwin, in his “Life of Shelley,” copies the following verses on the poet-banker Rogers, which he attributes, whether justly or not, to Byron:

“Nose and chin would shame a knocker,
Wrinkles that would puzzle Cocker,
Mouth which marks the envious scorner,
With a scorpion at the corner,
Turning its quick tail to sting you,
In the place that most may wring you;
Eyes of lead-like hue and gummy,
Carcase picked up from some mummy,
Bowels—but they were forgotten,
Save the liver and that’s rotten;
Skin all sallow, flesh all sodden,
From the devil would frighten Godwin.
Is’t a corpse set up for show?
Galvanized at times to go?
With the Scripture in connection,
New proof of the resurrection?
Vampire! ghost! or goat, what is it?
I would walk ten miles to miss it.”

“The author of the ‘Pleasures of Memory,’” remarks William Howitt, “has never met with that species of Mohawk criticism, that scalping and scarifying literary assault and battery, which so many of his contemporaries have had to undergo.” Nevertheless, it would be hard to find in the wide range of Satanic literature a scarification as intense and as sweeping as that in the lines above quoted.

_Junius on the Duke of Bedford_

“My lord, you are so little accustomed to receive any marks of respect or esteem from the public, that if in the following lines a compliment or expression of applause should escape me, I fear you would consider it as a mockery of your established character, and perhaps an insult to your understanding. You have nice feelings if we may judge from your resentments. Cautious, therefore, of giving offence where you have so little deserved it, I shall leave the illustration of your virtues to other hands. Your friends have a privilege to play upon the easiness of your temper, or probably they are better acquainted with your good qualities than I am. You have done good by stealth. The rest is upon record. You have still ample room for speculation when panegyric is exhausted....

“Let us consider you, then, as arrived at the summit of worldly greatness; let us suppose that all your plans of avarice and ambition are accomplished, and your most sanguine wishes gratified in the fear as well as the hatred of the people. Can age itself forget that you are now in the last act of life? Can gray hairs make folly venerable? Is there no period to be reserved for meditation and retirement? For shame, my lord! Let it not be recorded of you that the latest moments of your life were dedicated to the same unworthy pursuits, the same busy agitations, in which your youth and manhood were exhausted. Consider that though you cannot disgrace your former life, you are violating the character of age and exposing the impotent imbecility, after you have lost the vigor of the passions.

“Your friends will ask, perhaps, Whither shall this unhappy old man retire? Can he remain in the metropolis where his life has been so often threatened, and his palace so often attacked? If he returns to Woburn, scorn and mockery await him; he must create a solitude round his estate if he would avoid the face of reproach and derision. At Plymouth his destruction would be more than probable; at Exeter, inevitable. No honest Englishman will ever forget his attachment, nor any honest Scotchman forget his treachery, to Lord Bute. At every town he enters he must change his liveries and name. Whichever way he flies, the hue and cry of the country pursues him.

“In another kingdom, indeed, the blessings of his administration have been more sensibly felt, his virtues understood; or, at worst, they will not for him alone forget their hospitality. As well might Verres have returned to Sicily. You have twice escaped, my lord; beware of a third experiment. The indignation of a whole people, plundered, insulted, and oppressed as they have been, will not always be disappointed.

“It is in vain, therefore, to shift the scene; you can no more fly from your enemies than from yourself. Persecuted abroad, you look into your own heart for consolation, and find nothing but reproaches and despair. But, my lord, you may quit the field of business, though not the field of danger; and though you cannot be safe, you may cease to be ridiculous. I fear you have listened too long to the advice of those pernicious friends with whose interests you have sordidly united your own, and for whom you have sacrificed every thing that ought to be dear to a man of honor. They are still base enough to encourage the follies of your age, as they once did the vices of your youth. As little acquainted with the rules of decorum as with the laws of morality, they will not suffer you to profit by experience, nor even to consult the propriety of a bad character. Even now they tell you that life is no more than a dramatic scene, in which the hero should preserve his consistency to the last; and that as you lived without virtue, you should die without repentance.”

_Ruskin on the Bicycle_

This is what John Ruskin thought of the bicycle: “Some time since I put myself on record as an antagonist of the devil’s own toy, the bicycle. I want to reiterate, with all the emphasis of strong language, that I condemn all manner of bi-, tri-, and 4–, 5–, 6–, or 7–cycles. Any contrivance or invention intended to supersede the use of human feet on God’s own ground is damnable. Walking, running, leaping, and dancing are legitimate and natural joys of the body, and every attempt to stride on stilts, dangle on ropes, or wiggle on wheels is an affront to the Almighty. You can’t improve on God’s appointed way of walking by substituting an improved cart-wheel.”

_A Serious Interruption_

An amusing story about the late Baron James de Rothschild, who was as sarcastic as he was shrewd, is now going the rounds of the French press. It is to the effect that the baron was playing whist one night, “a financier’s game”—for moderate stakes, that is—with the wealthy Marquis d’Aligre and a party, when the marquis, having let a louis fall on the floor, insisted on stopping the game until he found it. The baron, learning the cause of the interruption, exclaimed in a pathetic tone, “A louis on the floor? Ah! that is a serious matter,” and coolly taking a hundred-franc note from his pocket, rolled it up, lighted it at a candle, and held the blazing paper down to the carpet with profound gravity to help the marquis in his search!

_Imitation of Shakespeare’s Commentators_

“_Stilton Cheese._”—So, some of the old copies; yet the 4to, 1600, reads “_Tilton_.” But I confess the word _Tilton_ gives me no idea. I find Stilton to be a village in Huntingdon, famous for its cheese—a fact which clearly evinces the propriety of the reading in the old copy, and justifies my emendation.

THEOBALD.

Here we have a very critical note! The word Tilton can give Mr. Theobald no idea. And it is true, words cannot give a man what nature has denied him. But though our critic may be ignorant of it, it is well known that in the days of chivalry _Tilting_ was a very common amusement in England; and I find that, during the performance of these martial exercises the spectators were frequently entertained with a sort of cheese, which, from the occasion on which it was made, was called _Tilting_, and by corruption _Tilton_ cheese. Mr. Theobald’s emendation, therefore, as needless and truly absurd, ought by all means to be rejected.

WARBURTON.

The emendation, in my opinion, is not more absurd than the remark which the learned annotator has made upon it. There is, indeed, a stupid error in some of the old copies. But discordant opinions are not always nugatory, and by much agitation the truth is elicited. I think Mr. Theobald’s alteration right.

JOHNSON.

Stilton is a village in Huntingdon on the great North road. Tilton, though not so well known, is a village in Leicester. In an old collection of songs, black-letter, no date, we read “_Tilton’s_ homely fare,” which all critics will allow can only mean cheese. In an old MS. of which I remember neither the date nor the title Tilton is said to abound in rich pasturage; both which circumstances make it highly probable that our author wrote, not as Mr. Theobald supposes, _Stilton_, but _Tilton_; though I confess the passage is not without difficulty.

STEEVENS.

_Wordsworth’s Horse_

Will Wordsworth was a steady man,
That lived near Ambleside,
And much he longed to have a horse,
Which he might easy ride.

It chanced one day a horse came by,
Of pure Arabian breed,
Gentle, though proud, and strong of limb;
It was a gallant steed!

Full many a noble rider bold
This gallant steed had borne;
And every one upon his brow
The laurel wreath had worn.

Those noble riders dead and gone,
And in the cold earth laid,
The gallant steed by Wordsworth’s door
Without an owner strayed.

No more ado; the steed is caught;
Upon him Wordsworth gets;
The generous courser paws and rears,
And ’gainst the bridle frets.

“He’s too high mettled,” Wordsworth says,
“And shakes me in my seat;
He must be balled, and drenched, and bled,
And get much less to eat.”

So balled, and drenched, and bled he was,
And put on lower diet;
And Wordsworth with delight observed
Him grow each day more quiet.

At first he took from him his oats,
And then he took his hay;
Until at last he fed him on
A single straw a day.

What happened next to this poor steed
There’s not a child but knows;
Death closed his eyes, as I my song,
And ended all his woes.

And on a stone, near Rydal Mount,
These words are plain to see,—
“Here lie the bones of that famed steed,
High-mettled Poesy.”

_A Sylvan Reverie_

_Scene, Hawarden Park._ [_Mr. Gladstone discovered engaged in felling
a tree, surrounded by fourteen hundred liberals of Bolton. He
strikes a few blows; the crowd cheer vociferously. Mr. Gladstone
pauses from his labors, reflects a few moments, and then sings sotto
voce_:]

How sweet are the sounds of the popular voice
In an ex-ministerial ear!
How surely I know that the national choice
_Must_ go with the noisiest cheer!
As I gaze upon votaries faithful as those,
And their incense of worship ascends,
I forget for a moment the malice of foes
And—still better—the coldness of friends.
I feel I am great, and I know I am good,
And no longer regret my position
As statesman who’s taken to chopping of wood
And abandoned the paths of ambition.

Is it vanity prompting me? Is it self-love?
Can I, safe in my conscience, decide
That it is not such feelings my bosom that move?
Yes ... I think it’s legitimate pride.
I am not—or I hope not—a lover of praise;
I am humble—I hope so at least.
It will do me no harm—on occasional days—
Such a rich popularity-feast.
For perhaps I _am_ great, and I think I am good,
And it’s surely a mark of submission
To take, though a statesman, to chopping of wood,
And abandon the paths of ambition.

[_He strikes a few more blows with his axe; then again pauses. The
cheering is renewed._]

How simple I look! how unconsciously grand,
As I rest from my toil for a space,
With my waistcoat thrown off, and my axe in my hand,
And humanity’s dew on my face!
Oh, my brethren in toil, who stand wond’ring around,
By what ties have I bound you to me?
An orator, scholar and statesman renowned,
Condescending to cut down a tree!
Yes, I know I am great, something tells me I’m good;
And I feel it’s a lofty position,
A statesman’s, who’s taken to chopping of wood,
And forsaken the paths of ambition.

[_He gazes round him for a few moments with visibly increasing
complacency._]

The consular woodman! this citizen host!
Could the old world’s imperial Queen
In the days of her early simplicity boast
A more nobly republican scene?
Let me think, as I watch the admirers who note
The simple pursuits of my home,
Of Lucius Quintus summoned by vote
Of the state from the furrow to Rome.
Yes, I feel I am great, and I know I am good,
And I’m greater by far, with submission,
As statesman, when occupied chopping of wood
Than when treading the paths of ambition.

But Rome? Is it Roman or Greek that’s recalled?
’Tis the heroes so dear to my pen,
Pelides, whose war-cry the Trojans appalled,
Agamemnon the leader of men.
For have I not led men aright when astray?
Turned them back from the false to the true?
And do not the Tories and Turks with dismay
Recollect what my war-cry can do?
Yes, yes, I am great, and I surely am good,
Or I could not endure the position
Of statesman resigned to the chopping of wood,
And renouncing the paths of ambition.

But both Roman dictator and Danaan chief
In one cardinal point I excel,
For I am—as I hazard the humble belief—
Conscientiously Christian as well.
And content with all this, let detractors repeat—
As with angry persistence they do—
That my claim to the homage I p’r’aps might complete
Were I only an Englishman too.
Let them rave—I am great; let them sneer—I am good;
And they vex not the happy condition
Of statesmen who, taking to chopping of wood,
Have abandoned the paths of ambition.

_Carlyle as a Masquerader_

He was a masquerader of great ability and still greater erudition. If we read his works with careful scrutiny we find nothing new in them except his odd and barbarous way of expressing his ideas. His originality is in his language, which is a miserable model, affording the reader no improved forms of expression. He assumed the character of a censor; but he told the public no new truths, and sought to keep alive the public interest in his writings by his savage personalities. He seems to have masqueraded in the character of Dr. Johnson; but he could not come up to his original except in what was offensive. If he was a smasher of idols, he immediately set them up again for men’s worship after he had cemented the pieces together in ridiculous shapes.

EVASIONS OF AMBIGUITY

_The Greek Lexicographers_

Dr. Henry Liddell, who had become celebrated by his Greek lexicon, was at one time headmaster of Westminster. One day he required the boys in his class to write an English epigram, each to choose his own subject. Among those that were handed in was the following:

Two men wrote a lexicon,
Liddell and Scott;
One-half was clever,
And one-half was not.
Give me the answer, boys,
Quick to this riddle,
Which was by Scott,
And which was by Liddell?

Dr. Liddell, on receiving it, only said, “I think you are rather severe.”

_The Religion of Wise Men_

John Toland, in his “Clidophorus” (key-bearer), relates an incident which he was told by a near relation of old Lord Shaftesbury. The latter conferring one day with Major Wildman about the many sects of religion in the world, they came to the conclusion at last that notwithstanding the infinite divisions caused by the interest of the priests and the ignorance of the people, _all wise men are of the same religion_; whereupon a lady in the room demanded with some concern what that religion was? To whom the Lord Shaftesbury straight replied, “Madam, wise men never tell.”

_A Deceiver_

When Johnny was questioned as to why his engagement with Miss H. had been broken off, he rolled his eyes, looked very much pained, and groaned, “Oh, she turned out a deceiver.” But he forgot to mention that he was the deceiver whom she had turned out.

_An Acknowledgment_

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the author of “The School for Scandal,” had a very ingenious manner of answering applicants for literary notice at his hands. He generally wrote, “I have received your book and no doubt shall be delighted after I have read it.” But whether he meant satisfaction with the volume or satisfaction at the close of a tedious task was what no one could find out.

_An Artful Dodger_

When Talleyrand was Minister for Foreign Affairs, and there was a report in Paris of the death of George III., a banker, full of speculative anxieties, asked him if it was true. “Some say,” he replied, “that the King of England is dead; others say that he is not dead; but do you wish to know my opinion?” “Most anxiously, Prince.” “Well, then, I believe neither. I mention this in confidence to you; but I rely on your discretion: the slightest imprudence on your part would compromise me most seriously.”

On another occasion, when Talleyrand sat at dinner between Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier, the celebrated beauty, Madame de Staël, whose beauties were certainly not those of the person, jealous of his attentions to her rival, insisted upon knowing which he would save if they were both drowning. After seeking in vain to evade her, he at last turned toward her and said, with his usual shrug, “Ah, madame, _vous savez nager_” (you know how to swim).

_Rouge_

St. Francis de Sales being consulted by a lady on the lawfulness of wearing rouge, replied, “Some persons may object to it, and others may see no harm in it, but I shall take a middle course, by allowing you to rouge on _one_ cheek.”

_A Difference_

A judge, reprimanding a criminal, called him a scoundrel. The prisoner, “Sir, I am not as big a scoundrel as your honor”—here the culprit stopped, but finally added—“takes me to be.” “Put your words closer together,” said the judge.

_Which?_

A certain lawyer was compelled to apologize to the court. With stately dignity he rose in his place and said, “Your Honor is right and I am wrong, as your Honor generally is.” There was a dazed look in the judge’s eye, and he hardly knew whether to feel happy or fine the lawyer for contempt of court.

_Divine Service_

A lady who greatly admired Dr. Chalmers’s preaching, and was much addicted to pursuing popular orators, sent him her compliments one Sunday morning and begged to know if he intended to preach that day at St. George’s. The worthy doctor answered, “Tell Lady —— that there certainly is to be Divine Service in St. George’s Church to-day.”

_Doubtful Compliment_

At a printers’ festival the following toast was offered: “Woman! second only to the press in the dissemination of news.” The ladies are yet undecided whether to regard this as a compliment or otherwise.

_King or Pretender?_

The following epigram, though popularly attributed to Jonathan Swift at the time it appeared, was written by John Byron. On one occasion, during the rising of 1745, when Manchester had eagerly embraced the cause of Prince Charles, Byron, in a mixed company, being asked to drink the king’s health, cautiously replied,—

God bless the King! I mean our faith’s defender;
God bless—no harm in blessing—the Pretender;
But who Pretender is, or who is King,—
God bless us all! that’s quite another thing.

_A Legal Question_

In the Greek Anthology we are told of an unhappy man who went to Diodorus for advice and instruction about the children of a female slave. The following metrical version of the case is by Merivale: