Chapter VII: Part 7

"On my walk with Lamb," notes Robinson, "he spoke with enthusiasm of Manning, declaring that he is the most wonderful man he ever knew, more extraordinary than Wordsworth or Coleridge. Yet he does nothing. He has traveled even in China, and has been by land from India through Thibet, yet, as far as is known, he has written nothing." "My father," said Charles Kingsley, "was a magnificent man in body and mind, and was said to possess every talent except that of using his talents." Dr. Johnson lamented that "those who are most capable of improving mankind very frequently neglect to communicate their knowledge; either because it is more pleasing to gather ideas than to impart them, or because to minds naturally great, few things appear of so much importance as to deserve the notice of the public." "Great constitutions," says Sir Thomas Browne, "and such as are constellated unto knowledge, do nothing till they outdo all; they come short of themselves, if they go not beyond others, and must not sit down under the degree of worthies. God expects no lustre from the minor stars; but if the sun should not illuminate all, it were a sin in nature." Rogers said of Sydney Smith (of whose death he had just heard), in answer to the question, "How came it that he did not publicly show his powers?" "He had too fastidious a taste, and too high an idea of what ought to be." Disappointment is often felt and sometimes expressed concerning Coleridge, by those who hear so much of his extraordinary intellect. How could he have done more? His was one of those great, homeless souls which fly between heaven and earth; his language was only partly understood in this world, if wholly in another. His best utterances were but incoherencies to the human ears that heard them. Stupid John Chester understood them as well as any.

"Vast objects of remote altitude," says Landor, "must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but as single witnesses to his claims." "Shakespeare," said Coleridge, "is of no age--nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind; his observation and reading supplied him with the drapery of his figures." "The sand heaped by one flood," says Dr. Johnson, "is scattered by another; but the rock always continues in its place. The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare." "Milton is not," says De Quincey, "an author amongst authors, not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers; and the Paradise Lost is not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces." Landor, in his Imaginary Conversations, makes Marvell thus to address Marten: "Hast thou not sat convivially with Oliver Cromwell? Hast thou not conversed familiarly with the only man greater than he, John Milton? One was ambitious of perishable power, the other of imperishable glory; both have attained their aim." Hazlitt and Coleridge being together, some comparison was introduced between Shakespeare and Milton. Coleridge said "he hardly knew which to prefer. Shakespeare seemed to him a mere stripling in the art; he was as tall and as strong, with infinitely more activity than Milton, but he never appeared to have come to man's estate; or if he had, he would not have been a man, but a monster." "A rib of Shakespeare," said Landor, "would have made a Milton; the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since." Said Goethe, "Would you see Shakespeare's intellect unfettered, read Troilus and Cressida, and see how he uses the materials of the Iliad in his fashion." Said Coleridge, "Compare Nestor, Ajax, Achilles, etc., in the Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare, with their namesakes in the Iliad. The old heroes seem all to have been at school ever since." "It was really Voltaire," said Goethe, "who excited such minds as Diderot, D'Alembert, and Beaumarchais; for to be somewhat near him a man needed to be much, and could take no holidays." "To have seen such a man as Dr. Johnson," said Dr. Campbell, "was a thing to talk of a century hence." "Nature," said Heine, "wanted to see how she looked, and she created Goethe." "Were Byron now alive, and Burns," said Hawthorne, "the first would come from his ancestral abbey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the mighty peasant who grew immortal while he stooped behind his plow."

Generally, thought Goethe, the personal character of the writer influences the public, rather than his talents as an artist. Napoleon said of Corneille, "If he were living now, I would make him a prince," yet he never read him. "I have often been amused at thinking," says Landor, "in what estimation the greatest of mankind were holden by their contemporaries. Not even the most sagacious and prudent one could discover much of them, or could prognosticate their future course in the infinity of space! Men like ourselves are permitted to stand near, and indeed in the very presence of Milton: what do they see? dark clothes, gray hair, and sightless eyes! Other men have better things: other men, therefore, are nobler! The stars themselves are only bright by distance; go close, and all is earthy." "There is," says Emerson, "somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are turned; the care with which it registers everything touching Queen Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias. A popular player,--nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of the two." "The people of Gascony, who knew Montaigne well," says the biographer of the great essayist, "thought it very droll to see him in print. He had to pay printers and publishers in Guienne; elsewhere they were eager to buy him." Horace Walpole heard a sight-seer, on being shown the bows and arrows in the armory at Strawberry Hill, ask the housekeeper, "Pray, does Mr. Walpole shoot?" One of his titled neighbors told him, that, having some company with her, one of them had been to see Strawberry. "Pray," said another, "who is that Mr. Walpole?" "Lord!" cried a third, "don't you know the great epicure, Mr. Walpole?" "Pho!" cried the first, "great epicure! you mean the antiquarian." The only tradition a visitor could gather in Pope's garden at Twickenham was that a fine cedar was planted there by a famous man a long time ago. An elderly, well-to-do inhabitant of Beaconsfield, of whom the same person inquired where Burke had lived, made answer: "Pray, sir, was he a poet?" During a pilgrimage which we are told Rogers and his friend Maltby made to Gerrard Street, Soho, to discover the house once occupied by Dryden, they came upon a house agent, who, scenting a job, eagerly responded: "Dryden--Mr. Dryden--is he behindhand with his rent?" There is a story of an American who lost his way in the vain attempt to discover the residence of Wordsworth. Meeting an old woman in a scarlet cloak who was gathering sticks, he asked her the way to Rydal Mount. She could not tell him. "Not know," said the American, "the house of the great Wordsworth?" "No; but what was he great in? Was he a preacher or a doctor?" "Greater than any preacher or doctor--he is a poet." "Oh, the poet!" she replied; "and why did you not tell me that before? I know who you mean now. I often meet him in the woods, jabbering his pottery (poetry) to hisself. But I'm not afraid of him. He's quite harmless, and almost as sensible as you or me." A Prussian staff-officer was quartered in Goethe's house after Jena. This officer, being afterward much interrogated by the curious as to his impressions of the great man, replied "that he had thoroughly tested the fellow and found that he had nothing but nonsense in his head!" Rogers told Leslie that when the Pleasures of Memory was first published, one of those busy gentlemen, who are vain of knowing everybody, came up to him at a party, and said, "Lady ---- is dying to be introduced to the author of the Pleasures of Memory." "Pray, let her live," said Rogers, and with difficulty they made their way through the crowd to the lady. "Mr. Rogers, madam, author of the Pleasures of Memory." "Pleasures of what?" "I felt for my friend," said Rogers.

No doubt the most genuine and grateful rewards which authors have received were those which came to them as surprises, or in overheard responses, unbidden and natural, from the common heart of humanity. Mrs. Broderip reports of her father's pleasure in the immense popularity of his Song of the Shirt, that "what delighted and yet touched him most deeply was, that the poor creatures to whose sorrows and sufferings he had given such eloquent voice, seemed to adopt its words as their own, by singing them about the streets to a rude air of their own adaptation." Bernard Barton ends a letter descriptive of an endearing girl's village funeral, with telling how "the clergyman, at the close of the service, stated that, by her wish, a little hymn, which was a great favorite with her, would be sung beside her open grave, by the school-children--some five-and-twenty little things--whose eyes and cheeks were red with crying. 'I thought they could never have found tongues, poor things; but once set off, they sang like a little band of cherubs. What added to the effect of it, to me, was that it was a little almost forgotten hymn of my own, written years ago, which no one present, but myself, was at all aware of.'" Goldsmith, in his college career, wrote street ballads, to save himself from starving, sold them for five shillings apiece, and stole out of college at night to hear them sung. "Happy night to him, worth all the dreary days!" exclaims his biographer, Forster. "Hidden by some dusky wall, or creeping within darkling shadows of the ill-lighted streets, this poor, neglected sizer watched, waited, lingered there, for the only effort of his life which had not wholly failed. Few and dull, perhaps, the beggar's audience at first, but more thronging, eager, and delighted, as he shouted forth his newly-gotten ware. Cracked enough, I doubt not, were those ballad-singing tones; very harsh, extremely discordant, and passing from loud to low without meaning or melody; but not the less did the sweetest music which this earth affords fall with them on the ear of Goldsmith."

VI.

LIMITS.

Minds, like some seed-plants, delight in sporting; there is great variety in thinking, but the few great ideas remain the same. They are constantly reappearing in all ages and in all literatures, modified by new circumstances and new uses; though in new dresses, they are still the old originals. Like the virtues, they have great and endless services to perform in this world. Now they appear in philosophy, now in fiction; the moralist uses them, and the buffoon; dissociate them, analyze them, strip them of their innumerable dresses, and they are recognized and identified--the same from the foundation and forever. If a discriminating general reader for forty years had noted their continual reappearance in the tons of books he has perused upon all subjects, he would be astonished at their varied and multiplied uses. Thinkers he would perhaps find more numerous than thoughts; yet of the former how few. The original thought of one age diffuses itself through the next, and expires in commonplace--to be born again when occasion necessitates and God wills. At each birth it is a new creation--to the brain it springs from and to the creatures it is to enlighten and serve. If the writer or speaker could know how often it has done even hack-service in the ages before him, he would repentantly blot it out, or choke in its utterance. In the unpleasant discovery, that indispensable and inspiring quality, self-conceit, would suffer a wound beyond healing.

"The number of those writers who can, with any justness of expression," says Melmoth, "be termed thinking authors, would not form a very copious library, though one were to take in all of that kind which both ancient and modern times have produced. Epicurus, we are told, left behind him three hundred volumes of his own works, wherein he had not inserted a single quotation; and we have it upon the authority of Varro's own works, that he himself composed four hundred and ninety books. Seneca assures us that Didymus, the grammarian, wrote no less than four thousand; but Origen, it seems, was yet more prolific, and extended his performances even to six thousand treatises. It is obvious to imagine with what sort of materials the productions of such expeditious workmen were wrought up: sound thought and well-matured reflections could have no share, we may be sure, in these hasty performances. Thus are books multiplied, whilst authors are scarce; and so much easier is it to write than to think." "The same man," said Publius Syrus, "can rarely say a great deal and say it to the purpose."

To ridicule the pervading absence of thought in common conversation, the author of Lothair makes Pinto exclaim, "English is an expressive language, but not difficult to master. Its range is limited. It consists, as far as I observe, of four words: 'nice,' 'jolly,' 'charming,' and 'bore;' and some grammarians add, 'fond.'"

Proverbs, old as they are, seem always new, and are always smartly uttered. Sancho Panza is but one of an immortal type, and the proverbs and maxims he was always using are older than the pyramids--as old as spoken language. "The language of Spain," says Bulwer, in Caxtoniana, "is essentially a language of proverbs. In proverbs, lovers woo; in proverbs, politicians argue; in proverbs, you make your bargain with your landlady or hold a conference with your muleteer. The language of Spain is built upon those diminutive relics of a wisdom that may have existed before the Deluge, as the town of Berlin is built upon strata amassed, in the process of ages, by the animalcules that dwell in their pores." Aristotle was so struck by the condensed wisdom of proverbial sayings, that he supposed them to be the wrecks of an ancient philosophy saved from the ruin in which the rest of the system had been lost by their eloquence and shortness. Pascal conceived that every possible maxim of conduct existed in the world, though no individual can be conversant with the entire series. "There is a certain list of vices committed in all ages, and declaimed against by all authors, which," says Sir Thomas Browne, "will last as long as human nature; which, digested into commonplaces, may serve for any theme, and never be out of date until doomsday." A proverb Lord John Russell has defined to be "the wisdom of the many in the wit of one." "The various humors of mankind," says the elder Disraeli, "in the mutability of human affairs, has given birth to every species; and men were wise, or merry, or satirical, and mourned or rejoiced in proverbs. Nations held an universal intercourse of proverbs, from the eastern to the western world; for we discover among those which appear strictly national many which are common to them all. Of our own familiar ones several may be tracked among the snows of the Latins and the Greeks, and have sometimes been drawn from The Mines of the East; like decayed families which remain in obscurity, they may boast of a high lineal descent whenever they recover their lost title-deeds. The vulgar proverb, 'To carry coals to Newcastle,' local and idiomatic as it appears, however, has been borrowed and applied by ourselves; it may be found among the Persians; in the Bustan of Saadi, we have 'To carry pepper to Hindostan;' among the Hebrews, 'To carry oil to a city of olives;' a similar proverb occurs in Greek; and in Galland's Maxims of the East we may discover how many of the most common proverbs among us, as well as some of Joe Miller's jests, are of Oriental origin. The resemblance of certain proverbs in different nations must, however, be often ascribed to the identity of human nature; similar situations and similar objects have unquestionably made men think and act and express themselves alike. All nations are parallels of each other. Hence all collectors of proverbs complain of the difficulty of separating their own national proverbs from those which had crept into the language from others, particularly when nations have held much intercourse together. We have a copious collection of Scottish proverbs by Kelly; but this learned man was mortified at discovering that many, which he had long believed to have been genuine Scottish, were not only English, but French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, and Greek ones; many of his Scottish proverbs are almost literally expressed among the fragments of remote antiquity. It would have surprised him further had he been aware that his Greek originals were themselves but copies, and might have been found in D'Herbelot, Erpenius, and Golius, and in many Asiatic works, which have been more recently introduced to the enlarged knowledge of the European student, who formerly found his most extended researches limited by Hellenistic lore."

Perhaps the proverb from the apostolical writings in most frequent circulation, is the one which St. Paul has adopted from Menander, and which, as Dean Alford suggests, may have become, in the days of the apostle, a current commonplace: "Evil communications corrupt good manners."

"What stories are new?" asks Thackeray. "All types of all characters march through all fables." "Will it be believed," says Max Mueller, in his essay On the Migration of Fables, "that we, in this Christian country, and in the nineteenth century, teach our children the first, the most important lessons of worldly wisdom, nay, of a more than worldly wisdom, from books borrowed from Buddhists and Brahmans, from heretics and idolaters, and that wise words, spoken a thousand, nay, two thousand years ago, in a lonely village of India, like precious seed scattered broadcast all over the world, still bear fruit a hundred and a thousand fold in that soil which is the most precious before God and man, the soul of a child? No lawgiver, no philosopher has made his influence felt so widely, so deeply, and so permanently as the author of these children's fables. But who was he? We do not know. His name, like the name of many a benefactor of the human race, is forgotten."

"Our obligations to genius are the greater," says a British essayist, "because we are seldom able to trace them. We cannot mount up to the sources from which we derive the ideas that make us what we are. Few of my readers may have ever read Chaucer; fewer still the Principia of Newton. Yet how much poorer the minds of all my readers would be if Chaucer and Newton had never written! All the genius of the past is in the atmosphere we breathe at present."

The author of The Eclipse of Faith, in one of his intellectual visions, saw suddenly expunged--"remorselessly expunged"--from literature "every text, every phrase, which had been quoted from the Bible, not only in the books of devotion and theology, but in those of poetry and fiction." "Never before," he says, "had I any adequate idea of the extent to which the Bible had moulded the intellectual and moral life of the last eighteen centuries, nor how intimately it had interfused itself with the habits of thought and modes of expression; nor how naturally and extensively its comprehensive imagery and language had been introduced into human writings, and most of all where there had been most of genius. A vast portion of literature became instantly worthless, and was transformed into so much waste paper. It was almost impossible to look into any book of merit, and read ten pages together, without coming to some provoking erasures and mutilations, which made whole passages perfectly unintelligible. Many of the sweetest passages of Shakespeare were converted into unmeaning nonsense, from the absence of those words which his own all but divine genius had appropriated from a still diviner source. As to Milton, he was nearly ruined, as might naturally be supposed. Walter Scott's novels were filled with lacunae. I hoped it might be otherwise with the philosophers, and so it was; but even here it was curious to see what strange ravages the visitation had wrought. Some of the most beautiful and comprehensive of Bacon's Aphorisms were reduced to enigmatical nonsense."

A scholarly article upon Homeric Characters in and out of Homer, published in The London Quarterly, 1857, opens with this passage: "To one only among the countless millions of human beings has it been given to draw characters, by the strength of his own individual hand, in lines of such force and vigor that they have become from his day to our own the common inheritance of civilized man. That one is Homer. Ever since his time, besides finding his way even into the impenetrable East, he has found literary capital and available stock in trade for reciters and hearers, for authors and readers of all times and of all places within the limits of the western world. Like the sun, which furnishes with its light the courts and alleys of London, while himself unseen by their inhabitants, he has supplied with the illumination of his ideas millions of minds never brought into direct contact with his works, and even millions hardly aware of his existence."

One of the most eminent platform orators of the time has treated the habit of borrowing, in literature, in a most interesting manner. "Take," he said, "the stories of Shakespeare, who has, perhaps, written his forty-odd plays. Some are historical. The rest, two thirds of them, he did not stop to invent, but he found them. These he clutched, ready-made to his hand, from the Italian novelists, who had taken them before from the East. Cinderella and her Slipper is older than all history, like half a dozen other baby legends. The annals of the world do not go back far enough to tell us from where they first came. Bulwer borrowed the incidents of his Roman stories from legends of a thousand years before. Indeed, Dunloch, who has grouped the history of the novels of all Europe into one essay, says that in the nations of modern Europe there have been two hundred and fifty or three hundred distinct stories. He says at least two hundred of these may be traced, before Christianity, to the other side of the Black Sea. Even our newspaper jokes are enjoying a very respectable old age. Take Maria Edgeworth's essay on Irish bulls and the laughable mistakes of the Irish. The tale which Maria Edgeworth or her father thought the best is that famous story of a man writing a letter as follows: 'My dear friend, I would write you more in detail, more minutely, if there was not an impudent fellow looking over my shoulder reading every word.' ('No, you lie; I've not read a word you have written!') This is an Irish bull, still it is a very old one. It is only two hundred and fifty years older than the New Testament. Horace Walpole dissented from Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and thought the other Irish bull was the best--of the man who said, 'I would have been a very handsome man, but they changed me in the cradle.' That comes from Don Quixote, and is Spanish; but Cervantes borrowed it from the Greek in the fourth century, and the Greeks stole it from the Egyptians hundreds of years back. There is one story which it is said Washington has related of a man who went into an inn and asked for a glass of drink from the landlord, who pushed forward a wine-glass about half the usual size. The landlord said, 'That glass out of which you are drinking is forty years old.' 'Well,' said the thirsty traveler, contemplating its minute proportions, 'I think it is the smallest thing of its age I ever saw.' [The same story is told of Foote. Dining while in Paris with Lord Stormont, that thrifty Scotch peer, then ambassador, as usual produced his wine in the smallest of decanters, and dispensed it in the smallest of glasses, enlarging all the time on its exquisite growth and enormous age. "It is very little of its age," said Foote, holding up his diminutive glass.] That story as told is given as a story of Athens three hundred and seventy-five years before Christ was born. Why, all these Irish bulls are Greek--every one of them. Take the Irishman who carried around a brick as a specimen of the house he had to sell; take the Irishman who shut his eyes and looked into the glass to see how he would look when he was dead; take the Irishman that bought a crow, alleging that crows were reported to live two hundred years, and he meant to set out and try it; take the Irishman that met a friend who said to him, 'Why, sir, I heard you were dead.' 'Well,' says the man, 'I suppose you see I am not.' 'Oh, no,' says he, 'I would believe the man who told me a great deal quicker than I would you.' Well, these are all Greek. A score or more of them, of the parallel character, come from Athens."

The critics and scholiasts would have us believe that "we have no very credible account of Rome or the Romans for more than four hundred years after the foundation of the city; and that the first book of Livy, containing the regal period, can lay claim, when severely tested, to no higher authority than Lord Macaulay's Lays. Livy states that whatever records existed prior to the burning of Rome by the Gauls--three hundred and sixty-five years after its foundation--were then burnt or lost. We are left, therefore, in the most embarrassing uncertainty whether Tarquin outraged Lucretia; or Brutus shammed idiotcy, and condemned his sons to death; or Mutius Scaevola thrust his hand into the fire; or Curtius jumped into the gulf--if there was one; or Cloelia swam the Tiber; or Cocles defended a bridge against an army. We could fill pages with skeptical doubts of scholiasts, who would fain deprive Diogenes of his lantern and his tub, AEsop of his hump, Sappho of her leap, Rhodes of its Colossus, and Dionysius the First of his ear; nay, who pretend that Cadmus did not come from Phoenicia, that Belisarius was not blind, that Portia did not swallow burning coals, and that Dionysius the Second never kept a school at Corinth. Modern chemists have been unable to discover how Hannibal could have leveled rocks, or Cleopatra dissolved pearls with vinegar. A German pedant has actually ventured to question the purity of Lucretia."

Hayward (translator of Faust), in his article on Pearls and Mock Pearls of History, says, "We are gravely told, on historical authority, by Moore, in a note to one of his Irish Melodies, that during the reign of Bryan, King of Munster, a young lady of great beauty, richly dressed, and adorned with jewels, undertook a journey from one end of the kingdom to another, with a wand in her hand, at the top of which was a ring of exceeding great value; and such was the perfection of the laws and the government that no attempt was made upon her honor, nor was she robbed of her clothes and jewels. Precisely the same story is told of Alfred, of Frothi, King of Denmark, and of Rollo, Duke of Normandy. Another romantic anecdote, fluctuating between two or more sets of actors, is an episode in the amours of Emma, the alleged daughter of Charlemagne, who, finding that the snow had fallen thickly during a nightly interview with her lover, Eginhard, took him upon her shoulders, and carried him some distance from her bower, to prevent his footsteps from being traced. Unluckily, Charlemagne had no daughter named Emma or Imma; and a hundred years before the appearance of the chronicle which records the adventure, it had been related in print of a German emperor and a damsel unknown. The story of Canute commanding the waves to roll back rests on the authority of Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote about a hundred years after the Danish monarch. 'As for the greater number of the stories with which the ana are stuffed,' says Voltaire, 'including all those humorous replies attributed to Charles the Fifth and Henry the Fourth, to a hundred modern princes, you find them in Athenaeus and in our old authors.' Dionysius the tyrant, we are told by Diogenes of Laerte, treated his friends like vases full of good liquors, which he broke when he had emptied them. This is precisely what Cardinal de Retz says of Madame de Chevreuse's treatment of her lovers. There is a story of Sully's meeting a young lady, veiled, and dressed in green, on the back stairs leading to Henry's apartment, and being asked by the king whether he had not been told that his majesty had a fever and could not receive that morning, replied, 'Yes, sire, but the fever is gone; I have just met it on the staircase, dressed in green.' This story is told of Demetrius and his father. The lesson of perseverance in adversity taught by the spider to Robert Bruce is said to have been taught by the same insect to Tamerlane. 'When Columbus,' says Voltaire, 'promised a new hemisphere, people maintained that it did not exist; and when he had discovered it, that it had been known a long time.' It was to confute such detractors that he resorted to the illustration of the egg, already employed by Brunelleschi when his merit in raising the cupola of the cathedral of Florence was contested. The anecdote of Southampton reading The Faery Queen, whilst Spenser was waiting in the ante-chamber, may pair off with one of Louis XIV. As this munificent monarch was going over the improvements of Versailles with Le Notre, the sight of each fresh beauty or capability tempts him to some fresh extravagance, till the architect cries out that if their promenade is continued in this fashion it will end in the bankruptcy of the state. Southampton, after sending first twenty, and then fifty guineas, on coming to one fine passage after another, exclaims, 'Turn the fellow out of the house, or I shall be ruined.' On the morning of his execution, Charles I. said to his groom of the chambers, 'Let me have a shirt on more than ordinary, by reason the season is so sharp as probably may make me shake, which some observers will imagine proceeds from fear. I would have no such imputation; I fear not death.' As Bailly was waiting to be guillotined, one of the executioners accused him of trembling. 'I am cold,' was the reply. Frederick the Great is reported to have said, in reference to a troublesome assailant, 'This man wants me to make a martyr of him, but he shall not have that satisfaction.' Vespasian told Demetrius the Cynic, 'You do all you can to get me to put you to death, but I do not kill a dog for barking at me.' This Demetrius was a man of real spirit and honesty. When Caligula tried to conciliate his good word by a large gift in money, he sent it back with the message, 'If you wish to bribe me, you must send me your crown.' George III. ironically asked an eminent divine, who was just returned from Rome, whether he had converted the pope. 'No, sire, I had nothing better to offer him.' Cardinal Ximenes, upon a muster which was taken against the Moors, was spoken to by a servant of his to stand a little out of the smoke of the harquebuse, but he said again that 'that was his incense.' The first time Charles XII. of Sweden was under fire, he inquired what the hissing he heard about his ears was, and being told that it was caused by the musket-balls, 'Good,' he exclaimed, 'this henceforth shall be my music.' Pope Julius II., like many a would-be connoisseur, was apt to exhibit his taste by fault-finding. On his objecting that one of Michel Angelo's statues might be improved by a few touches of the chisel, the artist, with the aid of a few pinches of marble dust, which he dropped adroitly, conveyed an impression that he had acted on the hint. When Halifax found fault with some passages in Pope's translation of Homer, the poet, by the advice of Garth, left them as they stood, but told the peer that they had been retouched, and had the satisfaction of finding him as easily satisfied as his holiness. When Lycurgus was to reform and alter the state of Sparta, in the consultation one advised that it should be reduced to an absolute popular equality; but Lycurgus said to him, 'Sir, begin it in your own house.' Had Dr. Johnson forgotten this among Bacon's Apophthegms when he told Mrs. Macaulay, 'Madam, I am now become a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are upon an equal footing, and to give you an unquestionable proof, madam, that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit down and dine with us'?" Boswell once said, "A man is reckoned a wise man, rather for what he does not say, than for what he says: perhaps upon the whole Limbertongue speaks a greater quantity of good sense than Manly does, but Limbertongue gives you such floods of frivolous nonsense that his sense is quite drowned. Manly gives you unmixed good sense only. Manly will always be thought the wisest man of the two." Corwin, a brilliant wit and humorist of the Sydney Smith stamp, and in his time the greatest of American stump-orators, was often heard to say that his life was a failure, because he had not been, with the public, more successful in serious veins. A friend relates that he was riding with him one day, when Corwin remarked of a speech made the evening before, "It was very good indeed, but in bad style. Never make the people laugh. I see that you cultivate that. It is easy and captivating, but death in the long run to the speaker." "Why, Mr. Corwin, you are the last man living I expected such an opinion from." "Certainly, because you have not lived so long as I have. Do you know, my young friend, that the world has a contempt for the man that entertains it? One must be solemn--solemn as an ass--never say anything that is not uttered with the greatest gravity, to win respect. The world looks up to the teacher and down at the clown; yet, nine cases out of ten, the clown is the better fellow of the two." Sydney Smith is reported to have said to his eldest brother, a grave and prosperous gentleman: "Brother, you and I are exceptions to the laws of nature. You have risen by your gravity, and I have sunk by my levity." In one of Steele's Tatlers, Sancroft asked the question, why it was that actors, speaking of things imaginary, affected audiences as if they were real; whilst preachers, speaking of things real, could only affect their congregations as with things imaginary. Bickerstaff answered, "Why, indeed, I don't know; unless it is that we actors speak of things imaginary as if they were real, while you in the pulpit speak of things real as if they were imaginary." This answer, besides being borrowed by Betterton, has been credited to every famous actor since Steele printed it. Every reader of Charles Lamb remembers his amusing essay on the Origin of Roast Pig. The legend of the first act of oyster-eating is enough like it to remind one of it. It is related that a man, walking one day by the shore of the sea, picked up one of those savory bivalves, just as it was in the act of gaping. Observing the extreme smoothness of the interior of the shells, he insinuated his finger that he might feel the shining surface, when suddenly they closed upon the exploring digit, causing a sensation less pleasurable than he anticipated. The prompt withdrawal of his finger was scarcely a more natural movement than its transfer to his mouth, when he tasted oyster-juice for the first time, as the Chinaman in Elia's essay, having burnt his finger, first tasted cracklin. The savor was delicious,--he had made a great discovery; so he picked up the oyster, forced open the shells, banqueted upon the contents, and soon brought oyster-eating into fashion. Nothing, it is said, puzzled Bonaparte more than to meet an honest man of good sense; he did not know what to make of him. He would offer him money; if that failed, he would talk of glory, or promise him rank and power; but if all these temptations failed, he set him down for an idiot, or a half-mad dreamer. Conscience was a thing he could not understand. Rulhiere, who was at St. Petersburg in 1762, when Catherine caused her husband, Peter III., to be murdered, wrote a history of the transaction on his return to France, which was handed about in manuscript. The empress was informed of it, and endeavored to procure the destruction of the work. Madame Geoffrin was sent to Rulhiere to offer him a considerable bribe to throw it into the fire. He eloquently remonstrated that it would be a base and cowardly action, which honor and virtue forbade. She heard him patiently to the end, and then calmly replied, "What! isn't it enough?" Lord Orrery related as an unquestionable occurrence that Swift once commenced the service, when nobody except the clerk attended his church, with, "Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places." Mr. Theophilus Swift afterward discovered the anecdote in a jest-book which was published before his great kinsman was born. In Domenichi's Facetiae, and other old Italian books, there is this story of Dante. The famous poet, returning home one day out of the country, was overtaken by three gentlemen of Florence, his acquaintance; who, knowing how ready he was in his answers, they all three resolved, by way of proof, to make three successive attacks upon him in the following manner. The first said to him, "Good day, Master Dante;" the second, "Whence come you, Master Dante?" the third, "Are the waters deep, Master Dante?" To all of which, without once stopping his horse, or making the least pause, he answered thus: "Good day, and good year; From the Fair; To the very bottom." Not unlike this is a story of Henry IV. of France, who was overtaken upon the road by a clergyman that was posting to court; the king, putting his head out of his coach, asked the man in his hasty way, "Whence come ye? Whither go ye? What want ye?" The clergyman, without any ceremony or hesitation, made answer: "From Blois; To Paris; A benefice." With which the king was so well pleased, he instantly granted his request. It is related of Raphael, that one day, after he had begun the Galatea, and was already well advanced with it, while he was absent a visitor called to see him. The scaffoldings were around the room preparatory for the other decorations, and the visitor, after looking at the Galatea for a while, mounted the ladder, and with a fragment of charcoal drew a colossal head on the wall beneath the cornice. Raphael did not return, however, and after waiting for some time the visitor departed, refusing to give his name to the servant, but saying, "Show your master that, and he will know who I am." Some time after, Raphael came in, and on inquiring if any one had been there, his servant told him a small black-bearded man had been there and drawn a head on the wall by which he said he would recognize him. Raphael looked up, saw the head, and exclaimed, "Michel Angelo!" A similar story is told of Apelles and Protogenes. It is told by Pliny, and the point of it is, that Apelles, on arriving at Rhodes, immediately went to call upon Protogenes, who was then living here. Protogenes, however, was absent, and the studio was in charge of an old woman, who, after Apelles had looked at the pictures, asked the name of the visitor to give to her master on his return. Apelles did not answer at first, but observing a large black panel prepared for painting on an easel, he took up a pencil and drew an extremely delicate outline on it, saying, "He will recognize me by this," and departed. On the return of Protogenes, being informed of what had happened, he looked at the outline, and, struck by its extreme delicacy, exclaimed, "That is Apelles--no one else could have executed so perfect a work." An anecdote is told of Sir George Beaumont going in a coach to a tavern with a party of gay young men. The waiter came to the coach door with a light, and as he was holding this up to the others, those who had already got out went round, and getting in at the opposite coach-door came out again, so that there seemed to be no end to the procession, and the waiter ran into the house, frightened out of his wits. The same story is told of Swift and four clergymen dressed in canonicals. "Men of the world," says Goldsmith, in one of the papers of the Bee, "maintain that the true end of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them." How often, said Irving, is this quoted as one of the subtle remarks of the fine-witted Talleyrand! Every one remembers another familiar witty repartee attributed to the latter. When seated between Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier, and pouring forth gallantry, first at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de Stael suddenly asked him if she and Madame Recamier fell into the river, which of the two he would save first? "Madame," replied Talleyrand, "you could swim!" This pretty reply has been matched by Mrs. Jameson with one far prettier, and founded on it. Prince S. was one day loitering on the banks of the Isar, in the English garden at Munich, by the side of the beautiful Madame de V., then the object of his devoted admiration. For a while he had been speaking to her of his mother, for whom he had ever shown the strongest filial love and respect. Afterward, as they wandered on, he began to pour forth his soul to the lady of his love with all the eloquence of passion. Suddenly she turned and said to him, "If your mother and myself were both to fall into this river, whom would you save first?" "My mother," he instantly replied; and then, looking at her expressively, immediately added, "To save you first, would be as if I were to save myself first." There is yet another variation. Captain Morgan, with whom Leslie crossed the Atlantic, had a good story apropos to everything that happened, and Leslie has preserved a specimen of his amusing inventions. Single ladies often cross the water under the especial care of the captain of the ship, and if a love affair occurs among the passengers, the captain is usually the confidant of one or both parties. A very fascinating young lady was placed under Morgan's care, and three young gentlemen fell desperately in love with her. They were all equally agreeable, and the young lady was puzzled which to encourage. She asked the captain's advice. "Come on deck," he said, "the first day when it is perfectly calm,--the gentlemen will, of course, all be near you. I will have a boat quietly lowered down; then do you jump overboard, and see which of the gentlemen will be the first to jump after you. I will take care of you." A calm day soon came, the captain's suggestion was followed, and two of the lovers jumped after the lady at the same instant. But between these two the lady could not decide, so exactly equal had been their devotion. She again consulted the captain. "Take the man that didn't jump; he's the most sensible fellow, and will make the best husband." A sculptor relates an incident of General Scott, of whom he once made a bust. Having a fine subject to start with, he succeeded in giving great satisfaction. At the last sitting he attempted to refine and elaborate the lines and markings of the face. The general sat patiently; but when he came to see the result, his countenance indicated decided displeasure. "Why, sir, what have you been doing?" he asked. "Oh," answered the sculptor, "not much, I confess; I have been working out the details of the face a little more, this morning." "Details?" exclaimed the general warmly; "---- the details! Why, man, you are spoiling the bust!" Sir Joshua Reynolds once went with one of his pupils to see a celebrated painting. After viewing it for a while, the young man gave it as his deliberate opinion that the picture "needed finishing." "Finishing?" exclaimed Sir Joshua, a little impatiently; "finishing would only spoil the painting." Judge Rodgers related a death-bed incident of a neighbor of his,--a poor honest Scotsman, a woodsawyer,--whose admiration and solace, all through his hard life, had been Scotia's great poet. The good man, worn out and weary, was told by his physician that his last hour had come--that he must soon die. He received the announcement philosophically, and after naming a few things for which he expressed a desire to live, he said to the judge--about the last thing he said on earth, "Yes; for these things I should like to live; but--but--judge--(they had many a time read the poet together)--I shall see--Burns!" Socrates, upon receiving sentence of death, said, amongst other things, to his judges, "Is this, do you think, no happy journey? Do you think it nothing to speak with Orpheus, Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod?" "Shakespeare's Joan of Arc," says Hayward, "is a mere embodiment of English prejudice; yet it is not much further from the truth than Schiller's transcendental and exquisitely poetical character of the maid. The German dramatist has also idealized Don Carlos to an extent that renders recognition difficult; and he has flung a halo round William Tell which will cling to the name while Switzerland is a country or patriotism any better than a name. Yet more than a hundred years ago the eldest son of Haller undertook to prove that the legend, in its main features, is the revival or imitation of a Danish one, to be found in Saxo Grammaticus. The canton of Uri, to which Tell belonged, ordered the book to be publicly burnt, and appealed to the other cantons to cooperate in its suppression, thereby giving additional interest and vitality to the question, which has been at length pretty well exhausted by German writers. The upshot is that the episode of the apple is relegated to the domain of the fable; and that Tell himself is grudgingly allowed a commonplace share in the exploits of the early Swiss patriots. Strange to say, his name is not mentioned by any contemporary chronicler of the struggle for independence. Sir A. Callcott's picture of Milton and his Daughters, one of whom holds a pen as if writing to his dictation, is in open defiance of Dr. Johnson's statement that the daughters were never taught to write. There is the story of Poussin impatiently dashing his sponge against his canvas, and producing the precise effect (the foam on a horse's mouth) which he had been long and vainly laboring for; and there is a similar one told of Haydn, the musical composer, when required to imitate a storm at sea. He kept trying all sorts of passages, ran up and down the scale, and exhausted his ingenuity in heaping together chromatic intervals and strange discords. Still Curtz (the author of the libretto) was not satisfied. At last the musician, out of all patience, extended his hands to the two extremities of the keys, and, bringing them rapidly together, exclaimed, 'The deuce take the tempest; I can make nothing of it.' 'That is the very thing,' exclaimed Curtz, delighted with the truth of the representation. Neither Haydn nor Curtz had ever seen the sea. Sir David Brewster, in his life of Newton, says that neither Pemberton nor Whiston, who received from Newton himself the history of his first ideas of gravity, records the story of the falling apple. It was mentioned, however, to Voltaire by Catherine Barton, Newton's niece, and to Mr. Green by Mr. Martin Folkes, the President of the Royal Society. 'We saw the apple-tree in 1814, and brought away a portion of one of its roots.' The concluding remark reminds us of Washington Irving's hero, who boasted of having parried a musket bullet with a small sword, in proof of which he exhibited the sword a little bent in the hilt. The apple is supposed to have fallen in 1665. Father Prout (Mahony) translated several of the Irish Melodies into Greek and Latin verse, and then jocularly insinuated a charge of plagiarism against the author. Moore was exceedingly annoyed, and remarked to a friend who made light of the trick, 'This is all very well for your London critics; but, let me tell you, my reputation for originality has been gravely impeached in the provincial newspapers on the strength of these very imitations.'" Dr. Johnson's Latin translation of the Messiah was published in 1731, and Pope is reported to have said, "The writer of this poem will leave it a question for posterity, whether his or mine be the original." Trench, in a note to one of his Hulsean lectures, says, "There is a curious account of a fraud which was played off on Voltaire, connecting itself with a singular piece of literary forgery. A Jesuit missionary, whose zeal led him to assume the appearance of an Indian fakir, in the beginning of the last century forged a Veda, of which the purport was secretly to undermine the religion which it professed to support, and so to facilitate the introduction of Christianity--to advance, that is, the kingdom of truth with a lie. This forged Veda is full of every kind of error or ignorance in regard to the Indian religion. After lying, however, long in a Romanist missionary college at Pondicherry, it found its way to Europe, and a transcript of it came into the hands of Voltaire, who eagerly used it for the purpose of depreciating the Christian books, and showing how many of their doctrines had been anticipated by the wisdom of the East. The book had thus an end worthy of its beginning."