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HISTORY OF COURT FOOLS.

THE
HISTORY OF COURT FOOLS.

BY
DR. DORAN,

AUTHOR OF ‘TABLE TRAITS,’ ‘HABITS AND MEN,’ ‘LIFE OF YOUNG, THE POET,’
‘QUEENS OF THE HOUSE OF HANOVER,’ ‘KNIGHTS AND THEIR DAYS,’
‘MONARCHS RETIRED FROM BUSINESS,’ ETC.

LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET,
Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.
1858.

PRINTED BY
JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR, LITTLE QUEEN STREET,
LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.

TO
HEPWORTH DIXON,
THIS FRIENDLY HOMAGE
FROM
THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS.

THE
HISTORY OF COURT FOOLS.

THE FOOL,—OF LEGEND AND ANTIQUITY.

In the days of old, it happened that all Olympus was dull, and Zeus complained, yawning the while, that there was not a fool amongst the gods, with wit enough to keep the divine assembly alive, or to kill the members of it with laughter.

“Father,” said Mercury, “the sport that is lacking here, may be found for us all, on earth. Look at that broad tract of land between the Peneus and Aliacmon. It is all alive with folks in their holiday gear, enjoying the sunshine, eating sweet melons, singing till they are hoarse, and dancing till they are weary.”

“What then?” asked Jupiter.

“It would be rare sport, oh king of gods and men, to scatter all these gaily-robed revellers, and by a shower, spoil their finery.”

“Thou hast lived to little purpose in witty companionship, complacent son of Maia,” observed the Olympian, “if that be thy idea of sport. But thy thought is susceptible of improvement. Let that serene priest, who is fast asleep by the deserted shrine below, announce that a shower is indeed about to descend, but that it shall wet none but fools.”

A slight sound of thunder was heard, and the aroused servant of the gods stood in front of the altar, and made the requisite announcement to the people. There was a philosopher close by, leaning against the door-post of his modest habitation. He no sooner heard that the impending storm was to wet only the fools, than he first hastily covered his head, and next hurriedly entered his dwelling-place and shut himself up in his study. Not another individual prepared to avoid the tempest. Each man waited to see the fools drenched, and every man there was, in two minutes, wet to the very skin.

When the sun re-appeared, the philosopher walked out into the market-place. The thoroughly-soaked idiots, observing his comfortable condition, hailed the good man with the epithet of “fool.” They pelted him with sticks and stones, tore his gown, plucked his beard, and loaded him with foul terms that would have twisted the jaw of Aristophanes.

Bruised, battered, deafened, staggering, the philosopher nevertheless contrived to keep his wits. “Oh, sagacious asses!” said he to the roaring crowd, who at once sank into silence at the compliment paid to their wisdom, “have patience but for a single minute, and I will prove to you that I am not such a fool as I look.” Bending back his head, and turning the palms of his hands upwards to the sky, “Oh wise father,” he exclaimed, “of the witty and the witless, vouchsafe to send down upon me a deluge for my peculiar and individual use. Wet me to the skin even as these fools are wet. Constitute me, thereby, as great a fool as my neighbours; and enable me, in consequence, a fool, to live at peace among fools.”

At these words, the two assemblies,—of idiots below, and of Olympians above, shook with laughter, at once loud and inextinguishable. Down came the shower prayed for, upon the person of the philosopher, but peculiar influences were sent down with it, and the dripping sage rose from his knees ten times wittier than he was before.

Jupiter’s beard was yet wagging with laughter, and merry tears fell from the eyelids of Juno, whose head lay in frolicsome helplessness upon the bosom of her hilarious lord,—when the latter exclaimed, “We have spoiled that good fellow’s robe, but we will also make his fortune.”

“That is already accomplished,” remarked Juno. “I have just breathed into the ear of the chief of the district, and he is now taking the philosopher home with him, to be at once his diverter and instructor.”

At night, as all Olympus looked down into the court of the prince, near whom, at the banquet, the wise fool lay, pouring out witty truths as fast as his lips could utter them, the gods both envied the fun and admired the wisdom. “That fellow,” cried Jupiter, “shall be the founder of a race. Henceforward each court shall have its fool; and fools shall be, for many a long day, the preachers and admonishers of kings. Children,” he added, to the gods and goddesses, “let us drink his health!”

The brilliant society thus addressed could neither drink nor speak, for laughing. “Dear master,” said Hebe, as she took her place behind the monarch of divinities, who looked at her inquiringly, “they laugh, because you did not say fools, such as he, should henceforward furnish kings with funny counsel and comic sermons.”

“Let their majesties look to it,” answered Jove, “here’s a health to the first of fools!”

In the legend of the original jester, we cannot well pass over, without some brief illustration, the old, yet ever-young and especial mirth-maker of the court of Olympus itself, where Momus reigned, the joker of the gods. Perhaps I should rather say there he was tolerated, than that there he reigned. For there was this difference between the sublime immortals and weaker mortals,—that the former could never take a joke from their court fool without wincing, while the latter laughed the louder as the wit was sharper; for they wisely chose to applaud in such jesting,

“the sportive wit,
Which healed the folly that it deigned to hit.”

Not so, the irritable gods, with regard to Momus, who was, significantly enough, the Son of Night. Momus however cared nothing for the irritability of his august masters and mistresses. His ready wit pierced them all in turn; and the shafts of his ridicule excited many an absurd roar of anguish. When Minerva had built the house of which she was so proud, the Olympian fool at once detected the error made by the Goddess of Wisdom, and remarked, “Had I turned house-builder, I would have had a movable mansion.”

“Why so, you intellectual ass?” asked the lady, who was somewhat rough-tongued, and loved antithesis.

“Because,” answered the son of Nox, “I could then get away from bad neighbourhoods, and the vicinity of foolish women who consort with owls!”

Venus, clad in her usual attire, and proud in the conviction of her faultlessness, passed by Sir Momus, and turning gracefully in his presence, like Mademoiselle Rosati before a box-full of her admirers, defied him to detect a flaw in her unequalled and dazzling form.

Momus clapped his hands to his eyes, half-blinded by the lustre, and said, “It is true enough, Ourania,—you are not to be looked at without blinking; but before you executed that charming pirouette, I heard your foot-fall on the clouds. Now, a heavy-heeled beauty is not a vessel without a flaw.”

Save Venus herself, there was not a goddess within hearing, who did not laugh more or less loudly, at the fool’s censure. Vulcan, to draw off attention from the queen of love, and to gain a compliment for himself, directed the notice of Momus to the clay figure of a man which he had just executed. The critic looked at it for a moment, and turned away with a curl on his lip. “My man,” said he, “should have had a window in his chest. Through such a lattice, I could have looked in, not only upon his ailments, but his thoughts.”

“My bull here,” said Neptune, touching Momus with his trident, which at will he could extend from his own watery plain to the topmost point of Olympus,—“My bull here, of which I am the artist, is more perfect than our limping brother’s man.”

“The beast would have been more perfect still,” cried Momus, from his cradle in the clouds, “if he had had eyes nearer his horns. He would strike more surely than he can now. Leave making bulls, oh son of Ops, to your children in Ierne,—though, even their bulls shall be as laughable as your own.”

In this way the Fool of the Olympian Court treated without reserve the illustrious company, whom he fearlessly mocked and censured. They never bore the censure well; and, ultimately, they rose and ejected him from Heaven. With a mask in one hand, and a small carved figure in the other, he lightly fell to Earth. “You see I come from the skies,” said the crafty fellow to the staring crowds that gathered round him, “and therefore am worthy of welcome and worship.”

How could the poor people know that he had been kicked out from Olympus? They raised an altar, hoisted the celestial exile above it, danced round it like fools, and went home shouting, “Vive la Folie!”

To pretend to show the moral of my story, would be to insult the good sense of my readers.

It is singular that the successor of Momus, as brewer of laughter to the gods, was Vulcan, and that he also was kicked out from Olympus. On the ninth day of his descent he came in sight of Lemnos, where the people, without stopping to think whether they were about to receive a precious gift or a rejected waif from Heaven, stretched out their arms to catch him. It is not everything that seems to come from above, that is divine.

And mark!—Since Momus fell, Folly has never left the Earth. But Vulcan taught men to labour; and the founder of industry, the great doer of a good work, was reconciled with Heaven. And Olympus did not continue without its fools, near or afar. The dances of Silenus, the lumbering grace of Polyphemus, and the coarse jokes of Pan, were provocatives of the empty laughter of the gods; and roystering dances, lumbering graces, and coarse jokes became the stock in trade of fools of later years and of more mortal mould.

They who will take the trouble to recall the incidents in the personal history of many of the philosophers of old, will not fail to perceive that, in many cases, they fulfilled the duties which were performed, much less efficiently, perhaps, by the official fools at modern courts. They appear to have exercised, generally with impunity, a marvellous license of speech, and to have communicated disagreeable truths to tyrants who would not have accepted an unpleasant inuendo from an ordinary courtier, without rewarding it with torture or death. This very rudeness of speech, on the part of many philosophers, to princes who were their patrons, was the distinguishing feature of the modern jester. In this respect they were sometimes imitated by the poets, who occasionally indulged in the criminal folly of making execrable puns; so early do we find an illustration of the remark of Ménage, that in all times the court poet was accounted as being also the court fool. Indeed, we shall see, under the head of French Jesters, a whole flock of royal poets vying with each other to receive the patent of King’s Fool, on the death of the official who had just departed full of honours and “doubles entendres.”

I believe that a volume might be very respectably filled with illustrations of the identity of philosopher, or poet, and fool,—in the sense of licensed court wit. My readers will probably be satisfied with a few rather than with a volume-full of proofs. Thus, it will be remembered that it was rather a perilous matter to joke with or to convey rough truths to the mind of the great Alexander. But his favourite philosopher, the light-hearted Anaxarchus, was able to do both, with impunity. What a necessary but disagreeable truth did he impress on his royal master, when the latter was bleeding from a recently received wound. “Ah!” exclaimed the philosopher, pointing to the place, “that shows that, after all, you are only a man, and not a god, as people call you, and as you would like to believe.”

Alexander only smiled at this very sufficient little sermon, and did not resent what perhaps he considered as amusing ignorance. It is remarkable, however, that as in less remote days we meet with potentates who could not tolerate the free-spoken court fool, so in those earlier times we find “tyranni,” who were utterly unable to digest a joke or a reproach. Now the speech of Anaxarchus was utterly disgusting to the mind and feelings of Nicocreon of Salamis, who happened to be present when it was uttered. What the philosopher’s especial patron chose to take without discerning offence in it, it was not for Nicocreon to resent; but he never forgot or forgave it. Alexander was hardly dead when Nicocreon contrived to get Anaxarchus into his power, and he ordered that the philosopher should be pounded to death in a mortar, “Pound away! pound away!” exclaimed the heroic fellow, as the iron hammers were reducing him to pulp, “it’s only my body! you cannot pound my soul!” Nicocreon told him that if he were not more silent and less saucy, his tongue should be cut out. To show how little Anaxarchus cared for the threat, he bit his tongue in two, and spat the mangled piece into the face of the tyrant.

There, indeed, his wit may be said to have failed him, and he acted with less presence of mind than the philosopher Zeno, when the latter was in a precisely similar situation. When the inventor of dialectics lay nearly bruised to death under the pestles of the executioners employed by Nearchus, he called the latter to him as if he had something of importance to communicate. Nearchus bent over the lip of the mortar to listen, and Zeno, availing himself of his opportunity and his excellent teeth, bit off the ear of the tyrant close to his head. Hence “a biting remark, like that of Zeno,” passed into a proverb.

In a later page, it will be seen how the famous jester, Gonella, had the boldness of speech, but lacked the boldness of soul, of Anaxarchus and Zeno. There was a saying of Gonella’s that very nearly resembles one of Hippias, a free-spoken philosopher of Elis, who pleasantly made virtue consist in the entire freedom of man from all and every sort of dependence upon his fellow-men. Again, in Anaximenes,—not that philosopher who maintained that the stars were the heads of bright nails driven into the solid concave of the sky, but the pupil of Diogenes,—we find a parallel with Chicot, the celebrated jester of the French Kings Henry III., the last Valois, and Henry IV., the first Bourbon. Both were occasionally engaged in affairs of political importance, and Anaximenes, on one of these occasions, did capital service to his employers. Lampsacus was being besieged by Alexander. It had nobly resisted; but, unable to hold out any longer, the authorities deputed the philosopher to make terms with the besieger. As soon as the latter beheld Anaximenes, guessing his errand, he exclaimed, in a burst of foolish rage, “I entirely refuse, beforehand, to grant what you are about to ask.” Chicot used to call Henry III. a “simpleton,” but Anaximenes only laughed pleasantly in the face of Alexander, as he said, “May it please your irresistible godship, the favour then which I have to ask is, that you will destroy the city of Lampsacus, enslave the citizens, and ruin their delegate who stands before you.” The conqueror laughed in his turn, and well rewarded the ready wit of a man who was for some years attached to his person.

The poets were not less free than the philosophers. When King Antigonus once caught his favourite Rhodian poet, Antagoras, cooking fish, he asked the bard whether Homer condescended to dress meals while he aspired to register the deeds of Agamemnon. “I cannot say,” answered the Rhodian, “but I very strongly believe this, that the king did not trouble himself as to whether any man in his army boiled fish or left it alone!”

The boldness of some of the old poets was quite on a par with their wit. Their absolute freedom of speech, like that of their official successors, the fools, was as useful and fearless as the modern freedom of the press. There were very few of the parasites and jesters of Dionysius who would venture to tell that disagreeable person beneficial truths. Antiphon, his poet, was an exception. The monarch once asked him, “What brass was the best?” and Antiphon answered, “That of which the statues of Aristogiton and Harmodius were made.” Considering that these were two patriots who rescued Athens from the tyranny of the Pisistratidæ, the answer was as daring as it was witty. Dionysius disregarded the wit, and resented the audacity;—in a sneaking way, however, for he put Antiphon to death because he refused to praise the writings of the despot. In one respect, Dionysius was like Cardinal Richelieu, he looked with spiteful feelings on every man who ventured to doubt his ability for writing tragedies. But in another sense, the “tyrannus” was superior to the cardinal, for he at least wrote his own tragedies, whereas those of Richelieu were written for him by his buffoon, Boisrobert, who might well afford to praise them. For a better reason than that which induced Richelieu to patronize Boisrobert (who, buffoon as he was, founded the French Academy), Philadelphus patronized the comic poet Aristonymus, whom the king made Keeper of the Library at Alexandria, and who kept the king in good humour by his joyous conversation. Aristonymus did not forget that he held a double office; and as the Bards censured as well as commended the behaviour of the people, so he scattered eulogy or blame on the conduct of his patron, according to the latter’s deserts.

We shall find, in subsequent pages, instances of kings going into mourning on the death of their fools, and of the royal patrons raising tombs to them. In ancient times we also have instances of a whole people cherishing their poets quite as fondly as some monarchs did their jesters. I will only cite the case of Eupolis, that comic poet of Athens, whose unlicensed wit was so very little to the taste of Alcibiades, and who ultimately perished in a naval engagement between the Athenians and the Lacedemonians. His countrymen were so afflicted at losing a man whose wit and poetry were as new life to them, that they passed a decree whereby it was ordered that no poet should ever afterwards go to war. Artaxerxes did not mourn more truly for his witty but then deceased slave Tiridates, than the Athenians mourned for Eupolis. But Artaxerxes did not mourn half so long. He sat weeping, indeed, for three days, but he found consolation when Aspasia offered her ivory shoulder to support his aching head. So Henry II., of France, mourned for his dead jester Thony, even commissioning Ronsard to write his epitaph, but forgetting poet, fool, and epitaph in contemplating the mature beauty of Diana of Poictiers.

Less forgetful of a favourite dead wit was the patron of the comic poet, Timocreon of Rhodes; famous alike for his sharp appetite and verses, and for his power of pouring out wit and pouring in wine. It was a brother wit who would not venture to praise him, but who contrived to make the dead jester censure, by celebrating, himself in the apparently autograph lines,

“Multa bibens, et multa vorans, mala denique dicens
Multis, hîc jaceo Timocreon Rhodius.”

“Having drunk much, eaten much, and spoken much evil, here I lie, Timocreon of Rhodes.” This heathen jester lived nearly five centuries before the Christian era; I might perhaps, had I a right to act “Censor,” suggest that his epitaph would not be unsuitable over many a serious but defunct gentleman, born since that era commenced.

Let me rather do justice to the wit and independence of the old poets, generally. While doing so, I cannot but add my conviction that the philosophers were, on the whole, more independent in their jests than the poets. When Apollonius repaired from Chalcis to Rome, to become the tutor of Marcus Antoninus, he refused to go to the palace at all, saying that it was fitter for the pupil to come to the house of the instructor than for the latter to go to the dwelling of the pupil. The imperial hint, good-humouredly conveyed, that he had himself commenced this latter process by repairing from Chalcis to Rome, could not move him.

It has been usual, and Flögel[A] has done it, among others, to rank the elder Aristippus among the ancient court wits. Inasmuch as that he was the chief flatterer of Dionysius of Sicily, and loved Epicurean voluptuousness, the founder of the Cyrenaic sect may be allowed to pass under that title, but he had little in common with the court jester of more modern times. He was as different from the latter in some respects, as he was from Crassus, the grandfather of Crassus the Rich, who according to Pliny was never known to laugh,—not even when his best friend broke his thigh.

It is certain that Dionysius treated his flatterers as later sovereigns did their official jesters,—allowing for the difference of manners, morals, and customs. The poor jester whose head was placed on the executioner’s block by the sportive order of the ducal sovereign of Ferrara, proved indeed to be even worse off than the parasite Damocles, when Dionysius seated him on his throne, beneath an unsheathed sword suspended from a horse-hair.

Again, the freedom which the court fool subsequently held by right of office, we find fearlessly exercised by the philosophic Demochares, the Athenian ambassador, who being asked, by King Philip of Macedonia, to whom he was sent, what the king could do to most gratify the Athenians, replied, “The most gratifying thing you could do would be to hang yourself.” The courtiers murmured with indignation, but Philip dismissed the envoy, with the remark, that he hoped the Athenians would perceive he had more wit than their representative, seeing that he could take with indifference such a joke as that flung at him by Demochares.

There are two philosophers whose names now occur to me, and of whom some erroneous notions appear to be entertained by their posterity;—Heraclitus and Democritus. We picture them as “Jean qui pleure” and “Jean qui rit,” looking on the first as made up of groans, and the latter of gaiety. The fact however is, that Heraclitus, though given, as any man might be, at any period, who thought of the matter, to weep over the wickedness of the world, made that world laugh heartily by his rough answers to the polite invitations of Darius, who would fain have had him at the Persian court. Heraclitus and Darius remind me of Brusquet and Charles V. Democritus, too, was a different man from what he is generally thought to have been. He laughed, indeed, but it was at the follies of mankind; and he did not disdain, like the weeping Ephesian, to figure at the court of Darius. There is one sample of his wit there, which is better than anything ever uttered by Bertholdo, the philosophic buffoon at the court of Alboin, King of the Lombards. Darius was inconsolable for the loss of his wife, declaring that he was the only man who had ever known real adversity. “And I will raise the queen from the dead in a few minutes,” said Democritus, “if I only——” “If you only, what?” impatiently exclaimed Darius, interrupting him. “If I only can find three individuals who have passed through life without adversity of some sort, and whose names I will engrave on the queen’s monument.” Darius knew the case was hopeless, and mournfully smiled. If he had given a small estate to the witty philosopher, the latter would have deserved it quite as well as the Joculatores of our first William and John, whose wit or wisdom was rewarded by raising them to the very pleasant condition of holders of land.

It is said of some of the German jesters that they occasionally lived on the people of the town, with the lord of which they resided in exercise of their office. A parallel to this may be met with in the annals of the philosophers, in the person of Demonax, who, leaving to his patrons to clothe and lodge him, boarded himself in a very facetious and economical way, by entering the first house, after he felt himself hungry, and there fully satisfying his appetite. But Demonax belonged to a lower class of the order of philosophers, as some later fools did to that of the general order of their profession. There was as much difference between Demonax and Socrates, as there was between Sibilot, as described by Huguenot authors, and our own light and noble-hearted Will Sommers. The happiest idea one can have of Socrates is that of seeing him in the studio of his father Sophroniscus, carving that group of the three Graces, the simplicity and elegance of which excited universal admiration. He was ever the same,—a rough labourer patiently and certainly creating beauty. In him we fail to discern anything of the mere unlicensed jester. The Platonic and the Xenophontic Socrates may be said equally, though in different ways and measures, to challenge admiration. Leaving the philosopher, to encounter him again presently, let us look over antiquity for traces of the fool in people as in individuals.

Among the ancients, perhaps the Tirynthians had the reputation of being the very merriest of fools. Theophrastus is cited by Athenæus in proof of this. Those people of Argolis were so continually merry that they at last got tired of it, and applied to the oracle at Delphos to save them from being any longer such joyous simpletons.

“You shall be cured,” said the oracular authority, “if after sacrificing an ox to Neptune, you can throw the carcase into the sea, without laughing.”

“That will be easy enough,” said the Tirynthians, laughing all the while, “if we can only keep children away from the sacred fire.”

Of course, however, an enfant terrible managed to be present at the show. He was no sooner discovered than the now solemn Tirynthians began to drive him away, lest he should laugh or raise laughter during the ceremony, by some childish remark or question.

“What are you afraid of?” asked the sprightly lad,—“that I should upset the dish” (and he pointed to the sea) “that is to hold your beef?”

Poor as the joke was, it so tickled the fancy of the Tirynthians, that they laughed till their sides ached; and so they remained merry fools for ever. No jester, at a royal table, was ever so highly esteemed as an uproariously gay buffoon from this old city of Hercules—roystering Tirynthia.

The Tirynthians were never excelled, except by the people of Phæstum, who, by all other Cretans, were reckoned as the first jesters in the world. In the days of those merry fellows, it may be observed, that the cleverest of them had to exercise their vocation on melancholy occasions. When Petronius Arbiter was committing slow suicide by alternately opening and closing his veins, nothing excited him to more laughter than the sharply comic epigrams uttered by the jokers who stood around him.

Under the cloak of folly, good service has been rendered by wise men. By feigning want of wit, the elder Brutus saved himself to save his country; revenged a wrong, and converted regal Rome into a republic. We have another notable instance in the case of Solon, who, when the Athenian law forbade mention of the subject of Salamis, that island which gave Athens such an infinite world of trouble, assumed the bearing of one out of his wits, and, in better verse than a fool could have indited, told truths that led to great consequences, and exhibited the patriotic courage and humour of the celebrated sage. Assuredly Solon was no fool, for he refused to be a king, and he invented taxation. I will revert for a moment to Aristippus, the lover of Laïs, and the flatterer of Dionysius,—the rosy philosopher who only cared for the present moment, but who had of the jester only his liberty of speech. When thrust into an inferior seat at table, and being asked, if he liked it as well as his higher place of the day before: “Ay, truly,” said he to Dionysius; “for the place I held yesterday, I despise today, since I hold it no longer. I honoured the seat, the seat did not honour me. So, today’s seat, which, yesterday, was without dignity, because I was not in it, is now dignified by holding me.” The court laughed; but the wit and the wisdom of the speech seem to be of the very mildest nature.

That the ancients carried their idea of “fooling” too far, may be seen in the fact that, as Sir Thomas Brown observes, “some drew provocatives of mirth from anatomies, and jugglers showed tricks with skeletons.” It was not any reverend gentleman or philosopher who improved the occasion of Egyptian feasts, by showing a model mummy, but a light-hearted slave who exhibited the ivory effigy to the garlanded guests with, “Behold what we must all come to!” Antiquity went further than this in its patronage of the fool. In the funeral train, followed the arch-mime lately retained by the deceased patrician; and it was this good fellow’s business to keep the mourners merry, by imitations of the speech, gesture, and manners of the deceased himself. Of this custom, the author last-named rightly says, that “it was too light for such solemnities, contradicting their funeral orations and doleful rites of the grave.” The mourners must have been sadly in want of the extract of Cachunde or Liberans, which was once a famous and highly magnified composition, used in the East Indies, to drive away melancholy.

How highly mirth was accounted of, even in grave sport, is proved by one fact,—that Lycurgus raised an image of Laughter, and caused it to be worshipped as a God. He loved, he said, to see people merry at feasts and assemblies.

Of the professional wit, we find a trace in a curious custom of Roman gentlemen. When these discovered that learning and wit began to be in more general estimation than arms or wealth, the clever fellows among them got on well enough, and setting their minds to discipline, became the favoured guests at the most brilliant parties. The dull millionaires were rather nettled at this, but they fell upon an exquisite plan to be on an equality with their sparkling rivals. They had neither wit nor learning themselves, but they purchased slaves, and especially Greek slaves, who possessed both. Had they to attend an assembly where philosophy was most in fashion, they took with them their more learned bondsmen; but was the evening expected to be mirthful, then the stolid owners ordered the slaves with comic dispositions and merry turns of thought and expression, to accompany them. These delightful fellows were ever welcome, and when their sallies produced explosions of laughter and applause, their masters stroked their beards complacently, and assumed a modest composure, as if they had said all the good things uttered by their serfs.

Like the fools of later ages, these jesters were the more acceptable, because they helped mortal man to kill Time. When society was without books, it learned what it could, and amused itself as it might, by the help of philosophers, minstrels, or jesters. Printing, indeed, killed neither mirth, music, nor philosophy; but the decline of the profession of the hired fool certainly began at the period of the discovery of printing.

I might find opportunity here of saying something touching the office of the parasite, as a jester; but I have treated that subject at such length, in my “Table Traits,” that I will rather refer my readers to that little volume than repeat what is said in it, here. I may notice, however, in addition, that the old classical, professional jesters, in Athens, had the privilege of entering any company, without invitation. Plautus, therefore, calls them “Flies.” The parasite was of this profession, and there was not much civility vouchsafed towards him, if he was of the class that did not wait to be invited. The host would rudely order him to play the fool for the amusement of the company; to whom he narrated all the jokes he could remember, and when his memory ran dry, he would ignobly descend to read them from manuscripts. Maître Guillaume, a fool at the court of Henri IV., did much the same. The parasite was interested personally, as well as pecuniarily, in amusing his hearers, for if he failed to do so, they had no hesitation in rising, kicking his seat from under him, raining blows upon his body, breaking the dishes upon his head, and, fixing a rope, or collar, round his neck, flinging him headlong into the street.

Xenophon, in his account of the banquet at the marine villa of Callias, affords us an excellent idea of the person and merits of the professional buffoon. The name of the latter is Philip. This fool by vocation, when all the gentlemen are at supper, knocks at the door, and with a rollicking sort of impudence, says to the servant who opens it, “Here we are! the gentlemen need not deliberate about letting me in to supper. I am provided with everything necessary for doing so, for nothing. My bay horse is tired with carrying nothing in his stomach, and I am quite as weary with running about to see how I can best fill my own.” And then forcing his way in, he raises a laugh, by exclaiming—“Gentlemen, you all know me and my professional privilege. But I have come uninvited, chiefly because I have an aversion from ceremony, and a disinclination to put you to the trouble of a formal invitation.”

Callias remarks, “We must not refuse him his dish;” and the host then welcomes the jester, by bidding him take place; for serious conversation has made the guests dull, and they will be glad of an opportunity to indulge in laughter.

Philip cut a thousand jokes without being able to tickle his hearers into laughter; and it was only when he affected to be broken-hearted and about to die with shame at his ill-success or their dulness, that they promised to try and find something risible in his professional mirth. And this must have been a very sorry joke indeed.

The best, perhaps the only tolerable scintillation of wit struck out by the “laughter-maker,” is to be found, after the circus-girl who accompanies the Syracusan showman has leaped through the hoop in which knives are planted with every point towards the passing leaper. Philip has then a fling at an Athenian alderman who belonged to the Peace-party of his day:—“Ah!” he exclaims, “what pleasure should I enjoy to see Pisander, that grave counsellor, taking lessons from this girl; he that is ready to swoon away at the sight of a lance, and says it is a barbarous cruel custom to go to war and kill men!” This is not extremely lively, but it is at least as good a joke as when he says to Socrates, on the assertion of the philosopher that he intended to dance: “Well, I believe your thighs and shoulders are of the same weight; and that if you put the one into one scale, and the other into another, just as the constable weighs bread in the market-place, you will not be in danger of being forfeited, so justly poised will be the respective weights.” And, therewith, the buffoon expresses a desire to dance with Socrates, and begins awkwardly imitating the previous graceful dancing of the girl, raising peals of mirth from the little company of nobles and sages, and ending, heated and panting, with a sly look towards the slaves standing in grim repose before the board on which was placed the wine. With a sly remark, he wishes they were like coachmen, who are the more prized for being quick in their driving and dexterous in turning. This remark, of course, sets the wine-bearers rapidly moving towards Philip and among the company generally.

This professional fool, it is to be observed, is proud of his profession. “I suppose you value yourself,” says Lycon, “on your power to make men laugh?”

“Ay, truly,” answers Philip;—“and have I not better reason for being proud of this, than the finical Callipides of piquing himself at making men weep at his tragic verses in the theatre?—Proud of my trade!” he subsequently exclaims, “oh, oh, I should think so; for see you, when people are in the way of good fortune, they invite me to their houses; but when misfortune or misery falls upon them, they carefully avoid meeting me.” Nicerates is struck by the remark, for he is one of those men whose friends, ruined by their extravagance, expect him to extricate them from their difficulties. He sighs, when he compares his own condition with that of the fool, whose vocation at this renowned banquet terminates by a taste of his craft, when he approvingly winks to the Syracusan, and, after his fashion, says Amen to that lucky showman’s prayer, soliciting the gods to send plenty of everything, wherever he came, save of judgment and good sense.

This is his last joke, for Socrates grows weary of him and of his chattering. “But it is not proper,” says Philip, a little nettled, “that we should be silent at a feast.”

“Very true,” replies the philosophic son of a statuary and a midwife, “but it is also true that it is better to be silent than say what it were more profitable to leave unsaid.” And this very strong hint extinguishes the jester.

It is impossible to read the graphic sketch by Xenophon, taking it as a faithful account of an actual scene, without feeling wonder that an intellectual party, like the one depicted, should need, or should tolerate, such aids to enjoyment as those professed to be afforded by the buffoon and the mountebank with his pretty dancing-girl and ballet company. The wit and the wisdom are all on the side of the gentlemen, and of Socrates in particular, who, to do him justice, is quite as merry as he is wise. His wit sparkles throughout the banquet, and perhaps a hecatomb of witty fools would never have bethought themselves of giving a description so graceful, so touching, and so true, of the rich uses and the vast abuses of wine, as Socrates does at this very party. Nor is stately Xenophon himself without his joke,—as though moved by the fact of his dealing here with jesters. “When the little ballet of ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ was played out,” says the author, “the company found it so natural in its pantomime, that they became convinced of what had not previously entered their minds, namely that the youth and girl who had represented the chief characters were actually in love with one another. This,” adds Xenophon, “caused the guests who were married, and some who were not, to mount their horses forthwith, and ride full speed to Athens, with the briskest resolutions imaginable.” But while the husbands went home to greet their spouses, and lovers to pay homage to their respective Lalages, some stayed behind—Socrates was of the number—and these “went a-walking with Lycon, Autolicus, and Callias.” But the fool went not with the philosopher, the nobles, and the young Autolicus, who had won a prize at the Olympic Games,—and, consequently, we must keep in the company with which we are bound to journey.

This species of company was not equally pleasant to all men. Athenæus tells us that the Scythian Anacharsis was once present at a banquet, at which a number of professional fools did their office so drolly, that every one laughed,—save the Scythian. Presently, a monkey was introduced, and at this animal’s singular tricks, Anacharsis laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks. As some surprise was expressed at this, by the company, the Scythian justified himself by remarking,—“The monkey is comic and risible by nature, and without effort; but man is so only by art and affectation.” In a similar sense, Athenæus quotes a passage from Euripides, in which the poet says:—“There are numerous people who study the art of raising laughter by witty speeches and sparkling repartees. For my part, I hate these elaborate buffoons, whose unrestrained tongue spares not the wise, and whom, indeed, I do not reckon worthy of being accounted among ‘men.’”

In the days of King Philip, the Macedonian, whenever a man told an extremely witty story, he was pretty sure to be met with the remark, “Ah, that comes from the Sixty.” It was as much as doubting the originality of the wit. “The Sixty” was, in fact, a club of wits. They met in Athens, not at a tavern, but in the temple of Hercules. We should as soon expect to hear of a convivial body of wits assembling every Saturday night in “Rowland Hill’s Chapel.” They were fellows who had the very highest opinion of their own abilities, for they regularly entered in a book all the witticisms of the evening. This was, probably, the very first jest-book ever put together. To listen to it, when the Secretary took it with him to private parties, must have been an antepast of ‘Punch.’ The precious book has perished, but Athenæus has preserved the names of a few of the members, which, however, are not worth repeating, though it may be stated, that the owners had also nicknames; and one tall, clever, nimble fellow, Callimedes, was familiarly hailed by his fellow-clubbists as “the Grasshopper.” Philip heard of this merry, social, witty company, and longing to know more of them, their sayings and doings, he did not indeed invite them to his distant court, but he sent them a talent (nearly £200 sterling), and requested the loan of the last volume of the transactions of the “Sixty Club.” The book was duly despatched; and perhaps the loan of a volume was never paid for at so high a rate: the authors thus played the part of court fools by deputy. Their jokes were stereotyped, and had a long and merry life of it. It was useless for any man to fire one off as his own, for the source was instantly discovered, and the company would derisively call out, “An Old Sixty!” just as dull retailers of faded jests are suppressed, in our own day, by the cry of, “An Old Joe!”

Philip is said to have possessed his own court fool in Clisophus. Flögel says, that the latter excited shouts of laughter by his imitations of his royal master’s style, voice, manner, and even infirmities. But, according to Athenæus, Clisophus seems to have been a parasite, who imitated his patron out of flattery, and did not mimic him in order to excite risibility. At other courts there were mimics who played the fool before their sovereign lords, by caricatured imitations of fencers, singers, and even orators,—especially of their defects. The most celebrated, perhaps, was Herodotus, a burly namesake of the father of history, who kept the court of Antiochus ever merry by his mimicry, and who was named, par excellence, Logomimus.

The fools and the philosophers were not always identical, and they often came in contact, as was to be expected. We have an instance in the buffoon Satyrion, named by Lucian, and the grave Alcidamas, who wrote a treatise on death. The sage could not tolerate the fun and the Egyptian accent of the ugly and close-cropped fool; and when the latter called the man of wisdom a “lap-dog,” the philosopher challenged him to single combat. Some of the guests were ashamed, and some laughed, to see sciolist and sage heartily belabouring each other; but the laughter was universal when the philosopher, beaten to a mummy, confessed himself vanquished, and afterwards stood as mute as a courtesan in a Greek play.

Socrates (as I have previously remarked) is said, by more than one writer, ancient and modern, to have united in his own person the philosopher and the fool. His ugliness, deformity, and uncouthness,—his childish play, his extravagant dancing, his inclination to laugh at everything,—all these and more have been cited as foundations for reckoning him among the jesters. Zeno, according to Cicero, especially styled him the “Athenian buffoon,” which was probably meant for a compliment. The best description of him is that of Alcibiades, in Plato, who says that Socrates resembled the large images of Silenus, which were filled with little statuettes of the gods. Flögel rejects the picture of Socrates, represented by Aristophanes in the ‘Clouds,’ as “suspicious.” But Socrates has nothing of the fool in him in that play, except that he is represented as proprietor of the Thinking-Shop, and deriving powers of humbug and circumlocution, from the clouds. In this play, the recognized freedom of the fool, as regards liberty of speech at the expense of the audience, is exercised by the characters “Just Cause” and “Unjust Cause,” as the following sample will show:—

“Unj. Now, then, tell me: from what class do the lawyers come?

“Just. From the blackguards.

“Unj. Very good! And the public speakers?

“Just. Oh, from the blackguards, also.

“Unj. ——And now look; which class most abounds among the audience?

“Just. I am looking.

“Unj. But what do you see?

“Just. By all the gods, I see more blackguards than anything else. That fellow, I particularly know; and him yonder; and that blackguard with the long hair.”

The above was the true license of the fool, in the professional use of the term; and the Athenian blackguards only laughed to hear themselves thus distinguished.

The above is among the boldest of the personal assaults made by Aristophanes against the vices or failings of his countrymen. He claimed the privileges of Comedy, as the Fool did those of his cap and bells. This he does, especially in ‘The Acharnians,’ when Dicæopolis, looking straight at the audience, says, “Think nothing the worse of me, Athenian gentlemen, if, although I am a beggar, I hazard touching on your affairs of state, in comic verse; for even comedy knows what is proper, and, if you find me sharp, you shall also find me just.” Still nearer did the poet come to the license of the jester, when, in ‘The Knights,’ he himself turns actor as well as author, and so dressed, looked, and mimicked, without once employing the name of, the great demagogue whom he was satirizing, that every spectator recognized the well-known Cleon. The same author’s attack on the litigious spirit of the Athenians, in his ‘Wasps,’ is another instance of what I am attempting to illustrate. This is more particularly the case when he makes his characters address themselves immediately to the audience, as may be supposed to occur in the Parabasis of the last-named piece. Here the satirist bids the audience to provide themselves with clearer understandings, if they would enjoy the poets thoroughly. “Henceforth, good gentlemen,” are his words, “have more love and regard for such of your poets as treat you to something original. Preserve their sayings, and keep them in your chests with your apples. If you do this, there will be a scent of cleverness from your clothes, that shall last you through a whole year.” In his ‘Peace,’ the finest touch of satire is not in what is said, but in what is left unsaid; for the goddess whose name gives a title to the piece, never once opens her mouth. The licensed jester appears as broadly in the author’s dealings with the gods, whose place in Heaven is represented as occupied by the Demon of War, who is engaged in braying the Greek States in a stupendous mortar. The daring of the author, as exercised in pelting the gods themselves with jokes, is still more flagrant in ‘The Birds,’ where he burlesques the national mythology, in presence of a people whose jealous fury was just then aroused by suspicion of a conspiracy existing against the national religion. That the audience should have tolerated the audacity of their favourite jester, is a proof of the power he held over them. Nevertheless, they were probably more delighted with his personalities, and they recognized with shouts of laughter the brace of gallant military gentlemen thus described by one of the women in the ‘Lysistrata’:—“By Jove, I saw a man with long hair, a commander of cavalry, on horseback, who was pouring into his brazen helmet a lot of pease-soup, which he had just bought from an old woman. I saw also a Thracian, with shield and javelin, like Tereus. He went up to the woman who sold figs, and, frightening her away with his arms, took up her ripe figs and began swallowing them.” The national satirist is seen again in the recommendation put in the mouth of the male chorus in the same play, and which is to this effect:—“If the Athenians would only follow my advice, their ambassadors should never go upon their missions, except when drunk. Sobriety and Common Sense do not go together with us. If, for instance, we send sober legates to Sparta, they only watch for opportunity to create mischief. If the Spartans speak, we do not heed them; if they are silent, we wrongly suspect them. Let our envoys get drunk, and agree in what they hear, and in the reports they send home.” Nor does Aristophanes spare the women more than the men. How archly, no doubt, did Mnesilochus look at the audience, when he ungallantly remarked, in ‘The Thesmophoriazusæ,’—“Among all the ladies of the present day, you would seek in vain to find a Penelope. They are Phædras, every one of them.” It is not to be supposed that the comic poet ever offended by his trenchant jests, although a passage delivered by the chorus, in ‘The Ecclesiazusæ’ (that exquisite satire against the ideal republics of philosophers, with impracticable laws), would seem, perhaps, to imply something of the sort. Turning to the audience, the Chorus remarks, “I am going to make a little suggestion to you. I wish the clever among you to be on my side; for remember how clever I am myself. They who laugh merrily will prefer me, I know, because of my own mirthful jesting.” This suggestion sounds as if the dunces and dullards had been sneering at the satirist for his smartness and sprightliness. Even if so, he continued to laugh at gods and men. At both, as in ‘Plutus,’ where he ridicules the deities for their many names, by which they hoped to catch a gift under one appellation, which they lost under another; and where he illustrates the irreligiousness of men, by remarking that nowadays they never enter a temple, except for a purpose which, it will be recollected, was religiously avoided by the Essenes on the Sabbath. The last illustration is made in the very spirit and letter which marked the “Fools” of the fifteenth century. They pleaded for such jokes the immunities of their office, and Aristophanes does something very like this when he makes Xanthias exclaim, in ‘The Frogs,’ “Oh, they are always carrying baggage in comedy!”

Flögel has been too anxious to increase his list of Fools, by including among them the planus, or impostor. He takes for a joker, the cheat denounced by Horace in the 17th of the First Book of his Epistles. That cheat is simply a street vagabond, who deceives the humane by pretending to have broken his leg, and who laughs at them when they have passed on, after giving him relief. Even this sorry joke he cannot often repeat. Then we have, from Athenæus, other comical fellows cited, whose funny things won the admiration of Greece and Rome, the people of which countries must have been easily pleased. Among these are the Alexandrian Matreas, who wrote chapters of a ‘Comic Natural History,’ wherein he discussed such questions as, “Why, when the sun sets at sea, does he not set off swimming?” “Why do the swans never get drunk with what they imbibe?” Then we hear of a Cephisodorus,—neither the tragic poet nor the historian,—whose stock joke consisted in his running breathless, either from or towards the city honoured by his residence, and with an air of frantic terror, informing all whom he passed or encountered, of some awful calamity. It is hardly possible to imagine that people laughed more than once, if once, at a sorry fool like this. Not much more risible was that Pantaleon, who was wont to address strangers in the street in tirades of bombastic nonsense, utterly meaningless and incomprehensible. The joke was for the standers-by, who knew Pantaleon, and enjoyed the astounded look of those whom he addressed. According to Athenæus, the last comicality of Pantaleon was in imposing on his two sons, whom he called separately to his side, when dying, and confidentially told each where he would find a hidden treasure. When they had looked for this in vain, they probably understood why their respectable sire had died laughing. Many of this class of fools can only be considered as “hoaxers.” Such was another Cephisodorus, who disgraced his dignified name by very undignified tricks,—as when he hired a host of hardy day-labourers, and gave them rendezvous in such a narrow street that, when all were assembled, it was impossible to move either backward or forward. The “Berners Street Hoax,” by Theodore Hook, was entirely after the fashion of Cephisodorus, and was not the more excusable on that account.

Forcatulus, a learned writer on law, accepts as true a story, very like one to be found in Rabelais, and which Flögel quotes from another accomplished jurist, Accursius. It is a story in which ignorance is made to pass for wisdom, and is therefore, although common, yet not quite so excellent a joke as it would pretend to be; and is to this effect:—

The Romans sent an ambassador to Greece, in order to procure a copy of the Laws of the twelve Tables. The Greeks would make no such costly gift till they were satisfied that the petitioners had men amongst them who could comprehend the wisdom of the Laws. They despatched an envoy to look into the matter; and when the Romans heard of him and his purpose, they resolved to defeat him by means of a fool. They clothed the latter in purple, surrounded him with a guard of honour, and dismissed him to encounter the accomplished ambassador from Greece, with one single point of instruction,—he was on no account to open his mouth.

The Athenian commissioner, seeing the representative of Roman wisdom standing before him, grave and speechless, observed, with a smile, “I understand. The gentleman is a Pythagorean, and carries on an argument only by signs. With all my heart!” And, thereupon he raised a single finger, to imply that there was only one principle of nature in the universe.

The simpleton sent by Rome, not dreaming that this was the opening of a philosophical argument, but looking upon it rather as a menace, extended two fingers and a thumb towards the Greek, as if about to take him by the nose.

“Good! very good!” murmured the Athenian. “He shows me the Pythagorean Trias,—the triple God in one. I must intimate that I understand him;”—and the philosophical envoy approached the stolid Roman, with the flat of his hand extended towards him. He intended thereby to imply that the divine Trias was the upholder of all things. The Roman, however, thinking it an approximation to a box on the ear, drew back a step, lifted his doubled fist, and awaited the coming of the Greek.

The face of the latter was covered by a radiant smile. He could only exclaim, “Perfect! charming! divine! The silent sage tells me that the divine supporter of all things is in himself All-mighty. Admirably done! a nation with such sages must be worthy of laws enacted by the leaders of civilization.”

Now if this story be, as Forcatulus will have it, historically true, I must add that it has been improved in the hands of the story-tellers. These, of course, have made it a Christian disputation, in which the hired fool has but one eye. The real metaphysician reads in the signs of the simpleton the whole Christian revelation, but the story is improved by the fool’s own description of the matter. “When I saw him raise one finger, I thought he mocked me, as having but one eye; and I held out two fingers, meaning that my single eye was as good as his two. But when he, therefore, held out three fingers, signifying that there were only three eyes between us, I doubled my fist, to knock him down for his insolence.”

Among the old class of jesters some writers rank the Aretalogi, who appear to have been improvisers of merry or wonderful stories for the amusement of a company, by whom they were invited, or hired. Juvenal says that when Ulysses, at the table of Alcinous, described the person and deeds of the cannibal Polyphemus, some of the guests turned pale, while the narrator, to others seemed only a jester:

“Risum fortasse quibusdam
Moverat mendax Aretalogus;”

or, as the Jesuit Tarteron translates this passage,—“Les autres pâmoient de rire, et regardoient Ulysse comme un diseur de contes faits à plaisir.” Some of the guests, in fact, laughed at Ulysses as they would have done at a regular romancer.

Again, Suetonius, in the 74th chapter of his Life of Augustus, after describing the pleasant social customs of the emperor, his agreeable company, and his courteous and affable manner with them, adds that, to encourage their mirth and their freedom, “aut acroamata et histriones, aut etiam triviales ex circo ludios interponebat, ac frequentius aretalogos.” To show the value of this last word, according to English writers, I turn to an old translation of Suetonius, published in 1692, and there I find that, “for mirth’s sake, Augustus would often have at his table either some to tell stories, or players, or common Merry Andrews out of the Circus, but more frequently boasting pedagogues and maintainers of paradoxes.”

It might easily be concluded that the Aretalogus was really of the number of professional jesters, were it not that I find Lampridius quoted by Flögel as including Ulpian in this class, because he sat at the table of Alexander Severus, “ut haberet fabulas literales.” But it is almost impossible to admit of this, for the wise Ulpian was the solemn president of the Imperial Council of State, a great lawyer, a great reformer, a moral and a religious man, according to the light possessed by him. He was, as it seems to me, rather the Mentor than the Jester of Severus, who was, for a time, the bright example of men,—of any and every rank. The imperial virtues were held to be the result of the teaching and practices of Ulpian. To his frugal table the Emperor invited men of learning and virtue, and Ulpian was invariably of the number. So far, however, was the profound jurisconsult from being a mere jester, that, as we are told, the pauses in the pleasing and instructive conversation of himself and fellow-guests “were occasionally enlivened by the recital of some pleasing composition, which,” says Gibbon, “supplied the place of the dancers, comedians, and even gladiators, so frequently summoned to the tables of the rich and luxurious Romans.” That there was little or nothing of the conceited Aretalogus in Ulpian, may be seen in the fact that his virtue was of too stern a quality, and that he was slain by the Prætorian guards because he was more wise than merry.

We next come to the Scurra, a jester, of whom we find an illustration in ancient comedy. When the witnesses called by Agorastocles (in the ‘Pœnulus’ of Plautus) pompously order Collybiscus to walk in their rear, that personage remarks,

“Faciunt scurræ quod consuerunt; pone sese homines locant.”

“They act exactly like buffoons, who put every man behind them;” in which we see something of the ordinarily insolent character of these individuals.

Yet they are themselves said to have been originally the “followers” in the retinue of great men, and their name, Scurra, or Sequura, is derived by some lexicographers from ‘sequi,’ to follow. Their wit was sharp but polished, and to be scurrilous, in the olden time, was rather a credit than a disgrace; and if the enemies of Cicero called him the scurra consularis, it was not that they found his sarcasms coarse, but that they felt them penetrating and fatal.

The Scurræ, however, seem to have sunk to a level with the common buffoons, as we collect from the letter of Pliny to Genitor (l. ix. ep. 17). Pliny’s friend had written to him to express his disgust at a splendid entertainment where he had been a guest, being marred by the jokes, antics, and wiles of the professional scurræ, cinædi, and moriones. The difference between the first and the last who belonged to the profession of fools, consisted in this,—the Scurra professed the art of exciting his hearers to risibility by extravagant yet sparkling wit. The Morio worked more quietly, and as if he joked licentiously by natural disposition thereto. It is worthy of observation that Pliny rather chides his friend. He writes, substantially, in reply, “Pray smooth your brow. I do not hire such fellows myself, but I do not turn up my nose at those who follow a contrary fashion. There is nothing novel or grateful to me in the hackneyed gestures of the wanton, the pleasantry of the jester, or the nonsense of the fool.” And the philosopher adds, with great fairness, “You see it is not so much my judgment as my taste that is against them;” and, he says further, “When I have reading, music, or the company of an actor at my own house, there are some guests who leave directly, or who, if they stay, look as ‘glumpy’ at the diversions I provide, as you did at those which lately marred your entertainment. The truth is,” thus concludes the philosopher, and it is advice as valuable now as ever, “we should accept, as well-meant, the diversions provided for us by others, that they, in their turn, may be indulgent towards those we provide for them.” One thing noteworthy here is, that the sensible people in Rome did not really care for the “fool.” If the conquest of Scipio Asiaticus over Antiochus brought in that sort of entertainment, the best philosophers (for some stooped to folly) protested against it by both precept and example.

The Scurra, as I have said, was not in every age a polished fool. The buffoon at the fair who obtained the applause of his audience for grunting like a pig, and, as the audience thought, more like a pig than the animal itself, is called by Phædrus a “Scurra.” He probably sank lower in his practice than any of his class, for he announced that the entertainment he was about to exhibit had never before been known on any stage. But even the best of the Scurræ seem to me to justify rather the censure of Genitor than the praise of Horace. The latter, it will be remembered, on the famous journey to Brundusium, was present at the cudgelling of brains between Sarmentus (who had run away from slavery to set up as a Scurra) and Cicerrus, who was a well-to-do parasite of his day. Horace asserts that the wit of these two induced them all to merrily prolong their supper; and yet all the fun perpetrated was of a dreary cast. The Scurra joked coarsely on the deformity and infirmity of the parasite, and the latter retorted by reproaching the Scurra with his condition of slave, and the puny insignificance of his body. If Sarmentus was the “delight” of Cæsar Augustus, that monarch was very easily pleased.

Perhaps there was no greater patron of the Scurræ, and all similar and many more degraded persons, than Sylla. He wasted his colossal fortune on fools of every description,—some of them monsters of uncleanness. Flögel, when noticing the criminal liberality of Sylla towards the crowds of debauched followers who occupied his table and house, and accompanied him abroad, says that for their sakes and under their influences, he neglected public business. But the fact is, that Sylla did not lead this disreputable life until after he had abdicated the dictatorship, and had gone into his sensual and unhappy retirement at Puteoli.

Antony was not more choice than Sylla in his “jolly companions,” nor in his own conduct. He was often indeed his own fool, and few great men ever played that character so thoroughly, but all were not fools and jesters and jugglers, whom historians have placed round the table and at the hearth of Antony. Flögel especially errs in classing among the jugglers retained by the Triumvir the beautiful Cytheris, or Lycoris, that slave whom the gentle and gallant Gallus loved, but whose desertion of him for Antony gained for us the tender eclogue of Virgil.

Juvenal cites with Sarmentus, the name of Galba as a buffoon or parasite of Augustus, and he does this (Sat. v.) in order to shame a dissolute friend who saw no harm in allowing his “loins to grow fat by others’ meat.” “What!” exclaims the Satirist, “are you not yet ashamed of your course of life? Can you still believe that sovereign happiness consists in living at another man’s table,—where you support more insults than were ever heaped on Sarmentus and Galba at the table of Cæsar?”

Galba was an aristocratic Demonax. He was, moreover, a short hump-backed fellow, and he seems rather to have been the cause of wit in others than witty himself. It was in allusion to his deformity that Augustus remarked, after Galba had maintained some absurd proposition, “I can tell you what is right, yet I can’t put you straight.” It is of Galba that is told the story of his feigning to go to sleep at his own table while Mæcenas was saying very polite things to the host’s wife; but when another of the guests attempted to filch something from the board, “Hold there!” cried Galba, “I am asleep for him, but not for you!”

Martial complains that he himself was less known to his contemporaries, all witty poet as he was, than Caballus, the buffoon of Tiberius. This individual is supposed to be the same with the Claudius Gallus of Suetonius. But Gallus seems to have been as much of a friend as a man could be, of an Emperor who was accustomed to behead such of his acquaintances as got the better of him in argument. That Gallus was hardly a professional fool may be gathered from the words of Suetonius, according to the quaint translation of the edition of 1692. “Claudius Gallus, a most notorious old Sir Jolly, who had been formerly branded for his debauches by Augustus, and severely reprimanded by himself (Tiberius) in the Senate, inviting him (Tiberius) to supper, he promised to come, on the terms that nothing were omitted of his usual way of entertainment,”—which, according to the context, seems to have been of a terribly licentious character.

Flögel refers, for an example of the impunity of Court Fools, in the bold wagging of their tongue at the Courts of the Roman Emperors, to the remark of a jester to Vespasian. The former had been saying sharp things to all around him, but, observed the Emperor, “you have addressed no observation to me.” Now Vespasian, whom we are accustomed to picture to ourselves as a towering personage of heroic carriage, was a poorly built fellow who went about in a half-sitting posture, like Mr. Wright in the part of the retired coachman, whose limbs have stiffened into the posture which he had preserved through a long course of years, on the box. The jester joked very indecently on this weakness of the monarch, but I do not think the sorry humourist was a wit by profession. “Quidam urbanorum,” is the way in which he is described, but this may mean “one of the men about town,” and the old translation from which I have already made an extract, renders it “one of the wits of the time.” Whichever it be, it seems to show that the jokers could take great liberties with some emperors. Other instances prove that some emperors took deadly vengeance on the jokers.

Commodus Antoninus may be reckoned among those princes who have been their own fools, and he played the part rarely; but it was more in the spirit of insane than witty folly. His fun, like the club of Hercules, which he for ever carried on his shoulder, was crushing rather than exhilarating. Gallienus, who resembled him in many respects, and was as cruel, licentious, depraved, and cold-hearted, kept a second table for his buffoons; which they occupied like regular gentlemen of the Imperial household. When this potentate played the fool for his own amusement, he could be, by caprice at least, less bloodthirsty in his frolicsomeness than Commodus; as, for instance, when he ordered a knave of a jeweller to be flung into the arena, and let loose upon him—not a roaring lion, but a poor capon. The joke, as poor as the bird, was, of course, received with universal applause.

We have some insight afforded us with regard to the position occupied by the retained jester, in the account of the strange supper given by Nasidienus to Mæcenas and others. The guest just named took with him his two “shadows” uninvited. They were expected to contribute to the hilarity of the feast, and they occupied the same couch with their patron, the latter reclining between them. Nasidienus was in the same way supported by his two parasites, one of whom excited the mirth of the company by swallowing whole cheesecakes at once, like a clown in a pantomime; and the other extolled the dishes generally. These two, however, drank little or nothing; they appear to have been trained to spare their master’s wine. The guests and their parasites observed no such temperance, but tippled freely, and one of the latter especially kept up the laughter of the visitors by mock compliments on the feast, and mock sentiment on things, generally.

The Morio, as I have previously observed, was usually a mis-shapen creature, a sort of monstrous imbecile, heavy and hideous in body, and childish in mind; a simpleton, whose naturally foolish remarks contrasted with his strength and rude shape of body. Ladies in the olden time kept them, as ladies of a later period kept monkeys, for their amusement in their own chambers. There was even a market for them, and at the Forum Morionum, a thoroughly frightful and foolish animal of this species would fetch about eighty pounds sterling.

Many Emperors, too, bought specimens of these monstrosities, a fashion which was only less hideous than the mania of a later time for china monsters, who exonerated their stomachs of the liquor required by their mistresses. Heliogabalus was a prodigal amateur of the former kind of property; and it has been suggested that an imbecile Morio was kept by a dull owner, that his own stupidity might seem wit by comparison.

That a noble Roman maintained slaves whose wit should entertain himself and his friends, we know from several instances. The same slaves were also employed to lighten the last hours, and to render death easy to their masters,—if they could. Nay, it must be confessed that it seems they sometimes succeeded. Witness the case of Petronius Arbiter, that magnificent Consul, who almost renders vice attractive, like Boccaccio, by writing of it in choice and elegant (yet mournful) phraseology. When that very superb gentleman was stretched on his death-couch, he might have remarked, with the Irish squire, that he died in perfect ease of mind, for he had never denied himself anything. But Petronius could not die easily without a little stimulant. He felt himself ennuyé, and he sent for his wittiest friends and his choicest slaves. Of the latter he freed some and whipped others, and he found a mild pleasure in both. But the dearest solace of this dying Roman noble was in the amusing stories and ridiculous epigrams recited to him. With these he amused his fancy till his jaws suddenly fixed in a fit of laughter, and the jesters around look down upon a corpse. Thus died an accomplished Roman gentleman A.D. 66.

But we are departing from the official fool, of whom it is said, that, with his place and privileges properly marked in a household, he was not known in Europe till the period of the Lower Empire. It is certain that the stern Attila brought professional jesters, as well as irresistible warriors, with him across the Roman frontiers. When the ambassadors of Theodosius the Younger were entertained at a banquet by the Hun, the pomp, gravity, and tremendous drinking were accompanied by an immoderate amount of foolery. “A Moorish and a Scythian buffoon,” says Gibbon, “successively excited the mirth of the rude spectators, by their deformed figure, ridiculous dress, antic gestures, absurd speeches, and the strange unintelligible confusion of the Latin, the Gothic, and the Hunnic languages; and the hall resounded with loud and licentious peals of laughter. In the midst of this intemperate riot, Attila alone, without a change of countenance, maintained his stern and inflexible gravity.” We hear, too, of the presence of a Harlequin at the state ceremonies of the great barbarian and dignified chief. It is, however, indisputable that the professional, though perhaps not exactly the court fool, was known in Rome nearly two hundred years before the period of Attila. To do honour to the accession of Gallienus (when Valerian was alive, but a captive in Persia), numbers of Persian prisoners were paraded at the festival in Rome. At this festival, certain buffoons, we are told, committed an act of audacity for which the common crowd of spectators had not courage. They crossed over among the prisoners, and curiously and deliberately scanned the features of every man there. “Gallienus,” as I have noticed in ‘Monarchs Retired from Business,’ “expected some mirth, but seeing nothing come of it, and that the buffoons were retiring with a disconsolate look, he asked the meaning of the episode. ‘Well,’ said they, with a little hesitation, ‘we went over to these Persians to see if we might discover among them the great Valerian, your gracious divinity’s father.’ Gallienus thought this a very sorry joke indeed. He ordered the buffoons to be bound together, and to be burnt alive in one batch. It was a very serious matter to joke with, and it was a mortal matter to joke against, this Emperor of Rome.”

We come to a later illustration in the Baron de Reiffenburg’s book (‘Le Lundi,’ p. 251), where it is stated that Theophilus, Emperor of Constantinople, found pleasure in witnessing the follies of a jester, Danderi, whose spirit of curiosity led him to the discovery that the Empress Theodora had little images in her oratory to which she prayed. The fool was not cunning in betraying the secret to the Iconoclast husband of Theodora. The Empress, more crafty, persuaded Theophilus that the images were only dolls, for the amusement of their children. So, at least, says the legend, which does discredit to the most accomplished of Eastern Emperors, though he had a hatred for trade, and a love for gaudy toys and jewellery.

Before leaving this part of my subject, let me notice another Court appendage from which ancient monarchs drew incentives to mirth,—namely, the Dwarfs. These sometimes rank among the Moriones, and as they formed a portion of the Court household, parents often made dwarfs of their children, by stunting their growth, in order to obtain profit by them. The most clever exhibited their little prowess, in full armour, in mimic fights which sometimes terminated seriously to the combatants, in wounds of certain gravity. Augustus did not disdain either to converse, or gossip rather, and play at various games with them;—or to listen to them chattering and see them playing with each other. By some writers, this taste of Augustus is denied, but it may be believed, since of one dwarf, Lucius, he had a statue sculptured, the eyes of which were of precious stones. That these little personages sometimes exercised great influence may be seen in a passage of the sixty-first chapter of the Tiberius (in Suetonius’s “Lives”), wherein it is said:—“A person of Consular dignity, in his Annals, has this passage, that at a great feast, where he himself was also present, the question was put suddenly and loudly to Tiberius by a dwarf, who was standing in waiting near the table among the dirty buffoons (‘inter copreas’), ‘Why Paconius, who had been condemned for treason, was still living?’” Suetonius adds indeed that the dwarf was sent to prison for being impertinent, but also that Tiberius, thus reminded of the existence of an enemy, sent orders to the Senate, that speedy care might be taken for his execution. Domitian was the Emperor who especially delighted in putting arms into the hands of his dwarfs, and setting them to pink out each other’s little lives. From the Court the fashion reached wealthy people generally, and Dio, in his ‘History of Rome,’ tells us of these small personages being kept by Roman ladies, in whose rooms they ran about all day long, and perfectly naked. The fashion did not cease till after the accession of Alexander Severus, who drove from his Court the whole tribe of dwarfs, male and female, and indeed other equally unseemly appendages to the household of a grave and dignified prince. They became matters of attraction to the mob, and being vulgar, are no more heard of in the palaces of kings and the mansions of nobles, till a later period and in highly civilized Christian courts. Let us do with them as Alexander Severus did, and consider now the condition of the more modern Court Fool, though in doing so we may have to look occasionally to a more remote antiquity than that at which I close this Chapter. It will perhaps be found that kings and their fools must, for a time, have had a rather pleasant time of it. “He,” so ran an old proverb quoted by Seneca, “he who thinks to achieve every object that enters his head, must either be a born king or a born fool.” Herein, it is supposed, is intimated the proximity in degrees of happiness of the respective individuals, who could neither be called to account for things done nor for words uttered.

THE FOOL BY RIGHT OF OFFICE.

When Erasmus praised Folly, it was only by making Folly advocate her own cause. After all, her pleading neither recommends her cause, nor says much for the wit of the pleader. Folly, in the abstract, has been denounced alike by Scripture and ancient heathen sages. “All men are fools,” was once a received text. Over the text, some have laughed, some have cried, and upon it, or its equivalent, divines have preached sermons now mirthful now melancholy. “If I wish to look at a fool,” says Seneca modestly, “I have not far to go. I have only to look in a mirror.” A sharper saying still was once uttered by Rhodius, a physician of Marburg, who had adorned the front of his house with full-length portraits of all the lawyers and doctors in the city, himself in the centre, and all in the dress of the professional buffoon. “You have a large number of thorough fools painted on your walls,” once remarked a passer-by. “Ay, ay,” rejoined Rhodius, “but there are still more who pass this way and look at them.” He was something of the opinion of Schuppius of Hamburg, who used to remark that in this world, the fools outnumbered the men; and the Emperor Maximilian II. delicately expressed a similar sentiment when he observed that every young fellow must be pulled by fools’ strings, for seven years, and that if, during that time, he forgot himself for an instant, he had to re-commence his seven years’ service. This potentate distinguished the dullest of his counsellors by the title of the King of Fools. On once addressing a prosy adviser by this title, the gentleman neatly enough replied, “I wish, with all my heart, I were King of Fools; I should have a glorious kingdom of it, and your Imperial Majesty would be among my subjects.”

The “Fool” was not the exclusive possession of a Sovereign King. In course of time, wealthy individuals prided themselves in their own jesters, as ladies of the last century did in their black foot-boys and monkeys. Counts, Cardinals, Barons, and even Bishops had their professional makers of mirth. In France the Fou du Roi was an official title, and Champagne is thought by some to have enjoyed the monopoly of furnishing his Gallic Majesty with a new Fou du Roi en titre d’office, when the old one died. The profession, in most Courts, survived the name; and the office has been exercised by many gentlemen who, perhaps, little thought of the duty they were performing. The office has not seldom been filled, as I have before remarked, by the Court poet; and the well-known epigram on Cibber, the above fact being considered, has a happy application.

The term itself however has often been mis-applied. Thus Charles the Simple was no fool, but a man of extraordinary simplicity of mind and feeling. So Homer, when he called Telemachus, Νἡπιος, a fool, or “silly,” did not employ it as a term of reproach, but one of endearment.

The term “fool,” “fol,” “fou,” is said to be of Northern origin. Every language, however, or nearly so, has an original word expressive of the office.

Some French writers deduce the term Fool,—that is their own word Fol or Fou,—from the Game of Chess. In the French game, the pieces which we call Bishops, are called “Fous;” and in anciently carved sets are represented in the fool’s dress;—hence the saying of Regnier in his 14th Satire:—

“Les Fous sont aux échecs les plus proches des Rois.”

Thomas Hyde, in his ‘De Ludis Orientalibus,’ lib. i. 4, does away with this derivation by remarking that the chess term Fou or Fol is derived from the eastern word Phil, an “Elephant;”—he adds that two figures of this animal were always to be seen on the old boards; and that they had the oblique move of our “bishops.” This is no doubt true. The line of Regnier, however, indicates the place of the “Fou,” not only at chess, but at Court—namely, always near the King. The dignity of the latter, however, was preserved by a simple arrangement, namely, the ranking as “fool” or of deranged wit, every one who ventured to utter to his superior a disagreeable truth. As for a closer connection between kings and fools, it is marked by Rabelais, who observes that wearers of crown and sceptre are born under the same constellation as the wearers of cap and bells.

And this office, it is to be observed, was partly in fashion as being a good sanitary system; “Laugh and grow fat” is a popular saying, with much philosophy therein. “Laughter,” says the Prussian Professor, Hufeland, “is one of the most important helps to digestion with which we are acquainted; and the custom in vogue among our ancestors, of exciting it by jesters and buffoons, was founded on true medical principles. Cheerful and joyous companions are invaluable at meals; obtain such, if possible, for the nourishment received amid mirth and jollity, is productive of light and healthy blood.”

Walter Scott, when discussing, in a note to ‘Ivanhoe,’ the question whether Negroes were known in England at the period of that romantic story, cites an instance, whereby he not only establishes an affirmative, but proves that the professional jesters were of value to their patrons in other ways besides exciting their laughter and improving their digestion. “John of Rampayne,” he tells us, “an excellent juggler and minstrel” (words implying the professional jester), “undertook to effect the escape of one Andulf de Bracy by presenting himself in disguise at the Court of the King where he was confined.” For this purpose “he stained his hair and his whole body entirely as black as jet, so that nothing was white but his teeth. And succeeded in imposing himself on the King, as some Ethiopian minstrel. He effected by stratagem the escape of the prisoner. Negroes therefore must have been known in England in the dark ages.” When the joyous brotherhood could perform services of this nature we need not be surprised that prelates as well as princes entertained them, and that the Council of Paris, in 1212, in vain denounced churchmen who were worldly enough to maintain fools in their households.

The idea that fools were instituted in order to supply the wants of a free society is, perhaps, not so strictly true as that they were gradually allowed to go out of fashion because their licensed freedom of expression was calculated to lead to social liberty. At first, a sarcasm from an equal may have only been considered as an insult; “yet conversation,” says Southey, “wanted its pepper and vinegar and mustard,” and so Fools were allowed to make the seasoning. When freedom of speech became vulgar (that is, popular or general), the Fool, as such, began to disappear. The term is sometimes applied in a singular sense. Thus “Fools’ Pence” was the name given to a tax once levied on the astrologers of Alexandria, because of the gain of their own ingenious folly derived from fools.

It is to be observed too that people themselves have been as sovereigns who possessed their witty fools to teach them lessons of wisdom. Such servants of the public are to be recognised in Menenius Agrippa, when he taught the rebellious commons the respective duties of governors and governed, by repeating to them the apt allegory of “The Belly and the Members;” and in Themistocles, when, to the over-taxed citizens who wished to introduce a new element into the government, he wittily told, how once a fox entangled in a bog, was soon covered by flies who sucked nearly half the blood out of his body. A hedgehog who came near, politely offered to drive the flies away. “No, no,” said the sly yet suffering fox, “if these be driven away who are well-nigh glutted, there will come a new, hungry set, ten times more greedy and devouring.” Another sample we have in the case of Sertorius, who showed how much wit was better than strength, by citing the case of two men who were set to see who could get off the tail of a horse in the shortest time. One pulled at the whole tail, and pulled in vain. The other easily conquered by taking the tail of his horse and plucking out the hairs, one at a time. There was very much of this sort of instruction imparted by “fools” to princes, and by enlightened men to people, when prince and people equally objected to have their prejudices bruised by the bitter balsam of advice.

In the courts of princes and the houses of wealthy men were to be found fools of various sorts, according to the taste of the lord. Some were coarse, rude, licentious fellows. Others were refined of speech, acute of observation, quick at repartee, of much learning, and of great memory. Others again were monstrous deformities, or beasts of stupendous appetite, to contemplate whom was very good mirth to melancholy lords of evil digestions and twisted minds.

Some princes chose not to be in the fashion at all, and to keep no retained fool at their Court. Charles Louis, Electoral Prince of the Rhine, was one of these. “How is it,” asked a friend, “that your serene greatness does not keep a court fool?” “Well, it’s easily accounted for,” answered the Prince; “when I am inclined to laugh, I send for a couple of professors from college, set them at an argument, and laugh at their folly.”

More than one German prince either feared or despised the “learned fool.” Flögel tells us of one, near whose castle lived a reverend pastor who, because he knew a little of the Hebrew grammar, of which no one in the vicinity knew Aleph from Gimmel, thought himself a prodigy, and all the rest of the world, asses. He never preached a sermon without impressing on the bumpkins the advantages of being acquainted with the Hebrew grammar; and half the lords in the country went to hear him as fool-general of the district. It happened that, on one occasion, the chief lord went to the church, to stand godfather to the schoolmaster’s child; and as the noble gentleman was a bachelor, it became the duty of the pastor, according to custom, to examine him as to his religious principles. We have all heard of the too-polite English vicar, who, churching a countess, said, “Lord, save this lady, thy servant;” and of his equally civil clerk, who, not to be outdone in politeness, responded, “Who putteth her ladyship’s trust in thee!” It was some such courtesy that was paid by the pastor to his lord. He would not, as with common peasants, try him in the Catechism, but inquired, with a sort of dignified familiarity, “Young Sir, may I ask you, what you are?”

“Certainly,” said the noble godfather; “I am a fool!”

“Oh fie!” whispered the pastor; adding aloud, “I mean, what is your belief?”

“Well, my belief is that you are as great a fool as I am.”

“Oh, nonsense!” exclaimed the pastor, who remembered his knowledge of the Hebrew grammar; “that cannot be.”

“Ay, but it is so,” said the noble catechumen. “The biggest fools are always the last to acknowledge the fact.”

And thereat, all the grand and the common people present burst into a loud laugh; and the courteous godfather shook them again by the observation, that no fool at Court was ever half so pleasant a fool, as a fool in a cassock!

The Court, however, would seem to have had the advantage, for there, it was popularly said, were always to be found two fools,—of whom, the Prince treated one just as he pleased; and the other treated the Prince just as it pleased him.

Some writer, since Epictetus, who was among the first to call man the solitary laughing animal, has remarked that “brutes never make themselves ridiculous; that is the peculiar prerogative of man. The former, in their strangest vagaries, act according to nature; while the latter, in trying to go beyond her, render themselves contemptible in the eyes of others, just in proportion as they excel in their own.” Notwithstanding this, the practice of Wit and Jesting was once no unprofitable profession. The profession changed, and the practice was modified. Professor Miller, in his ‘Historical View of the English Government,’ comes to the conclusion that jesters and the ludicrous pastimes of former ages were exploded “by the higher advances of civilization and refinement,” which contributed also, he thinks, “to weaken the propensity to every species of humorous exhibition.” But, he adds, “though the circumstances and manners of a polished nation are adverse to the cultivation of humour, they are peculiarly calculated to promote the circulation and improvement of wit.” The full passage may be found quoted in Sydney Smith’s ‘Lectures on Moral Philosophy,’ in one of which he combats the Professor’s assertion, by maintaining that as civilization improves the mind, true humour is better appreciated under a high than under a low degree of civilization. Idle and illiterate nobles under the latter, could enjoy the coarse jokes and tumbles of the professional jester, but idle people who are also intellectual people “must either be amused or expire with gaping.” The humour that will be acceptable to these civilized yawners must be, we are told, “of a different complexion from what would pass current in more barbarous times; it must be the humour of the mind, not the humour of the body. It must be devoid of every shade of buffoonery and grimace, and managed with a great degree of delicacy and skill. Civilization improves the humour, but I can hardly allow that it diminishes it. I am strongly inclined to think there will be more humour, more agreeable raillery, and more facetious remark displayed between seven and ten o’clock this evening, in the innumerable dinners which are to be eaten by civilized people in this vast city, than ten months could have produced in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth or Henry VII.” This is very high authority, and even to express a doubt of it may seem justly to expose him who entertains the doubt, to a charge of presumption. Let the great men of the respective periods be reckoned, and it could hardly be proved that the “Table Talk” of the age of Elizabeth was not as brilliant as that of her cherished successor, Victoria. Take, for instance, the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when “Fools” had not yet disappeared from Court, and I think it will be conceded that at the Cabinet or general dinners of such Prime Ministers as Bacon, Burleigh, or Sackville, the company was likely to be as good, the wit as genial, and the humour as genuine, as at any of the banquets,—Cabinet, general, or “fish dinner” at Greenwich,—which have been presided over by the Victoria Premiers, Melbourne, Peel, or Russell, Derby, Aberdeen, or Palmerston. Then, as for the better taste of our higher civilization, it is not favourably illustrated in the national love for Christmas pantomimes, the Fool’s portion of which has neither wit nor decency, but is dull, dreary, and disgusting; but which seems, nevertheless, to be as generally venerated by this highly polished nation, as the horrid Bel and the hideous Dragon were by the elegant Babylonians.

About the middle of the sixteenth century, the favour which official jesters enjoyed at Court and in noble houses,—far beyond that granted to more worthy men,—excited the disapprobation of many observant commentators. There was then no better way of amusing an aristocratic company on a dull evening, in a dreary castle, than by having the fool into the hall, and allowing him full license to attack old and young, married and single, lovers and enemies. Sir Cockscomb delighted in scandal, and he sometimes, nay very often, told stories which made the matrons look down at the keys hanging from their girdles, the maidens hide their faces as best they could, and the noble gentlemen laugh loudly and fling commendations at the jester.

Some of this gentry, on whom their uncultivated betters depended for amusement, appear to have been a species of mountebanks, often performing tricks which are only now accomplished by parti-coloured “artists” in equestrian circles. The fool who could most wonderfully distort his body, squint most horribly, turn his face to his back, and bend himself as if he were made of nothing but one wonderful series of joints,—such a fool was accounted next in merit to his witty cousin.

And, if the fool pleased everybody,—on the other hand, it was necessary that everybody should please the fool, at least if he had business that he wished should prosper with the fool’s master. Access to the latter was chiefly to be had through Sir Knave, a word from whom was often most effective in bringing about conclusions. The fool often sat near his patron at table when philosophers stood humbly in the background, and courtiers laughed servilely at the jokes, good or bad, made by “Cap-and-bells” at their expense.

At Courts where several fools were retained, the master of his company felt as much above his followers as an old Drury tragedian above a Dunstable actor. He strutted like a peacock, and thought himself an elephant, when he was only an ass. There was great diversity, however, among them. Ordinarily, a clever lord preferred a clever fool, and the dull lord, who could neither read nor write, found the same sort of retainer a necessity. Thus the fool of merit, according to his profession, was the ablest man at Court; and his superiors in rank were his inferiors in intellect. As Swift remarks, “In Comedy, the best actor plays the part of the droll, while some second rogue is made the hero or fine gentleman. So, in this farce of life, wise men pass their time in mirth, while fools only are serious.”

Greatly respected as was the privilege of the fool to speak the truth on all occasions, whoever might wince under it, the unrestrained use of such a privilege often brought the merry speaker in danger of cudgel or dagger. There is a story of a fool at a continental Court, in early days, who stirred up all the wrath that could be contained in the heart of the Lord Chamberlain, by so exact an imitation of his voice, and so sarcastic a description of his character, as to excite roars of laughter in every soul in the banqueting room, from the sovereign beneath the daïs to the scullion at the door, waiting for the dirty plates. The angry Chamberlain encountered Sir Fool an hour afterwards, when he communicated to the latter his intention, at fitting opportunity, to see if a few inches of his poniard could not stop the loquacious folly of the other for ever. The merry-andrew flew to his princely master, and sought protection for his life.

“Be of good heart, merry cock!” said the prince; “if the Chamberlain dares run his dagger into your throat, his throat shall be in a halter the day after. I will hang him as high as Haman.”

“Ah, father!” cried the jester, “the day after has but promise of sorry consolation in it. He may thrust his knife between my ribs tomorrow;—and couldn’t you hang him the day before?”[B]

Some describers of old court manners assure us that there was often more wise and profitable counsel to be found under the cap and bells of the jester, than under many a mantle which hung from the neck of venerable statesmen. Flögel, on the authority of Don Sylvio di Rosalva, says this was especially the case in Spain. It appears to have been also the case in other places, for when a Venetian ambassador, endeavouring to dissuade Louis XII. from making war against Venice, spoke of the wisdom of the Republic, Louis replied, “J’opposerai un si grand nombre de fous à vos sages, que toute leur sagesse sera incapable de les résister.”

Under another method of expression, Erasmus utters a similar sentiment. He points out that the wisest men have been the worst governors of states; that the greatest orators were the most easily put out of countenance; and that the most able statesmen had fools for their sons. Tully’s son, Marcus, we are told, was a fool, although he was bred at Athens; and the children of Socrates had more of their mother than of their father. Pericles was a great man, but his two sons were known by the unpleasant appellation of Βλιτομἁμαι, or “Boobies.” A similar name, indeed, used to be applied to the whole people of Brabant, of whom it was said, “The older they are, the greater fools they are.”

As every fashion has its detractors, so the fashion of fools could not escape the censure of those who did not care to be in the mode. The Emperor Henry III., surnamed the Black, could never comprehend the use of a court fool,—a licensed scoundrel, his Majesty said, who often obtained for his nonsense rewards that had never properly been showered on the benefactors of mankind. Frederick Barbarossa had an insurmountable dislike for court fools and proud courtiers. Nevertheless he had both about him; and one of the former, on one occasion, did not hesitate to risk his own life, in order to save that of his imperial and not over-grateful master. Several other Teutonic potentates shared in this distaste for the cockscomb wearers,—perhaps, because they could not tolerate unpalatable truths; and Christian I. of Denmark once sharply remarked, on a presentation to him of several court fools, that he was not in want of such things, and if he were, he had only to give license to his courtiers, who, to his certain knowledge, were capable of exhibiting themselves as the greatest fools in Europe.

Fools were free to speak before there was a liberty of the press, or even a press at all. But it was Frederick William I., King of Prussia, who placed his fools under censorship. They dared not speak without thinking, which, time out of mind, has been the privilege of your fool; and if their wit offended against good manners, they ran good chance of a whipping. It was probably to hold the freedom of the sprightly corporation in check that Philander von Sittewald invented and described the Hell of Fools, which he is supposed to have visited. The locality, we are told, was like the cellar of a palace, which was crowded with Zanies, condemned to hear for ever, and to burst with envy at, each other’s jokes. The retribution and the sarcasm are equally severe. The severity of the former is only inferior to that developed in another German idea, whereby, in the next world, all inefficient clergymen are condemned to read all the bad sermons ever printed in this.

We are not without instances in which the offices of preacher and fool have been exercised by the same individual. In the seventeenth century there was a preacher, named Schwab, at one of the German Courts, who was as much skilled in laying a cloth for dinner as in the construction of his sermons. These were never serious, but they were sometimes long. When the latter was the case, the not too pious Prince would interrupt the preacher in full career, and without waiting for the blessing, would roar aloud, “John, John, get ye down and lay the cloth!”—a command which met with a joke, by way of benediction, and instant obedience.

John evidently had not the fool’s license of speech, or he might have improved the occasion. And this reminds me of a passage and an illustration in Osborn’s Letters to his Son, which have reference to this very subject, and are well worthy of being quoted. “’Tis not dutiful,” says Osborn, “nor safe, to drive your prince by a witty answer beyond all possibility of reply; it being more excusable to appear rich than wise at the prejudice of one in superlative power, who have their ears so continually softened by flattery, as they easier bear diminutions in their treasure, which they look upon as below and without them, than in wit, handsomeness, horsemanship, etc., which their parasites have long made them believe are inherent in them. This, a carver at court, formerly in good esteem with King James (I.), found to his prejudice, who being laughed at by him for saying the Wing of the Rabbit, maintained it as congruous as the Fore Leg of the Capon, a phrase used in Scotland, and by himself here, which put the King so out of patience as he never looked on the gentleman more. The like I have been told of a bishop who, being reproved for preaching against the papists, during the treaty with Spain, replied, he could never say more than his Majesty had writ. ‘Go thy way,’ quoth the King, ‘and expect thy new translation in Heaven, not from me’—meaning he would never better his see. This humour makes these terrestrial gods more auspicious to fools than those Solomon saith are able to render a reason.”

There are instances, too, where the remark of the wit, or the professional jester, has enlightened while it amused the monarch. We have such an instance in the case of one of the Kings of Persia who wished his people to enjoy the benefits of instruction. Schools were established, and amongst others, the court fool commenced to learn spelling. But we are told that at the very commencement of his progress, at the first junction of syllables and vowels, he opened the Koran, and pointed out to his Sovereign the passage in which Mahomet forbids the payment of impost to the kings of the earth. The fool’s vigilance kept the people in ignorance and under taxation.

May we not reasonably conclude that there was once considerable dignity attached to the office of fool, seeing that many ancient families bore the insignia of fools in their arms? The chief of these was the family of Briesach, long since extinct; and indeed I only know one house now existing whose crest seems to intimate some connection with the old jester, or some love of “short, brilliant folly.” I allude to the House of Orford (Walpole). The crest is a male bust, on whose head is the old official fool’s cap, rising from a coronet. The motto also seems to bear reference to the circumstance; for Fari quæ sentias, “Speak what you think,” was exactly the injunction suited to the court jester.

It must, however, be observed that even the jester, licensed as he was, could not always do this without watching his opportunity, and the license at one court was different from that at another. It was just the same regarding courtiers and their homage to sovereigns. As Chesterfield reminds his son, it was respectful to bow to the King of England, but at that time it was rather a rudeness than otherwise to bow to the King of France.

And now let us contemplate the outward presence of the official fool. From the oldest period, the jester is represented bald, and wise men, monks at least, adopted the fashion. They shaved their heads, like fools, says Agrippa, in his discourse on Vanity. The fashion, however, was very ancient. The Greek Gelatopoios (laughter-maker), the Mimes, and the Moriones, are never represented otherwise but bald.

As with the natural, so with the artificial covering of the head, the fools and the monks followed, or nearly followed, one mode. The hood attached to the cloak was the covering for a fool, with an addition signified in a remark of Erasmus, that the Franciscans only wanted asses’ ears and bells, to look like fools by profession. The Franciscans would seem to have intended some such profession, for they called themselves Mundi Moriones, or Fools of the World. And it was not an unusual thing to meet with highly religious persons who styled themselves, some, “God’s Fools,” others, “Christ’s Fools.” Thus, in 1382, Conrad von Queinfurt, a priest, prays in his epitaph, “Christe, tuum Mimum salvum facias!” As a jester would address a sovereign to have mercy on his poor fool, so did Conrad address Christ. This fashion was adopted by Homagius, in 1609; when that pious personage called himself, “Fool in the Court of God,” or “God’s Court Fool.”

The ass’s ears further distinguished our ancient and merry friend. The Vice in old English plays wore a fool’s cap with ears, a long jacket, and at his side a wooden sword. Learned men have looked into Greek, and found there the origin of this word Vice. But, as far as it signifies this dramatic fool, Flögel’s derivation of it, from the old Frank word Vis (phiz), a face, a mask, may be accepted. Visdase, another old word for fool, is derived by Ménage from “Vis d’âne” (ass-face), and Vizard is a known term amongst ourselves for the mask or counterfeit representation, usually comic, of a face.

This derivation seems more satisfactory than that given by Upton, who tells us that “Old Vice was a droll character in our old plays, accoutred with a long coat, a cap, a pair of ass’s ears, and a dagger of lath. This buffoon character was used to make fun with the devil; and he had several trite expressions, as, ‘I’ll be with you in a trice. Ah, hah, boy, are you there?’ etc.; and this was great entertainment to the audience, to see their old enemy so belaboured in effigy. Vice seems to be an abbreviation of Vice-devil,—as Vice-roy, Vice-doge, etc., and therefore called, very properly, ‘The Vice.’ He makes very free with his master, like most other Vice-roys or Prime Ministers, so that he is the devil’s Vice, or Prime Minister. And,” adds Mr. Upton, “this it is which makes him so saucy.”

In that dialogue of which Erasmus is the author, called the ‘Franciscani,’ Conrad, the monk, asks Pandocheus, “Are not fools dressed otherwise than wise men?” “Well,” says Pandocheus, “I do not know which dress would be most suitable for you; but you only lack long ears and little bells, to look like the fools themselves.” “Ay,” replied Conrad, “we have not those adornments, and we are plainly fools as regards the things of this world; if we are what we profess to be.” “I know nothing about that,” rejoins Pandocheus; “but I do know that there are many fools, with elongated ears and tinkling bells, who are far wiser men than they who wear the whole insignia of a doctor.” He even goes so far as to assert, that there were some who outdid the University philosophers in their lectures, and who, of course, were twenty times as amusing;—the cockscomb outdoing the doctoral hat.

The cockscomb which surmounted the headpiece of the fool, is too familiar to require description. Its antiquity however is undoubted, since Lucian describes, in his ‘Lapithæ,’ the appearance of a jester with closely-shorn head, except at the top, where it was left in the form of the “comb” which decorates the head of the cock.

The fool carried a stick, staff, or club, which, according to Flögel, was originally nothing more than the plant (Typha Linnæi) which grows in marshes, and which was commonly known as the fools’ club, or sceptre. It was afterwards usual to furnish the jester with one made of leather, something in the shape of Hercules’ club, with a loop to hang it from the arm. It was such an emblem of his vocation as this that a fool once received from his lord, with the command never to give it up except to a greater fool than himself. Some months after, the donor fell ill, the doctor visited him frequently, and the latter being asked on one occasion of his leaving the house, what he thought of the patient, roughly answered, “He’ll be off soon; he won’t stop here long.”

The fool heard the words, ran into the stables, and seeing no preparation for departure, shook his head as if perplexed. The next day, he heard a similar remark from the doctor,—again looked into the stables, and observing all quiet there, went up to the chamber of his sick master.

“The doctor,” whispered he, “declares that you are going to leave us. How long will you be away, master mine? a year?”

“Longer, much longer, merry friend,” said the lord. “So long, that coming back is out of all question.”

“But I see no preparation in the stables—”

“No, nor elsewhere!” groaned the sick man.

“Then I beg to give you my club,” said the jester; “for if you are setting out on a journey which you know you must make, and from which you also know you will never come back, and all this without getting anything ready for it, assuredly, master, you are a greater fool than I. But, perhaps, it is not too late for remedy.”

It is said that the poor fool’s words touched the rich man’s heart, and that the latter, by prayer, prepared for his own journey; and by will provided for the comfort of those of his kin and household who were to tarry here, till summoned to tread the same inevitable road.

The club and the fool’s whip are supposed by some to have descended from the old wooden sword of the comic actor. To these two succeeded the slender staff with the fool’s head delicately carved at the top, which remained one of the signs of his office till the office itself had passed away. The broad frill was probably not adopted by the fool until the exaggeration of fashion had rendered it ridiculous. It still lingers round the necks of Scaramouch, Pierrot, and others of the family “Stultorum.”

Lastly, a fool was only half a fool without his bells. To show whence this ornament was derived, Flögel has ransacked libraries, and displayed a stupendous amount of learning to remarkably little purpose;—if that purpose were, to determine why they were worn by jesters. It is going to a period more than sufficiently remote, to say, that golden bells hung from the robe of the Jewish High Priest, and not for ornament only. They told of his presence; they rang man to thoughts of God; they rang away all the ill words that had fallen from human tongues; they represented the divine shadow; they warned men of death;—these and a hundred other significations have been found in the golden bells of the solemn High Priest.

Further, the Eastern kings, and especially the Persian, were as famous for the bells they wore as the lady in the ballad about Banbury Cross. It was but the other day that the ex-Queen of Oude was received by our own Sovereign Lady, when the head-dress or crown of the former was remarkable for its number of jingling ornaments, which sounded like bells. Christian bishops early adopted this mode, and for many centuries subsequent to this, the pictures of some of the greatest personages, male and female, royal and noble, represent them with bells of fine fashion, attached to neck-chains, bracelets, or girdle. Knights wore them on their armour, ladies on their zones; and people who were in the very highest of the mode attached them to their shoes. When this was the custom, the continual jingle at tournament or ball must have been deafening; and, what was worse, if cavalier and demoiselle bethought themselves of taking a quiet walk together beneath the oaks in the woods, every rustic near was made the confidant of the pleasant matter, as far as bells could do it. The folly of this was so patent, that we cannot wonder at fools mounting the bells in their caps.

Indeed, they mounted them not only in their caps, but on every part of the body. This was especially the case in the fifteenth century, when the fashion of wearing bells was abandoned to the professional merry-men. The mode itself, too, would seem to have prevailed in the East. As late as the seventeenth century, Tartar princes seldom stirred abroad in their barbaric splendour without a little knot of quaintly-dressed “Chaouls,” or fools, running in front of the gorgeous company, at whose every step the bells attached to their shoulders, knees, elbows, ankles, etc., jingled merrily. The Chaouls excited the mirth of their rather moody masters by satirical songs as they went along. In this latter custom we find a trace of the old usage of the Roman imperial soldiery who, at the ovations of Emperors, enjoyed full license of tongue, and took advantage of the triumph of their lord, to pelt him in rude songs with sly, rather than censuring, remarks alluding to his known or supposed vices. Suetonius furnishes us with more than one example of this sort.

As it was said in the olden time that there was no feast without a Levite, so, at a later period, there was no festival without a fool. That the latter custom proved a lack of civilization may perhaps be seen in the fact, that among savage nations a somewhat similar custom prevails. In its extreme form we find it among the old Kamtchatkans, whose gala days were rendered doubly joyous by the performances of the jesters by vocation. One sample however of the jokes of these gentlemen may suffice. This consists in harnessing themselves to sledges like dogs; by their close imitation of which animal in every respect, they excited roars of laughter from their not too delicate audience.

The fools who bustled about on the tournament ground of our knightly forefathers, were less gross in their merriment. They were for ever busy, before, during, and after the contest. While it was raging, they performed the part of the ancient Chorus, making sharp remarks on the proceedings, now full of pity, anon exulting; and as ready to help a favourite knight to victory, as to tender succour to his foe when fallen.

The year 1480 was, in one sense, the very jubilee year of German fools. It was then that took place the famous tournament described by Marx Walther, at which were present not less than fifteen professional fools, in splendid but grotesque uniform. Two of these were mounted, and headed the respective companies of opposing knights, playing lustily the while on screeching bagpipes. It was their delight to raise the wildest screaming from these instruments, as the adversaries rushed to the combat. They might not hope to frighten the knights, but they often succeeded in frightening the horses; at which, loudly laughed the gentle company. Of the remainder of the grotesque children of folly, eleven were engaged in racing, leaping, tumbling, and wildly joking. The remaining two galloped about the arena, sometimes with young fools, sometimes young nobles, on their backs. These fought their mock tournaments; and as the fools went prancing to the charge and rolled over one another in the dust, amid volleys of jokes of every possible description, the spectators condescended to be amused therewith till sterner fighters took the scene, and the breath which had been wasted in laughter, was now held in suspense.

While the combat was proceeding, the most restless of the fools would perhaps try to seek repose with his head reclining on a tin pot, into which, as he remarked, he had stuffed a whole sack-full of feathers to render his pillow softer. When a knight was slain, the fool had at his service a brief epitaph: “Here you are, gentle Sir, quiet for once in your lifetime!” These jokes of the old arena descended to the clowns of the circus; and manuals of wit continue to make mention of their sallies.

The descent was natural enough. As noble lords and ladies patronized fools who figured in the lists, so common people welcomed them at their village festivals. Some districts kept their own fools. There were others who raised to that distinction any “poor natural” of the locality, out of whose peculiarities or infirmities it was possible to extract something to laugh at. In some places, fools were hired on great occasions, to amuse a company unable to amuse itself. In the sixteenth century this appears to have been the case at notable Greek weddings in the Levant. Schweigger describes the nuptial feast (at which he was present) in 1578, of a patriarchal protonotary with a certain Irene Moschini, at which all the jollity was produced by a Jewish fool and other hirelings of the like amusing vocation.

The Jews themselves employed jesters to enliven their own wedding feasts. This was the case in Silesia as late as the last century. The company sat gravely enough till the indispensable jokers and tumblers were introduced, and then the fun was of the oddest, if not most refined, sort. But the Silesian Jews were a simple people, unacquainted with the mendacity and dreariness of wedding-breakfast speeches. Their fools had full license to abuse truth, but not to be dreary.

In passing now to the fools of different courts and localities, I will, by the way, notice a class which may claim precedence, by right of sex. I therefore proceed to say a few words of the Female Fools.

THE FEMALE FOOLS.

I do not know any earlier instance of a retained female fool than in the case of the wife of Seneca, who kept in her house one named Harpaste, and whom the philosopher describes as fatua, adding that he himself found no pleasure in such objects; and (as I have quoted in another page) that if he found it necessary to take delight in contemplating a fool, he had not far to go,—having only to look in a mirror. Harpaste may have been retained out of charity, for she was so witless that, becoming suddenly blind, she was not conscious of her calamity; but, remarking how very dark it was in the house, asked the pædagogus to lead her out-of-doors.

Seneca, it will be remembered, loved folly as little in a philosopher as in the fool by vocation. “He,” observes the son of the Cordovaner, “who duly considers the business of life and death, will find that he has little time to spare from that study. And yet, how we trifle away our hours upon niceties and cavils! Will Plato’s imaginary ideas make me an honest man?... A mouse is a syllable, but a syllable does not eat cheese; therefore a mouse does not eat cheese? Oh, these childish follies!... We are jesting, when we should help the miserable,—ourselves, as well as others.”

Jeanne, Queen of Charles I. of France, maintained a female fool of the name of Artaude du Puy, but of whom we know nothing more than that she cost her mistress, or rather the royal treasury, a considerable sum, for dress. There is an unpublished autograph letter of Charles, dated January 3, 1373, an extract from which, printed by the author of ‘Les Monnaies des Évêques,’ etc., shows that the King orders his treasurers to pay Jean Mandoli, furrier and citizen of Paris, the sum of 179 gold francs, for certain gauds and braveries of woman’s dress, furnished “to Artaude du Puy, Fole to our dear companion, the Queen.”

In 1429, we hear of a moult gracieuse folle (she is so called by St. Remy), whose name was Madame d’Or, and whose wit kept all the nobles laughing at the festival in honour of the institution of the Golden Fleece, at Bruges, in 1429. A folle was also attached to the household of Margaret, the granddaughter of Charles the Bold. Her position in the household is clearly ascertained by the fact that, when moving abroad, she followed her mistress in a chariot, accompanied by the “old ladies in waiting.”

In the succeeding century, in the year 1561, we find a woman, named La Jardinière, registered as “Fole de la Royne,” attached to the rather gloomy household of the Queen Dowager, Catherine de Medicis. Catherine seems to have patronized this sort of official, for in 1568, and for at least four subsequent years, there was a certain Jacquette, who held in the Queen’s establishment the office of “Plaisante de la Royne.”

As far, however, as witty license of speech went, Catherine’s court ladies not unfrequently excelled the court fools, male or female. They did not, indeed, let their lightly-hung tongues ring out at Majesty itself; but they observed no such restraint with anybody beneath the rank, even though the individual might be above the King himself in power. I may instance, as a case in point, the mighty Cardinal of Lorraine, who, despite all his puissance, was often the butt of the lively ladies of the Court of Catherine de Medicis and her royal sons. Brantôme says of this gay and intellectual priest, that, when things went well with him, his arrogance was insufferable; but that no one could be more courteous, or more humble, when his projects met with obstruction. One of the Queen’s maids-of-honour, Mdlle. de la Guyonnière, afterwards Madame de Ligneroles, often carried on a fool’s war with the redoubted Cardinal. Whenever the latter appeared to be meek and polite with this lady,—she, who, according to Brantôme’s pleasant compendium, “étoist très habile fille, belle, honneste, et qui disoit bien le mot,” would, with audacious gaiety, exclaim, “Come, come, meek Sir, tell us now if you have not met with some check during the night past? Confess at once that you have been humbled, or we will have nothing to say to you; for, most assuredly, you have encountered some defeat. So, let us hear all about it, if you would have us gracious with you.”

At a later period, we find another lady whose wit was wont to give mirth to courtly circles, if not to the French Court itself. I allude to the sister of that younger De Thou who was executed, by Richelieu, in 1642, for not revealing the conspiracy headed by Cinq-Mars, who had trusted the secret of it with his friend. In after-years, this lady attended the funeral service of the Cardinal, or a service held for the repose of his soul. And there she set the noble persons present into scarcely suppressed laughter, by exclaiming, as she gazed at the coffin where Richelieu lay, or was supposed to lie,—in the words of Martha to Christ, after the death of Lazarus,—“Domine, si fuisses hîc, frater meus non esset mortuus.” (“Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.”) It was very apt, though a little profane.

To return to the official female fool, we must go back to the Court of the father of the King, under whom this lady lived, namely, the Court of Henri IV. There was there a Mathurine, who seems to have held the office of Plaisante, not to the Queen exclusively, but for the benefit and amusement of the Court generally. Of what quality was the wit of these plaisantes, some of whom I think were dwarfs, I am unable to say; the only certain fact I can tell of them is, that they, though not more than the male fools, continued to wear out the soles of their shoes with great rapidity. The registers of accounts show an extraordinary consumption of shoe leather. In the ‘Collection de la Chambre des Comptes,’ under the year 1319, thirty-two pairs of shoes are set down as having been supplied at one time to the Queen’s dwarf!

It is said of Mathurine that she employed her wit in laughing people out of the Huguenot faith into Catholicism. Mathurine was present in 1594 when Jean Chastel wounded Henri, in his attempt on that king’s life, and she ran great risk of sharing the fate of the would-be assassin, for the monarch, aware of her frantic zeal for the Roman Catholic Church, and that she only looked on Henri as half a Romanist, or believing that she was playing too serious a joke by right of her office, ordered her under arrest as an accomplice. Mathurine, however, proved her innocence, and was set free. She died previous to the year 1627.

De Tillot quotes two authors who make mention of this female fool, Mathurine. The first is the anonymous author of ‘La Lunatique,’ who, addressing the King’s male jester, “Maître Guillaume,” remarks: “Thou doest well to have small love for the Reformers. Satan himself looks on them only with regret; and for a good reason, seeing that if the Reformers could have their way, there would soon be an end of court fools and buffoons. Ah, poor Mathurine, and you poor fellows, Angoulevent, Maître Guillaume, and indeed all you other fools, as well without hoods as with, where would all your pensions be if the Reformers had the upper hand?”

It is a significant fact, this, of the Reformers being the opponents of the expensive follies, and their professors, patronized at Court. Ogive, the second author cited by De Tillot, speaks also of Mathurine, as a salaried fool, appointed by the King: “Folle à gages, et appointée du Roi.” He writes, in 1627, saying, “Truly it is a marvellous thing that noble personages, who have been brought up all their lives with the parrots and apes of the Louvre, and who do not less belong to the Court than Mathurine did, or the Queen-Mother’s dwarfs do, should not have learnt in their cabinets to write reasonably.”

Thirty-four years after this was written, a Spanish folle appeared at the French Court, and in rather suspicious society; that of Don John of Austria, who accompanied the famous Pimentel to Paris, to negotiate the marriage of Maria Theresa of Spain with the young Louis XIV. (a marriage which, as it was to put an end to the war, was more cared for by Mazarin than a union which might have taken place between the Cardinal’s most clever niece, Marie Mancini, and the French king). Don John had the impudence to present at court this woman, whom he called his “Folle.” She was full of fun and wit, and every one sought to excite both. Louis enjoyed her jokes with wonderful zest. Her name was Capiton, and no party was thought complete without the presence of the Don’s Folle. The cudgelling of brains between her and Marie Mancini was a gladiatorial fight. Poor Marie had loved Louis, and Louis was warmly attached to a woman who had awakened in him the only good qualities he ever possessed, and who saved him from being such a mere beast as his successor was. Capiton loved to provoke Marie, by singing the praises of the Spanish Infanta, and Marie, sharp-witted, as well as sharply wounded by these praises of a rival who was to triumph over her, replied by sarcasms that were repeated with intense delight throughout France. The haughty, eccentric, coarse, and sensual Don John was proud of his Folle Capiton.

The official female fool survived as late as the year 1722, when we meet with a certain Kathrin Lise. She was the duly-appointed jokeress, if I may so speak, to the Duchess von Sachsen-Weissenfels-Dahme, who resided in the castle of Drehna, and depended upon Kathrin for her mirth. This is all we know of the last of the line of female jesters.

* * * * *

Before proceeding to sketch an historical outline of our own English fools, I propose to treat briefly of the Eastern buffoons. These may fairly claim precedence, on the ground that in the East the fashion of maintaining household fools is supposed to have originated, and that it has not yet expired in that locality. Further, there is, in connection with barbaric Courts, both in the East and the West, some legendary matter connected with the Fool, of which it may be as well finally to dispose, prior to dealing with the English jester as an historical character.

THE ORIENTAL “NOODLE.”

As I have just stated, the court or household fool probably originated in the East. The close of this Chapter will show that in the East that pleasant or pretentious official still survives. In a region where aberration of mind is taken to be a sort of divine inspiration, we need not wonder at finding the professional jester still attached to certain families, and himself and his vocation treated with a certain degree of respect.

I have already spoken of the buffoons who could not move the gravity of their own solemn master Attila; and we know that Timour rather kept these people for the amusement of his guests, than that he experienced any satisfaction himself in the exercise of their craft. They were not wanting in the Courts of the Caliphs, and the name of Bahalul conspicuously figures among the cap-and-bell favourites of Haroon Al-Raschid. It was to him that the Caliph once said, “Fool, give me a list of all the blockheads in Bagdad.” To which Bahalul answered, “That were not so easy, and would take too long; but if you want a list of the wise men, you shall have it in two minutes.”

It was in jest that Haroon presented him a document, by which he was constituted governor of all the bears, wolves, foxes, apes, and asses, in the Caliphate. “It is too much for me,” said the fool; “I am not ambitious enough to desire to rule all your holiness’s subjects.”

Bahalul one day, finding no one in the throne-room of the sovereign father of the faithful, seated himself on the cushions of the priest-monarch. The guards near were horror-stricken at beholding the jester on the sacred couch of authority, imitating the manners of Haroon himself; just as Chicot, long after, used to mimic those of Henri III. They speedily dragged him from the throne of cushions, and began bastinadoing him with such violence that the Caliph, hearing his cries, entered the hall and demanded the reason of the outcry. “Uncle,” said Bahalul, “I am not screaming on my own account, but on yours. I pity you. I have only tried royalty for five minutes, and I am already in a fever with pain inflicted by these fellows. What must you endure, then, who occupy the same distinguished seat every day!”

Bahalul seems to have been a dissipated fellow, and the Caliph enjoined him to marry and live discreetly, loving his wife, and bringing up his family in honour. The jester so far obeyed as to go through the nuptial ceremony; but as he was conducting his wife to her apartment, the uncourteous bridegroom suddenly paused, looked as if he were petrified, and declaring that he had never heard such a tumult in his life, took to his heels, and did not re-appear for months. Meanwhile, the deserted bride had procured a divorce, and then Bahalul made his rentrée at Court.

“So!” exclaimed the Caliph, with an inquiring air.

“Ay, ay!” cried the fool, “you would have done as I did. The tumult scared me away beyond the hills.”

“What tumult?” asked Haroon.

“Why,” said Bahalul, “as my wife was entering her room, there came from her, sounds as of a thousand voices. Amid them, I could distinguish the cries of ‘rent! taxes! doctors! sons! daughters! schooling! dress! silks! satins! muslins! drawers! slippers! money! more money! debt! imprisonment! and Bahalul has drowned himself in the Caliph’s bath!—therewith,” added the jester, “terrified at the solemn warning, and wishing to avoid the profanity of plunging my person into your brightness’s bath, I fled, till the danger was over, and—here I am; owing nothing, and disinclined to drown myself.”

Bahalul, however, was not the most favourite jester of this Caliph. There is no doubt that the most renowned of these was Ebn Oaz. We have indeed but one sample of his quality, but that is excellent. Unfortunately, it is also well known; but it must not be omitted in this record of the fraternity. Haroon, it is said, desired to exhibit the best qualities of the wit in presence of the young Sultana and her brilliant court; and he suddenly ordered Ebn Oaz to make some excuse which should be more offensive than the crime it was to extenuate. After considerable thought, Oaz slunk away, and the disappointed spectators were speaking of him as “incapable,” when the Caliph, suddenly starting up from his seat, with a roar and a look of exquisite anguish, set the whole court in confusion. The fact was, that Ebn Oaz had gone behind the curtains of the throne, and, opening them gently, had given the Caliph so astounding a pinch in the rear, that he sprang up as if a javelin had pierced him. Looking on the offender with rage and anguish, he ordered him to be slain for the treasonable and intolerable assault. “Stay!” said Oaz to the too-ready officials, who were already fingering their bow-strings. “Hear my excuse,” added he, turning to the Caliph; “I declare, by way of apology, that when I pinched your Holiness behind, I thought I was pinching the Sultana, your wife.” Haroon saw at once that the excuse was worse than the crime, and that he ought to be delighted; but he only laughed in a forced way, remarking to the Sultana, before he resumed his seat, that he felt he should not forget the joke for some time to come.

This story has been made wonderful use of, and has been dished up in a hundred different ways in a hundred different localities. It belongs, however, originally to the East, as do so many other of our most ancient and accepted anecdotes. I believe that all the facetiæ of Hierocles were old Indian, before they were new Greek stories, and that the “simpleton” who clung to the anchor when the ship was sinking,—who stood before a mirror with his eyes closed, to see how he looked when asleep,—who carried about with him a brick of his house, as a specimen of the building,—who made the experiment of keeping a horse alive without food, only failing to succeed by the premature death of the steed;—all these, and some dozens of others like them, had all drawn laughter from Eastern potentates before they began to raise a smile in the fairer faces of the Hellenes. But these stories only amused; and the jester had the prerogative of being free, as well as the duty of being entertaining.

This freedom of the jester, and the good use to which he could apply his joke and his license, is exemplified in the case of the town-fool who entered the hall where Mahmoud Ghizni was seated in full assembly. Without appearing to be conscious of the illustrious presence and the august company, he went prying about into the corners of the hall, as if in search of some particular object. At length, said he, “Not one!”

“Not one what?” roared the Ghiznian.

“Sheep’s tail!” said the fool, in a tone of voice which set every one in a roar of laughter.

“It’s no laughing matter,” added he; “I am starving, and all I ask is a sheep’s tail for my dinner.”

“Nay!” cried Mahmoud, “thou shalt have one;” and whispering to an official who stood near, the latter personage presently brought in a raw vegetable, which in its shape somewhat closely resembled the long, heavy, and unctuous tail of the Eastern sheep. The fool took it without observation; and, after thanks to the Prophet for excellent mutton, he began devouring it. Observing that the monarch smiled, the jester asked him, with the tail in his mouth, if what he was doing reminded his Majesty of anything.

“Of what should a sheep’s tail in thy mouth remind me,” said Mahmoud, “except of the proverb that ‘Extremes meet’?” The fool was overwhelmed for awhile by the laughter duly shouted forth by the subordinates at their great master’s joke, but he soon recovered himself, and when Mahmoud asked him what he thought of his joint, he answered, “That the thing was eatable enough, but that he observed that sheep’s tails were by no means so fat and well-flavoured as they had been in the days of his Majesty’s predecessor; but that, as men were more lean, too, now, than they used to be, perhaps the fact alluded to was of no material consequence.”

“Thou art not such a fool as thou pretendest to be,” said the sovereign. “It was but yesterday that one of thy profession told me of the gratitude the owls felt for me, because of the many ruined villages in the land; and now thou hintest at the misery of the people. Go thy way, good fellow, and go thy way with full stomach, and assurance that both evils shall yet be remedied.”

In the sixteenth century, when Baber was Emperor of Hindostan, the merry profession was in favour, but the furnishers of amusement for the monarch comprised others besides jesters. Thus, at state dinners, as soon as the imperial host and his guests took their places, tumblers, rope-dancers, and jugglers, whom no other country could equal, exhibited their feats. The highest point of fun was when the scattering of coin among the performers, excited a huge uproar. In earlier times, the wordy contests of two fools used to beguile the half-hour before dinner; but in Baber’s days, he and similar potentates were wont to be exceedingly well amused by witnessing a couple of rams butting at each other. It was perhaps as rational for royalty so to do, as to listen to Ethiopian serenaders chanting harmonized nonsense.

Some writers have classed the “Mutes” among the professional fools of the Eastern courts. This would seem to be an error not easily accounted for. The duty of that official was of a rather severe cast. The fool, however, was well known among the Turks, and perhaps the most celebrated was that Nasur ed Deen Chodscha, who was in the service of the first Bajazet, and who joked to such excellent effect that he once tickled Timour Leng into such good humour that the latter paid the fool the high compliment of saving from plunder his native town Jengi-Scheher (Neapolis). It was done after this wise:—

The inhabitants of the city, hearing of the approach of the conqueror, prepared to defend themselves with vigour. Nasur counselled them to do nothing of the sort, but to trust to him alone, and his mediation with Timour. The people were doubtful of his success, but they yielded. Before proceeding to the camp of the besieger, Nasur, who knew it was useless to approach the great chief without a present, considered what gift was likely to be most acceptable. He resolved it should be fruit, but he hesitated between figs and quinces. “I will consult with my wife,” said Nasur ed Deen, and he according did so. The lady advised him to take quinces, as the larger fruit. “Very good,” said Nasur, “that being your opinion, I will take figs.” When he reached the foot of the throne of Tamerlane, he announced himself as the ambassador from the beleaguered citizens, and presented, as an offering of their homage, his trumpery basket of figs. The chief burst into a rage, and ordered them to be flung at the head of the representative of the people of Jengi-Scheher. The courtiers pelted him with right good will; and each time he was struck, Nasur, who stood patient and immovable, gently exclaimed, “Now Allah be praised!” or, “Oh, the Prophet be thanked!” or, “Oh, admirable! how can I be sufficiently grateful?”

“What dost thou mean, fellow?” asked Timour; “we pelt you with figs, and you seem to enjoy it!”

“Ay, truly, great Sir,” replied Nasur; “I gratefully enjoy the consequence of my own wit. My wife counselled me to bring quinces, but I chose to bring figs; and well that I did, for with figs you have only bruised me, but had I brought quinces, you would have beaten my brains out.”

The stern conqueror laughed aloud, and declared that, for the sake of one fool, he would spare all the asses in the city, male and female, them and their property.

“Then,” cried Nasur, “the entire population is safe!” and he ran homewards to communicate the joyful intelligence.

Nasur, indeed, ranks among the most useful, as well as the most witty, of his ancient vocation. On one occasion, Bajazet had condemned many scores of his officers to death, for some trifling offence, in time of war. “Ay, indeed,” exclaimed the fool, “hang the knaves! hang them! what use are they? kill them for small offences, and rogues will fear to commit greater! excellent wisdom! Timour is at hand; away with them before he comes! The army can do without leaders. You take the standard; I will beat the drum; and we will thus meet that troublesome individual at the head of the forces. We will see how we can handle the Tartars, without such knaves as these to help us!” Bajazet comprehended the implied reproof, and spared the well-proved and lightly-offending leaders of his host.

On another occasion, Nasur, having succeeded so well with his figs, acknowledged the clemency of Timour, by presenting him with a few fresh gherkins, for the great warrior’s supper. The chief ordered him a reward of ten gold crowns, and Nasur went home rejoiced. When the season came that other gherkins had grown into cucumbers, Nasur, expecting commensurate recompense, carried to the residence of Timour a basket full of the refreshing vegetable. The door-keeper, however, refused to allow him to pass until he had agreed to give him half the reward that might be paid to Nasur by order of the chief. It happened that the latter was “not i’ the vein,” and instead of commanding a recompense of gold crowns, he sentenced the unfortunate gift-bearer to receive a hundred blows from the stick. Nasur took fifty patiently; but then he cried to the unpleasant official to hold his hand; and he explained how the other half of the acknowledgment belonged to the door-keeper. Timour swore that the stipulation should be observed, and the remaining half-hundred blows were paid where they were justly due.

A whole Encyclopædia might be written of the sayings and doings of the Eastern “simpletons,” alone. My space is too limited to allow of my doing much more than to offer a few illustrations; but, to those who have much curiosity in the matter, and who may not be disinclined to spend whole hours with a single class of the Oriental Fools, I recommend the well-known book, which contains the birth, parentage, and education, life, character, and behaviour, lively sayings, last dying speech and confession of the Gooroo Noodle. From that tempting chronicle, I return to the “Toorke” jester, with the remark that, great as was his freedom of speech, it was not every witty fellow at Court who was so licensed. The courtier who ventured to take a liberty with a Turkish potentate was as uncertain, as to the effect, as the Roman wits were when bold enough to joke with the Emperor. Selim, the son of Bajazet, was one with whom the most favoured of his followers could not with impunity venture on freedom of speech. When engaged on his Egyptian expedition, one of his officials the most closely attached to his person, hazarded the question as to when his Majesty expected to be at Cairo. “We shall be there,” said Selim, “when it may please God. As for thy arrival there, it rather pleases me that thou shalt stay here.” And therewith, on a sign from the Sultan, the unlucky querist was instantly put to death.

Murad the Third, though as savage by nature as Selim, could take a joke better than his predecessor could a simple question. There was one thing, however, which he could not tolerate—tobacco; the use of which he punished with death. But among the few members of his court was a man renowned for his wit, and for his power of raising the spirits of the Sultan, even when these had been depressed by a three days’ fit of drunkenness. Now this court-wit loved smoking, and was resolved, not only to have his pipe, but to escape the penalty of death attached to the enjoyment of it. Accordingly, he caused a deep pit to be dug in his tent, and when he desired to give himself up to his dearest indulgence, he would descend into it, sitting there concealed by a sieve-like construction drawn over the top, and lightly covered with turf. One evening, Murad became sagacious of the hookah from afar, and, tracing the offender to the very pit in which he was quietly smoking, threatened him with instant death. The offender, however, coolly thrusting his head upward, as he provokingly drew another mouthful of reeking luxury, exclaimed, “Go to, thou son of a bond-woman! Thy edicts extend over the earth, certainly; but they do not extend under it.” “Take thy life for thy joke,” said Murad, laughing and coughing,—the first at the jest, and the second at the odour and vapour, which he detested,—“I only wish thy pipe were as enjoyable as thy wit.”

Many samples of this sort I could continue to place before my readers; but, having regard to the patience of those who have so often borne patiently with me, I will only trace the Eastern jester down to modern times. Till after the commencement of the present century, the courts of the Hospodars of Moldavia and Wallachia were never without the mirthful official. The latter was usually an Armenian. Indeed, there were, ordinarily, several at each court. Their duty was to amuse their lord when he was at table, by every means in their power, by strange remarks, by droll stories, or by burlesques more or less extravagant. In processions, they walked before their masters, and carried long staves covered with silver bells. Since they fell into disuse, the Gipsies succeeded to the exercise of one part of their office, and these are admitted to the palaces of the great, on particular festivals, to amuse their illustrious hearers with national and comic songs.

From a very early period, the public and private buffoons of the East seem to have been selected from among the Armenians. Joinville introduces to us some very sprightly professionals of this sort, in his ‘History of St. Louis.’ “There came with the Prince,” he says, “three minstrels from Armenia (trois ménestriers de la Grande Hyrménie). They carried three horns, and when they began to perform on them, you might have taken the sound for that of swans. They produced the softest melody....” He then informs us how, having fulfilled their office of minstrels, they performed that of buffoons, for the amusement of the illustrious personages present. “They made three marvellous leaps (sauts); ... a cloth (touaille) being placed beneath their feet, they threw a somersault upon it, without any spring, and two of them leaped in this way, head backwards.”

The old fashion in the East did not altogether expire till a very recent period, for we find a jester at the court of the father of the present Sultan of Turkey. It was said of some eminent individual, that he had made two centuries illustrious; and something like it may be said of this oriental jester, who flourished at the court of Constantinople at the close of the last, and above a quarter of the present century. In 1836 died Abdi Bey, who, for nearly half a century previous, had been the favourite jester of successive Sultans. He worked hard and reaped a large fortune. In the early part of his career, his masters treated him as a mere brutish buffoon, on whom they might play any trick. Sometimes they set him off in a gallop, mounted on a giraffe, or tumbled him headlong into a pond, to the danger of his life. The late Sultan Mahmoud had no stomach for such sorry jokes, and Abdi Bey devoted his capacity to keep his patron in good spirits by amusing him with smart sayings and pleasant stories. He must have been an incomparable fool in his time, or his masters must have been greater fools than he, for out of their imperial bounty, he contrived to save £150,000, which he left to his grateful and deeply-resigned heirs. It was nearly as much as the late Mr. Greenough made by the manufacture of lozenges—“ten a penny!”

Abdi Bey has been called the last of the household buffoons. But this is not the case; for though the official fool has disappeared from Court, he is still to be found attached to families, or heads of families. We even meet with this rather impudent than merry fellow in the household of Christian Patriarchs. Only a few years ago, when the Nestorian Patriarch was flying, with a large number of his followers, from their would-be murderers in the mountains, they found refuge at Mosul, in the houses of the English Consul and the Rev. Mr. Fletcher. The latter gentleman, in his ‘Notes from Nineveh,’ so describes his reverence’s buffoon as to induce us to believe that to have much to do with him was really “no joke at all.” “My new guests,” he says, “were very orderly in their manners, though wild in their appearance. Only one decided quarrel broke out among them during their abode with me; and this was occasioned by a half-crazy old man who served the Patriarch in the double capacity of a domestic and buffoon. This worthy was addicted, like many of his countrymen, to the vice of intoxication; and having on one occasion partaken rather freely of the juice of the grape, he grew riotous, and addressed a reproachful epithet to one of his companions. The fiery nature of the mountaineer was excited, and he retorted in no complimentary terms. The old buffoon drew his dagger, and made a rush at his antagonist, who retreated into an inner apartment and shut the door. Nothing could equal the rage of old Yohanan at being thus baulked of his vengeance. Two or three times he burst from those who were restraining him, and drove his knife into the hard wood of the door. At length he was quieted, and after sleeping-off his drunkenness, appeared the next morning with a sober and abashed countenance.” I suppose old Yohanan was past being amusing, for we are subsequently told, that to raise the drooping spirits of the Patriarch, an itinerant Italian juggler was hired. At his tricks and witticisms the pious head of the Nestorian Church forgot the slaughter of his friends and the devastation of their and his homesteads. The saintly and sympathetic man laughed till he could hardly sit upright on his cushions, and only ceased then because some wonderful stroke of the juggler’s art induced him suddenly to suspect that such marvellous proficiency was only an inspiration of the devil.

* * * * *

By way of supplement to this Chapter, I will add a few short illustrations of the jester at other barbarous courts than those of the East;—and first, of “that beyond the Atlantic.”

When Cortez first visited the court of Montezuma, he found there various instances of high civilization:—among others, light ladies, strong drinks, court fools, and a spirit of infidelity against the established church, inspired by an influence called the “Rational Owl.” The Aztec monarch resembled Heliogabalus in one respect;—“he had a museum,” says Brantz Mayer, in his excellent work, ‘Mexico, Aztec, Spanish, and Republican,’ “in which, with an oddity of taste unparalleled in history, there had been collected a vast number of human monsters, cripples, dwarfs, albinos, and other freaks and caprices of nature.” Bernal Diaz saw the monarch at dinner, and among the incidents recorded by the old Spaniard, is, that, “at different intervals during the time of dinner, there entered certain Indians, hump-backed, very deformed and ugly, who played tricks of buffoonery; and others, who they said were jesters.” The fashion of maintaining the latter was followed by the nobles. “The principal men,” says Acoste, quoted by Prescott, “had also buffoons and jugglers in their service, who amused them, and astonished the Spaniards by their feats of dexterity and strength.”

Montezuma patronized rather the witty buffoons than the skilful jugglers. “Indeed, he used to say, that more instruction was to be gathered from them than from wiser men, for they dared to tell the truth.” Prescott adds in a note, founded on Clavigero, that “the Aztec mountebanks had such repute, that Cortez sent two of them to Rome, to amuse his Holiness, Clement VII.” This was only an exchange of personages of similar profession, for the European official house fool had already been imported into America. In 1519, at St. Jago, when Velasquez the governor was beginning to be suspicious of the designs of Cortez to supplant him, the two great men were walking together towards the port. As they passed on, the fool of the former called aloud, “Have a care, Master Velasquez, or we shall have to go a-hunting, some day or other, after this same captain of ours.” “Do you hear what the rogue says?” exclaimed the Governor to his companion. “Do not heed him,” said Cortez, “he is a saucy knave, and deserves a good whipping.” The hint of the fool, however, heightened the suspicions of his master; but how the latter was too slow of wit and action to profit thereby, is known to all who have read the graphic pages which tell of the conquest of Mexico.

But neither Aztec nor Spanish monarch rivalled their less civilized brother of Monomotapa in this peculiar department of his household. Gallienus alone deserves to be mentioned, in this respect, with the African potentate, who never stirred abroad with less than five hundred official fools in his vast and noisy retinue!

There were, as late as the last century, and there probably still linger on the Gold Coast, traditions of the mythological jester of Africa, Nanni, son of the Spider. His busy parent had spun all the human race from the thread of his bowels, and found no gratitude from the living produce of his labours. The Fetis seduced all creation to sin, and the Spider bethought him how to annoy the Fetis. With what little material he had left, he spun the last man, and educated him at his own paternal feet, on the edge of the domestic web. The tricks the father taught his boy were long the delight of polished and perspiring African tribes. Nanni was the ebony Owlglas of the land of Ham. He served the Fetis, but only as Jocrisse did his master, to his great vexation. Was Nanni commissioned to provide a chicken for dinner, he knew how, after devouring the bird himself, to replace bones and skin, and place it before his employer, the very model of a plump pullet. Was an egg ordered for breakfast, Nanni first sucked out the contents through a minute orifice, and filled up the shell with the finest sand. Nanni, too, was a married man, with numberless children, and more wives than “that Sardanapalus of Snobs,” Brigham Young. In a time of scarcity, when even a bean was worth more than its weight in gold, the hungry wives and offspring of Nanni drove him forth by their importunity, to seek food. He came upon a company of boys and girls who had been left by their father in charge of a quantity of beans, to dry and turn them in the air. Nanni leaped in among them, made them shriek with laughter at his jokes, and stamp with delight at his dancing. The latter exercise he concluded by rolling his well-oiled body among the beans, with which, sticking to him as he rose, he made off, after bidding the children look at his hands, to see that he carried nothing away with him. By repeating this feat, he nourished his household for days; and the alarmed owner of the precious vegetables could not account for their diminution from any account rendered by the young guardians. But detecting Nanni in the fact, the owner chopped off both his hands, as he lay rolling his greased body among the beans. The wit of the national jester had been grievously at fault, and his household becoming more hungry and angry than ever, his wives broke into open revolt, and eloped in a body, in search of another mate. But Nanni was beforehand with them in every respect; for taking the guise of a woodman, and having recovered his lost members, he met them in their flight, without being recognized by them. They told him of the fate of their husband, and of their intentions, concluding with a gentle hint that they were well enough inclined to accept a well-built young wood-cutter for their common husband. “No! no!” cried Nanni, “times are so very hard, that I have been obliged to dismiss forty-nine of my wives, and to live as well as I can with one!” This speech alarmed the ladies, who forthwith hurried homeward; but the active Nanni encountered them at the threshold, over which he would not allow them to pass till they had entered into stipulations whereby he was secured in full and despotic authority over his entire family.

The jokes of Nanni, son of the Spider, for a long time formed all the history, literature, and amusement of Negro circles. A thousand times over have his tricks been told and acted, in a semi-dramatic way, to delighted groups of swarthy listeners beneath the African moon. I may notice that the story-teller has always been a greater favourite in Africa than the mere jester. I remember, indeed, having read of one potentate, the Kaffir chief Tshaka, or Chaka, who would tolerate neither, at his horridly solemn court. On one occasion, however, and in full council, a merry fellow gave utterance to a frolicsome thought which he could not repress. It succeeded admirably,—gloomy king and grave counsellors were thrown into the most convulsive hilarity. When they had all recovered, the chief, pointing towards the jester, showed his grateful sense of a rare delight, by exclaiming, “Take that dog out, and kill him; he has made me laugh!”

To make his patron laugh was the especial and variously-rewarded vocation of the jester whom I now proceed to introduce to my readers. The English Court Fool was a very peculiar fellow, and in the history of some members of the order of Motley, in this country, there are incidents unparalleled in the history of the official jesters of any other nation. Let us see whence they came, as well as who they were.

ENGLISH MINSTREL AND JESTER.

All writers who have taken the ancient English minstrels for a subject, agree in stating that the old Saxon invaders of our land brought with them bards, and a profound reverence for the bards themselves and the art they professed. These highly-esteemed personages were rhyming historians, chroniclers, theologians, and philosophers. They held the key, or, what was the same thing to them, men believed that they held the key, of many secrets appertaining, not only to earth, but heaven. They were mighty personages in their day; but they could not withstand a ray from the Star of Bethlehem. When the Saxons became Christians, or at least professed Christianity, the vocation of the old, mysterious, rapt, inspired bard, with his eternal memory of the past, and his prophetic view into a long future, was entirely gone. He had been a sort of god, and he became a mortal who sang for hire. The Jupiter of yesterday was now, in most cases, and in most men’s eyes, only a Jupiter Scapin.

In most cases, but not in all; for, such as were scholars among the bards devoted themselves to the cultivation of poetry. There were others, like the early German jester who remarked that he did not know the Lord’s Prayer, but only the tune of it. They had more music in their souls,—such as the music was, and such as their souls were,—than religion. These turned minstrels, and sang and played for a reward.

With the superior class above noticed, I have nothing further to do; but have to keep companionship with the hired minstrel,—or the itinerating minstrel, who exercised his vocation for bread. The latter was not altogether wanting to the Anglo-Saxon, previous to the period of their conversion. The native gleeman who then exercised his welcome office, is described by Dr. Lingard, in his ‘History and Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church,’ as being a minstrel who was “either attached to the service of a particular chieftain, or wandering from place to place, and subsisting on the bounty of his hearers.” Mr. Eccleston, in his ‘Introduction to English Antiquities,’ describes the gleeman as all-important to the in-door life of the Anglo-Saxons, before whom he “sang, played, danced, and performed sleight-of-hand tricks for the pleasure of the company.” This would hardly seem to show that the gleeman was, as some have asserted, of a higher grade than the common minstrel of later years. It is certain that he was the popular minstrel of his day; his songs were sung in castle and farmyard; and when the great St. Adhelm was sensible of a call to preaching, and was desirous of getting together a congregation, he knew no better method than to assume the character of the gleeman. Thus accoutred, harp in hand, he would station himself at some cross-road, or at the corner of a bridge, and rattle forth a series of popular songs on passing and popular subjects. He soon drew an audience around him; and when he had fairly got them into a train of attention, he would gradually slip away from his comic songs and lively airs on the harp, and fulfil his office of Christian missionary, with as much success as he had played that of the vivacious gleeman.

There is another legend, showing how the guise of the minstrel was assumed for a different purpose. The legend to which I allude is that of Alfred entering the Danish camp in this false character, and spying out the weakness of his enemies, while he amused them with his songs to the harp. The story is altogether apocryphal, and was never heard of in Alfred’s time, nor till two centuries had elapsed since his death. It is certain that Alfred could not have safely entered the camp as a Saxon; and if he found admission as a Dane, his accent would have betrayed him as a spy. It has been suggested, that if he ever went at all, he went as a mimus, or buffoon (a word which had already been applied to minstrels), and that he amused his fierce enemies by the ordinary tricks, tumblings, and other performances of the jester.

For, in course of time, minstrel and buffoon came to be terms of much the same signification. This we find by another popular legend, which is supposed to have very little truth for a basis;—namely, the legend which tells of the faithful Blondel de Nesle, minstrel to King Richard I., seeking for his captured master, and discovering him by means of a song, sung outside the prison, to which the royal captive answered from within. Whether this story be true or not, it was accepted as truth at an early period, and in ‘Les Soirées de Guillaume Bouchet,’ we find, as a comment upon it, the following query:—“I just beg to ask you, if the wisest man in the world could have done more for his master; and if this buffoon of a minstrel (ce boufon de ménestrier) was not of more profit to King Richard, his lord, than the wisest scholars at court.”

For a long period, the minstrel seems to have been very well paid for the exercise of his art, at least in presence of royalty. At the marriage of the Countess of Holland, daughter of Edward I., every king-minstrel present received forty shillings! This guerdon, represented in modern money, would be not much under as many pounds sterling in value. The above was, perhaps, an exceptional occasion; but even the ordinary guerdon, of twenty and thirty shillings for a single night’s attendance, shows at what an early period the musical profession was exorbitantly remunerated;—for the individuals here alluded to were actual cantatores, and not mere joculatores.

The Court always thought better of them than the Church. “Actors and jesters,” says John of Salisbury (1160 circ.), “may not be admitted to the Sacrament.—Histriones et mimi non possunt recipere sacram Communionem.” And forty years later, there were some people who as much objected to marry their daughters to the King’s jesters, as the coachman of George II. did to his son marrying a maid-of-honour. One of the Pipe Rolls, supposed to be of the date of 1200, informs us that “Nicola, wife of Girard of Canville, accounts to the King for one hundred marks, for the privilege of marrying her daughter Maud to whatever person she pleases,—the King’s jester excepted—exceptis mimicis Regis. The mimici, whatever their exact office was, had as part of their duty, evidently, to amuse the King (John), and they would appear, from the reference made to them, to have been but a disreputable set of fellows. They were probably a sort of actors,—pantomimic, if not altogether dramatic;—for the descent of the ancient minstrel through poet and player to mere jester, is easy to be traced in the history of the profession in nearly every nation.

As I have but recently remarked, however, the minstrel proper, as well as he who joined gestas and joculatoria to his minstrelsy, was very much better paid than the clergy. Just so in the present day: we pay a tenore robusto a higher salary than the State awards to a general-in-chief or an admiral of the fleet, while a curate is more shabbily rewarded than the handicraftsman who makes his garments. To be sure, the “tenore robusto” can sing, while not one in ten of our curates knows how to read with effect. Perhaps, for some such reason, the minstrels of old had the advantage of the priest. Warton, in his second volume, notices the presence, in 1430, of a dozen priests and a dozen minstrels, at the festival of the Holy Cross at Abingdon. Both parties sang their best; but the clerics only received fourpence apiece for their pains, while the more lucky minstrels, who probably had some good jests for the Prior’s table, afterwards, received two shillings and fourpence each, and food for man and horse. Eleven years later, we are told of a feast held at the Priory of Maxtoke, near Coventry. Eight priests from Coventry were present, and half-a-dozen Mimi. The latter were players and jesters belonging to Lord Clinton, of Maxtoke. Well, priests and mimes sang, harped, and played, or sported,—the latter doubtless being the additional work of the “Mimi,” while the monks enjoyed themselves in the refectory. The Mimes received four shillings each, but the priests were supposed to be sufficiently well paid with just half the sum. Some such difference will be found by future examiners of court account-rolls regarding the payment of foreign and English singers of a very much later period. But, to return to the festival at Maxtoke, it is further to be observed, that the poor priests had no further compliment paid them, whereas the Sub-Prior invited Lord Clinton’s Mimi to sup with him “in the painted chamber,” and the chamberlain did honour to the occasion by putting eight massy wax tapers on the board. The incidents of this convent supper have not been recorded, but we may, without being uncharitable, judge them to have been of the jolliest aspect, with the Sub-Prior in the chair! At what time Lord Clinton saw his Mimi return to his castle, is not stated. The only further incident we hear of the conventual body at Maxtoke is, that for a sermon preached before its members by a travelling “Doctor Prædicans,” the Prior paid the preacher with sixpence! But, on consideration, that may have been as much as the sermon was worth.

If any doubt could exist of the identity of the minstrel and the jester, it might be removed by remembering that the jester alone had free access to the King, at any hour of the day or night, without let or hindrance, and without his being required to make previous application for permission. I believe no other official could enter the King’s chamber uninvited, unlicensed, or unannounced. Now I find the Serjeant Minstrel of King Edward IV. doing this, and on a very critical occasion. The King was in the North. The year was 1470; Edward had just quelled, or checked, the Lincolnshire insurrection, and he was passing his time in York, in gallantries and amusements, while Warwick was proclaiming Henry VI. One night his Serjeant Minstrel, Alexander Carlisle, rushed into the room where the monarch lay in bed, and bade him instantly arise, for enemies were abroad, and it would be well for him to be on the alert. We shall find a similar bold service enacted by the jester of William of Normandy, when we come to make record of the individual jesters, rather than of their profession generally. The above incident will help to show the identity of minstrel and jester; and the fact that Richard II., when he went to Ireland, had not only minstrels, but harpers, in his train, will serve to prove that the former was not identical with the latter. The minstrel, indeed, sang or acted, or did both, some Gest or story, from Scripture or romance. Hence probably the English term Jester,—originally the reciter and actor of some made-up poetical legend, with incidents added according to the taste of the hearers. The harper probably only accompanied the reciter of the Gest on his instrument.

It is not my province to narrate the history of the professional minstrel. It must suffice here to say, that they who commenced like gods, sank in course of time to a very degraded condition. The minstrels certainly belonged to the class of poor jokers about the time the law began to treat them as vagabonds. I can adduce an instance in the case of Richard Sheale, the author of one of the versions of the ballad of ‘Chevy Chace.’ Sheale was a minstrel by profession, and his home was at Tamworth, on the borders of Staffordshire and Warwickshire. Mr. R. White, in his Appendix to his ‘History of the Battle of Otterburn,’ affords us the following glimpse into the private and public life of this minstrel. “His wife was a ‘sylke woman,’ who sold shirts, head-clothes, laces, etc., at the fairs of Lichfield and other neighbouring towns. Being once in possession of above threescore pounds,—a large amount in those days,—and intending probably to settle various accounts contracted by his wife in her business, he left Tamworth on horseback, having his harp with him, and had the misfortune to be robbed by four villains who had lain in wait for him near Dunsmore Heath. The grief of his wife and himself at his loss—the coldness of worldly friends—the kindness of his patrons—the exertions of his loving neighbours at Tamworth, who induced him to brew a bushel of malt, and sell the ale for his benefit—and his appeal to the public for assistance, that he might clear off encumbrances, are all related in his ‘Chaunt,’ and show him to have been a simple, harmless man. But both this poem and the ‘Farewell’ afford humiliating evidence of the sorry life to which the poor minstrels were subjected in the early part of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.”

But leaving the descent of the English jester from the minstrel, or the question of their identity, to be decided upon by my readers, let us turn to the English poets for such information as they can afford us. The incidents there to be found in connection with this question, have doubtless reference to the English “fool” alone, in whatever country the poet may have located him. We meet with him however in England, in the tragedy of King Lear. The relation of fool and master, not a relation of the period of the play, but of a much later age, is very distinctly marked. Lear strikes a gentleman, only for chiding Lear’s fool; but the King keeps a whip for the latter, to be used when the jester’s truths smacked rudely, or were thrust forward unnecessarily. And these truths are occasionally of the very roughest quality, as, for instance, when the fool tells Lear, that he had given away all his titles save “fool,”—the one he was born with.

It is perhaps more by the comment of the jester than by the conduct of the King’s daughters, that Lear has fully revealed to him his state of terrible destitution; and if it be not an old traditionary saying of some jester, the advice is admirably in the jester’s way, which shows that if a man would rise in the world, it were better for him to let go a descending wheel, and to hang to one going up-hill.

The Yorick of Hamlet is probably a reminiscence of an English jester. He had carried the young prince on his back a thousand times, and the childish cavalier had kissed the merriest of fellows often. These were common incidents in a family where there was a household fool. Yorick however poured a flagon of Rhenish on the head of the gravedigger; but an English joculator would have drunk off the wine, and broken the gravedigger’s head with the flagon.

The whip was certainly ever present in the house that held an official Motley, in spite of the boasted license of speech supposed to be enjoyed by the latter. Touchstone is told that he shall be whipped for taxation. His qualities are, being able to string rhymes together in a butter-woman’s jog-trot pace to market; he has a memory for old verses; is full of smart sayings against the corrupt in fine linen, and has the faculty of making an honest calling seem uncleanly. He is a droll sort of philosopher, with a taste of the knave in him; and so far imitates the vices of his patrons, by being marvellously ready to seduce and betray. Rosalind tells him that he speaks wiser than he is aware, which a fool only seemed to do: it was part of his office. One of his happiest expressions has often been uttered by travellers who have gone abroad only to be disappointed: “Here am I in Arden. The more fool I! When I was at home, I was in a better place!”

The Duke admirably describes a first-rate jester when he notices Touchstone as “swift and sententious,” and that he “wore his folly as a stalking-horse, and, under presentation of that, shoots his wit.” Touchstone too is a gentleman in his way, seeing that he has “undone three tailors!”

The cynicism of the English fool is no doubt alluded to in Timon of Athens, where he is looked upon as a form of the old cynic philosopher, as indeed he was everywhere. To a sharp sentence of the fool, the churlish sage remarks, “That answer might have become Apemantas.”

Perhaps the truest likeness of Shakespeare’s fools to the actual Motleys, is the Clown in Twelfth Night. He preaches and quotes Latin with the facility of Chicot, and as if he had been much with the parson. The threat to hang him or turn him away, may show that loss of service was held to be a disaster; while the way in which (upon permission) he shows his mistress to be a fool, is an excellent illustration of the liberty arrogated by the professor of wit. Malvolio saw him put down in contention with an ordinary fool. These trials of wit were not uncommon when the household buffoon was common also; but it was all in jest. Nothing the jester uttered, however he meant it, was ever taken for serious. “There is no slander,” says Olivia, “in an allowed fool.” This shows the worth attached to Motley’s sayings; the clown, too, very accurately defines his own standing, when he says, “I am not her fool, but her corruptor of words;” and Viola exquisitely and perfectly portrays all that the fool should be, in the words:—

“This fellow’s wise enough to play the fool;
And to do that well craves a kind of wit:
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons and the time;
And, like the haggard, check at ev’ry feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice,
As full of labour as a wise man’s art:
For folly, that he wisely shows, is fit;
But wise men, folly fallen, taint their wit.”

It is impossible that any pen could better describe the requirements of the jester, his qualifications, the duty to be performed, and the way to perform it. No court fool of Shakespeare’s time or memory could have sat for the portrait. Neither Patch, nor Pace, nor Chester, nor Clod could have done so; perhaps Heywood comes nearest to it, but he was probably not in Shakespeare’s mind, when he imagined a more brilliant fool than ever sat at the hearth of a prince and railed at his patron.

Beaumont and Fletcher, in the Mad Lover, cannot be said to be nearly so successful in their description of the fool and his quality, though there is allusion in it to the would-be professors, worth noticing.

“Every idle knave that shows his teeth,
Wants and would live, can juggle, tumble, fiddle,
Make a dog-face, or can abuse his fellow,
Is not a fool at first dash. You shall find, Sir,
Strange turnings in this trade.”

In the Wit Without Money of these authors, we have a glimpse of a sort of household joker of those times, in the person of Shorthose, the widow’s fool, who grows dull in the country, brightens up by town associations, loves good living, dislikes morning prayers, and has a turn for clever similes and smart sayings, in the style of stage valets. He is superior, after all, to Tony, in A Wife for a Month, who is a mere low-comedy fool, with a wit to which Shakespeare’s jesters would scorn to condescend. In this piece, however, we again trace the presence of the whip, as a permanent menace against offending Motley, in English houses. The usurping Frederick, indeed, says to him, “Thou art a fool, and may’st do mischief lawfully;”—nevertheless, not only the fool’s master, but others of less authority, frequently threaten to chastise this official with an undefined position.

Geta, in the Prophetess, is described as a “jester,” but he is little more than a stage servant, who alludes to “turn-spits,” and who becomes duller the higher he rises in station. Villio, in the Double Marriage, is a type of the philosophical fool, of whom there were many; and who, with the wit of common sense, judges content in a cottage to be better than a throne with a thorn in the side of the king who sits on it. We have still fewer reflections of the jester in Penurio and Soto, of Woman Pleased, and in Jaques and Pedro of Women’s Prize. Beaumont and Fletcher have more success in painting the household dwarf than the household fool. The fidelity of Zoilus, dwarf to a duke’s son, in Cupid’s Revenge, is a compliment to his class. He is as ugly as most of these creatures were, who moreover lived in constant feud with the more gigantic jester, if there was one in the house. Zoilus is described as being “an ape’s skin stuffed; with a pudding in ’s belly;” and yet his lady loves him, for which, however, he is sent to death. Even Base, the jester to the passionate lord, in Nice Valour, is but a weak representative of our official friend. He has but one jest, and that is but a poor one. A servant says, “There comes a Cupid drawn by six fools.” To which Base replies, “That’s nothing, I ha’ known six hundred fools drawn by one Cupid.” There is a finer touch of the real Motley in Massinger’s Calandrino (Great Duke of Florence), when he remarks:—

“I confess,
I am not very wise, and yet I find
A fool, so he be parcel knave, in court
May flourish and grow rich.”

And his distinction between country and court air is quite in the fool’s vein:—

“As this court air taught me knavish wit,
By which I am grown rich, if that again
Should turn me fool and honest, vain hopes, farewell!
For I must die a beggar.”

Calandrino, however, is but the “merry servant” to the nephew of the Great Duke, and has only the attributes of the official jester, without actually exercising the office.

It will be remembered that against all fools, and especially against those introduced on the stage, Sir Philip Sidney made eloquent protest; and all that Puttenham could advance in support of the professional household jester, was that something amusing was to be found in listening to the pretended foolishness of a jester, who had the wit to be wise when he chose so to direct it.

The stage fool expired in 1662, in a prologue spoken by a “fool.” The play is a long-since forgotten piece called ‘Thorney Abbey,’ and the motley speaker of the prologue affects to reproach the author for writing a drama with a king and court in it, and omitting the time-honoured character of the jester.

Meanwhile, the buffoon was a prominent character, not only at court, but in corporations, where he measured out gaiety for the mayor and his guests; and in great households, when, for all his license, he sometimes got whipped for telling stories rather too coarse, in presence of ladies who could listen to a great amount of that sort of thing without blushing. We find him also in taverns, where he amused the topers by his rude jests and ruder minstrelsy, just as Dionysius, in his exile, is said to have done, when he enacted buffoon in a barber’s shop, for his daily bread; and finally, the buffoon was that, and bully too, in other establishments open to the public, but less favourably considered by the law.

We leave these, to follow more exclusively the court and household fool. The office of the jester was one which, says Fuller, in his ‘Holy State,’ “none but he that hath wit can perform; and none but he that wants it, will perform.” There is little doubt of this, for wit had its miseries, as Lodge graphically pointed out, in 1599, in a book which, under the title of ‘Wit’s Misery,’ has especial reference to this subject. The author, after pointing out the immoderate and inordinate jollity which was the stock-in-trade of the fool,—his comeliness of person, and his courtliness of dress,—adds that, after all, he was more of an ape than a man, and that his chief duties were to study the coining of bitter jests, to practise quaint and antique motions, to sing immodest songs, to laugh intemperately on very small occasion for it, and, when the wine was in his head, to mouth and gibe at all around him. The fool, says Lodge, “dances about the house, leaps over tables, outskips men’s heads, trips up his companions’ heels, burns sack with a candle, and hath all the feats of a lord of misrule in the country; feed him in his humour, you shall have his heart; in mere kindness, he will hug you in his arms, kiss you on the cheek, and, rapping out a horrible oath, cry, ‘God’s soul, Tom, I love you; you know my poor heart; come to my chamber for a pipe of tobacco; there lives not a man in this world that I more honour.’ In the ceremonies, you shall know his courting; and it is a special mark of him at the table, he sits and makes faces. Keep not this fellow company; for in juggling with him, your wardrobe shall be wasted, your credit cracked, your crowns consumed, and your time (the most precious riches in the world) utterly lost.” This was written in 1599; but only thirty-five years later, 1634, we find that some jesters at least had not a very miserable time of it; for Stafford tells us, in his Code of Honour, that “he had known a great and competently wise man, who would much respect any man that was good to his fool.”

In many cases, the latter was as much a household servant as mere jester, and was equally at home at the master’s board, or in the kitchen, where he received such whippings as he chanced to earn. That he was occasionally as much relished by the retainers as by his patron, there can be no doubt, and his position among these is so well described by Thornbury, in his rattling ‘Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads,’ that, in place of illustrating that position by citing old ballads and ballad-makers, I will place before my readers the lively picture portrayed by a skilful and living artist,—in ‘The Jester’s Sermon.’—

“The jester shook his hood and bells and leaped upon a chair;
The pages laughed, the women screamed, and tossed their scented hair;
The falcon whistled, stag-hounds bayed, the lap-dog barked without;
The scullion dropped the pitcher brown,—the cook railed at the lout;
The steward, counting out his gold, let pouch and money fall:
And why? Because the jester rose to say grace in the hall!

“The page played with the heron’s plume, the steward with his chain;
The butler drummed upon the board, and laughed with might and main;
The grooms beat on their metal cans, and roared till they turned red;
But still the jester shut his eyes and rolled his witty head;
And when they grew a little still, read half a yard of text;
And waving hand struck on the desk, then frowned, like one perplexed.

“‘Dear sinners all!’ the fool began, ‘man’s life is but a jest,
A dream, a shadow, bubbles, air, a vapour, at the best.
In a thousand pounds of law I find not a single ounce of love.
A blind man killed the parson’s cow, in shooting at the dove.
The fool that eats till he is sick must fast till he is well.
The wooer who can flatter most will bear away the bell.

“‘Let no man halloo he is safe till he is through the wood.
He who will not when he may, must tarry when he should.
He who laughs at crooked men should need walk very straight.
Oh, he who once has won a name may lie abed till eight.
Make haste to purchase house and land, be very slow to wed.
True coral needs no painter’s brush, nor need be daubed with red.