The Book-Lover’s Library.

Edited by
Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A.

STUDIES
IN
JOCULAR LITERATURE.

A POPULAR SUBJECT MORE CLOSELY
CONSIDERED.

BY
W. CAREW HAZLITT.

Ne moy reproues sans cause, quar mon entent est de
bone amour.

LONDON:
ELLIOT STOCK, 62 PATERNOSTER ROW
1890

CONTENTS.

STUDIES IN
JOCULAR LITERATURE

CHAPTER I.

Introductory Remarks on the Real Use and Importance of Jests and Anecdotes.

ONE of the Anglo-Saxon kings gave the manor of Walworth to his jester Nithardus; and we have all heard how the magnificent benefaction of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, subsequently repaired by Sir Richard Whittington, was founded by Rahere, the joculator and favourite of a later monarch of this isle. In former days, to be a fool within certain lines, or a buffoon of a special type, was a walk of life not to be despised either by a man or by his friends. The jokes which he made were negotiable securities of first-class value. Not a five-pound note, but broad lands and the smiles of a prince, awaited the fortunate utterer of the bon-mot and the fountain of merriment and good humour.

Even in the time of Charles II. the prosperity of the vocation had sensibly declined. Charles liked people who contributed to his amusement; but shabby constitutional restraints precluded him from endowing a pleasant fellow, who could play a conjurer’s tricks with the risible muscles and the purse-strings of his sovereign, with a large and valuable estate.

Nay, before the Stuart era, Henry VII., whose parsimony has been exaggerated, and who gave freely to many charitable objects, had to content himself with presenting the makers of jeux d’esprit with a few shillings—the shillings, of course, of that epoch.

The greater rarity of learning, and its status as a special mystery or cult, surrounded these ancient scholars with an atmosphere which we have not only a difficulty, but a sort of delicacy, perhaps, in thoroughly penetrating, so as to enable us to arrive at an absolutely accurate valuation of their gifts. Among their contemporaries and even immediate descendants they were regarded as something more than human; and this sentiment, while it, as a rule, limited itself to worshipful awe, not unfrequently degenerated into a superstitious dread fatal to the possessors of incomprehensible faculties.

The first impression of nine persons out of ten, on taking up a Book of Jests or Anecdotes, is that it is merely a volume prepared for their momentary diversion—to be bought at a stall for a trifle, cursorily studied, and thrown on one side.

But the moment that one approaches this description of literature in a critical spirit, it begins to wear a changed, and yet perhaps a more interesting, aspect. The application of a microscope of very inconsiderable power is found by a philosophical student of the subject to be adequate to the detection of much that is new and curious, lying either on the surface or not very far from it.

Anecdote-literature, in which I always desire to understand as included the Jest, seems to me fairly resonant with the life of other days—in larger measure than has been usually supposed, simply because on a superficial view we are very apt to content ourselves with the foregone conclusion, that a story, whether humorous or otherwise, is nothing but a story.

The notes to the series of Old English Jest-Books, edited by myself in 1864, and the frequent citations of such works in our philological literature, bring us to the consideration of another point of view, in which it is well, perhaps, that we should try to tolerate these facetious miscellanies, and regard with indulgence their sins alike against propriety and against wit. A dull story is frequently redeemed, it may be observed in studying such publications, by the light which it sheds on an otherwise unintelligible phrase or allusion—or, indeed, by the service which it renders in having rescued one from oblivion.

The accidental formation, more than twenty years ago, of this acquaintance with our own jocular literature, and the periodical renewal of it in an editorial capacity, have naturally led me to pay rather close attention to the Jest in its numerous varieties and stages of growth, and to cast from time to time a scrutinising eye over the contents of the extensive series of works in this class which has come under my notice.

The result, almost unconsciously to myself, has been that the theory on the subject, with which I started in life, has made room for one of a different complexion and drift; and I propose to offer in the following pages some suggestions for reducing to a better and more intelligent order certain of the facetiæ and jeux d’esprit, by way of sample, in the Collections, and to point out, to the best of my ability, how they have been subjected to disguising or transforming processes by political, literary, or commercial inducements.

Although the independent reading of the more thoughtful and studious had long brought them, of course, to a more enlightened inference, I almost apprehend that, until Mr. Wright’s volume on Grotesque and Caricature appeared, the loose general notion was that there was not much worth regarding in the present direction beyond the imperishable pages of Joe Miller; and I certainly think that a very narrow minority conceived in how wide and many-sided a meaning the Jest is susceptible of being understood.

On the contrary, the Jest offers itself to our consideration in a surprising diversity of types and garbs; and the project which I have now before me is, in fact, an attempt to treat for the first time, in a catholic and critical spirit, a theme which has been usually viewed as frivolous and undignified.

It is a matter of notoriety that some of our best antiquaries have loved to trace to their sources the comic and romantic tales which we have borrowed from the Continent, and to note the variations introduced for the sake of novelty, local requirement, or dramatic exigency, by a succession of writers in the same or in different languages.

A vast amount of labour and scholarship has been expended in illustrating by this light the works of Shakespear and our other early playwrights, as well as in recovering the clues to the material on which Chaucer and Spenser built their undying productions. Moreover, both in England and abroad, a great deal has been achieved in elucidating the literary history of our ancient jest-books, and improving our intimacy with the true origin of the stories and their subsequent adventures, in more or less numerous disguises, from the Hundred Merry Tales to Joe Miller or what may perhaps be termed the Milleriana.

But when one has assiduously sifted all this learning, one finds that it very naturally limits itself, as a rule, to the very early books, so far as facetiæ are concerned,—to that branch of the subject which belongs to Archæology; and, in short, I do not know that I have been to any but the most trifling extent forestalled in the design which I here try to carry out, of arranging and analysing the humorous traditions which we have received from our forefathers touching the celebrities of all ages and countries, yet more exclusively those who flourished within a measurable distance of time, or those whom no distance of time is capable of affecting; or, once more, such relations as owe, not to the names, but to the matter, their continuity of life.

The origin of all jocular or semi-serious literature and art is referable, of course, to a stage of human development when the deviation from a certain standard of feeling or opinion could be appreciable; and it does not require the long establishment of a settled society, judging from the habits of savage and illiterate communities, before a sense of the ludicrous and grotesque begins to form part of the popular sentiment.

The ludicrous and grotesque are, to a certain extent, relative or conditional terms. The canons of propriety and right in primitive life are so widely different from those which prevail in a state of civilisation, that what we should regard as fit material for a jest-book is elsewhere treated as a piece of serious history. A departure from the line of expression or deportment sanctioned by common usage has proved in all countries and all ages a fertile source of satire and caricature; but then that line, like the needle, is subject to variation, and the fixture of character is not, as is the case with straight and curved lines in mathematics, a matter of doctrine and fact, but one mainly of local circumstance and costume.

The joke has proved in all ages a factor of manifold power and use. It has ridiculed and exposed corruptions in the body politic and in the social machinery. It has laughed at some things because they were new, and at others because they were old. It has preserved records of persons and ideas, and traits of ancient bygone manners, which must otherwise have perished; and it frequently stands before us with its esoteric moral hidden not much below its ostensible and immediate purport.

Jests present humanity to our observation in its holiday attire, its Sunday best, or at least under some exceptional and temporary aspect. Quin and Foote, Mathews and Sydney Smith, Frank Talfourd and Henry Byron, had their grave, and very grave, intervals. Hood himself said that he had to be a lively Hood for a livelihood; and it was mournfully true, as the records of his every-day life, chastened by illness and sorrow, only too well establish. The pleasant or comic episodes may be an occasional incidence of the least happy existence or the least fortunate career; and the anecdotes, humorous or otherwise, of celebrated men and women are receivable with allowance as traits of character and conduct, for which some special circumstance, or a union of circumstances, is answerable. In the general tenor of the most favoured experiences the serious element is apt to preponderate; the heyday of our years is like short, intermittent sunshine; and we ought to come to the study of ANA, if we wish to judge them correctly, with a recollection of what they are, and also what they are not. They who have enjoyed the privilege of a personal acquaintance with the gayest of our modern humourists—and there are many such (including the present writer) among us still—are best qualified to pronounce an opinion upon this point; and they know how much of darkness and anguish often there is behind the scenes or off the boards. The jokes by or about any given individual do not, after all, amount to a great deal, when they are spread over thirty or forty years: all the genuine sayings of Theodore Hook or Douglas Jerrold would not fill more than a few octavo pages; and these things are to be taken, not as indices to the habitual unbroken mood of the man, but rather as samples of felicity of phrase or thought to be gotten, like mineral ore, under auspicious conditions from a wealthy soil.

We are too grossly subservient to habit and use. We naturally accustom ourselves, unless we reflect, to figure the clown with his tongue perpetually in his cheek and the wit discharging his shafts without cessation or repose—just as, on the contrary, no one would be prepared to believe, without the strongest proof, that a tailor had made a pun, or that a railway porter had written a Greek epigram.

If we try to realise in our imagination Grimaldi stretched on a bed of sickness, a jovial companion in a gouty paroxysm, or an excellent friend, the author of utterances which have delighted and convulsed the stage, in the extremity of mental depression or physical suffering, we shall be better able to see that the Anecdote generically, and the Jest in particular, are fortuitous emanations and not parcel of our daily being.

Facetious narrations are too seldom subjected to the test of circumstantial evidence. We are not apt to ask ourselves the question, who delivered the joke, or ushered it into print? There are cases, of course, where the author of a sally or rejoinder himself repeats it to a third party, possibly in its original shape, possibly with embellishments; but there must be, nay, there are numberless instances in which a funny thing is given to a person, not because he said it, but because he might or would have done so. It is an assignment by inference and likelihood.

CHAPTER II.

Origin of this Class of Literature, and its Dependence on the Conditions of Society—Jests before Jest-books—Influence of the Arts of Writing and Printing Long Subsequent to the Introduction of Caricature and Humour.

THE earliest form or phase of the Jest was the product of an illiterate age. A knowledge of the art of writing was a discovery long subsequent to the rise of a taste for the expression of the laughable, for the sake either of amusement or of ridicule. The primitive authors of jokes were men who employed, not the pen, but the chisel and the brush; and the most venerable existing specimens of this branch of human ingenuity belong to art, not to literature; and to Egypt, the cradle and nursery of art.

In his admirable History of Caricature and Grotesque, 1865, Wright has accumulated such an immense body of information on this most interesting subject of inquiry that, so far as it goes, it will supersede the necessity for traversing the ground again. He has traced with singular industry and scholarship the growth and development of the jocular sentiment in all its varied points of view, from its first infancy among the Egyptians, through the Greeks and Romans, to modern times and our own country.

For while during centuries the feeling for the grotesque or absurd, together with the almost inborn propensity for the exposure of foibles and vices in an enemy, a rival, or an obnoxious public character, had its outlets only through the agency of art, and the sculptor or draughtsman was the sole resource of those who loved caricature and farce, the introduction of caligraphy by no means diminished the call for the graphic delineators of comedy and satire. The English artists of the Georgian epoch were equally prolific and unsparing; and even now, when all the civilised communities of the world have their printing presses without number at command, the pencil remains a favourite vehicle for the exhibition of humorous or unpopular traits in distinguished persons of the day, and among many connoisseurs and students a volume of Gillray or Rowlandson is a more welcome object of attention or notice than a printed record.

The engraving has in all ages enjoyed over its literary counterpart or equivalent the great advantage, that it immediately attracts the eye, and enables one to embrace every point of view and the whole story at a glance; whereas in the other case the same effect is scarcely produced on the mind by many pages of letterpress or the most elaborate inscription on metal or stone. The spectator is in fact a far older student than the reader or the listener to a reading, or than the audience of the minstrel of yore. The organs of sight have been the direct media through which innumerable generations of mankind have received all the knowledge and culture which they ever possessed; and we perceive at the present moment how far the cheap print and the gay shop-window go to supply such Englishmen of the nineteenth century as have small leisure and perhaps equally small inclination for books with notions of current sentiments and transactions.

The manuscript or printed page has not a co-ordinate power with the mural sketch or other pictorial representation, with or without its adjunct of hyperbole and broad colouring, in an instantaneous appeal to the passions, or to the sense of the ridiculous, or, again, to the public instinct of wrong. The press bears its part; but whatever its development in the future may prove to be, it will never completely obliterate the demand and admiration for the labours of the graphic illustrator, whose origin is positively lost in antiquity, and whose pursuit was, doubtless, among the subjects of the Rameses dynasty themselves-an accomplishment derived from Oriental (possibly Turanian) instructors; for the most archaic published examples manifest a tolerable intimacy with design and the combination of effect, as well as a capability of awakening hilarious sensations by the burlesque perversion of serious matters.

The joke-wright and the anecdote-monger may be treated as two exceptionally fortunate professional persons, who enter the field of their labours and researches with a light heart and an empty budget. Their accumulation of stock is immense. The capital of all their ancestors becomes their fee simple ex officio. There need be among them no struggling beginners, no modest apprenticeship; and all that is expected at their hands is a certain proficiency in conveyancing, and the addition, before they and the world bid each other farewell, of a donation or two to the bank for the benefit of the public and of ensuing freeholders for evermore.

The introduction of typography, in jocular as in all other branches of literature, was instrumental in accomplishing a transition from oral delivery to the printed collection. In lieu of the minstrel and the bordeur, such sections of the public as could read might have in their closets and window-recesses garlands of facetiæ in prose or verse. The press slowly superseded the reciter and the professional buffoon with his budget of witticisms and tales. But the process was of course a very gradual one, so long as the diffusion of culture remained imperfect and partial; and for a great length of time the old-world system of reading from the MS., or repeating extempore to an audience, and of the passage of jests and tales from mouth to mouth, continued more or less to flourish, just as it does in the form of a revival, among certain classes of the modern English community, who seem to do from choice what their forerunners did from need.

A vein of exaggeration, which is apt to characterise anecdotes as they are repeated from mouth to mouth, or transferred from one book to another, resolves itself into mere innocuous caricature or gasconade, where the plot is of a comic turn; but where a certain indelicacy or double sense accompanies the original version, the new-renderer has it in his power to pander to the prevailing taste by making a gross story immeasurably more exceptionable, either by simple intensification or by connecting incidents and expressions with persons to whom they never in point of fact belonged.

Now, this I take to be very much the case with the Jests of Scogin, a compilation of the Tudor era by a doctor, as it is said, who was guilty of writing a fair amount of matter in a similar vein, but who, if these Jests were truly of his composition, shewed by his Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, and one or two other works, that he was capable of something higher. I refer to Doctor Andrew Borde, a learned and ingenious man, as we may perceive, but far from being fastidious in his writings, or (which is worse) in ascribing to the most exalted characters of an antecedent epoch a tolerance of the most outrageous and vulgar buffoonery.

It is exceedingly likely that the court of the susceptible and profligate Edward IV., to which Scogin is supposed to have resorted, was a scene of coarse simplicity and no model of decorum; and so late down as the reign of George II. the great ladies permitted themselves a licence in speech, which prevented the editor of Maloniana from printing the whole of the MS. But so far as the latter circumstance goes, these were mostly passages inter se (so to speak); and it remains incredible, that some of the adventures with which Scogin is reported to have met within the very precincts of the palace, can have actually happened under the eyes of the queen and her attendants. Dr. Borde, I apprehend in fact, has committed the impropriety of transferring to another age the manners of his own, which was so far venial enough, and consonant with dramatic usage; but he has most unwarrantably taken some of his characters from a sphere of life in which the enactment of such low pranks would hardly have been suffered. To cast aspersions on the representatives of an extinct dynasty, however, was a tolerably safe game. The Jests of Scogin had no political significance; and the occasional reflections on the clergy were not calculated to give serious offence in influential quarters, or to Henry VIII. himself, just at the juncture when the Reformation was imminent. Not in the pages of Borde alone, but throughout the literature of the later part of Henry’s reign, sly strokes at the doomed papal hierarchy were eyed with evident indulgence and favour. Borde knew his ground and his customers: had his satire been levelled at the Government in an infinitely milder and more covert way, the stake or the block would have been his portion; had his book been published twenty years sooner, his strictures on the Church would scarcely have been prudent; but he confined his pen, where he rose above a humble social level, to names which were little more than historical, and to an institution whose days were numbered.

CHAPTER III.

Literature and the Drama as Contributories to Jocular Literature—Dependence on Surroundings and Circumstances.

LITERATURE and the Drama have been the most munificent contributors to our Ana. If the sayings reported of or by actors and authors were subtracted from the grand total, the residuum would assuredly display a very deplorable shrinkage; and this is easily capable of explanation in a manner which itself explains the corrupt form in which much of this lore has descended to us. For the whole atmosphere of the theatre is conducive to the suggestion of odd circumstances and situations, and the professional writer enjoys peculiar facilities, through his reading and associates, for making himself master of the good sayings of his own circle and of other times. As Bacon observed, “Reading makes a full man, and conversation a ready man”; the caterer for the stage or the booksellers finds that it enters into his business to store his brain with such bons-mots and pieces of harmless scandal as he picks up in books or in society; and these are naturally apt to undergo, before they reach other ears, a polishing operation or the action of the churn. For, as they came to him, they offended in some particular, perchance, his artistic eyes, or it seemed good to change the bill.

To this kind of agency, no doubt, is owing the large stock, which survives in print in most languages, of various readings of stories; but a second and very different influence, not less potential, has been concurrently at work in the same direction. From time immemorial the professional joke-dresser has ranged at will over the whole field, and kept the market excellently well supplied with goods of this special description in every variety at the lowest possible figure.

Malone, in his Recollections, says of Richardson the artist:

“He was a great news- and anecdote-monger, and in the latter part of his life spent much of his time in gathering and communicating intelligence concerning the King of Prussia, and other topics of the day, as Dr. Burney, who knew him very well, informs me.”

This extract furnishes in some degree the key to the origin of a large share of the amusing tales, jeux d’esprits, and repartees, which the various extant collections offer to our consideration—that is to say, to their origin in a second or third state, as the printseller expresses it; and beyond question, if there is any branch of facetious biography or history which has reached us in an artificial condition, it is par excellence that which deals with alleged episodes in the careers of high-born personages, not merely of remote times, but of an approximate generation or so—nay, even of the great folks with whom we might touch elbows, si fas esset.

If it be the case that “a jest’s prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it,” it is equally true that a pleasantry depends for its thorough success on the atmosphere in which it receives utterance, and on the personality of the narrator. Something which might seem racy and piquant to an Oriental, would very probably fall flat in an ancient Greek and Roman gathering; and it demanded all the surrounding costume of Greece or Rome to give salience and effect to those specimens of wit, which do not often, as they are recorded, strike us as remarkably brilliant. It is as if we put old wine into new bottles. The liquor is there; but the crust and the beeswing have vanished.

So it is with the facetious heritage which comes to us from our own immediate ancestors. The substance and outline are with us; but the setting, the context, and the genius loci, are too frequently to be desired; and, besides, an editor has perhaps come upon the ground, and turned what was rough copy into a sentence or a paragraph “teres atque rotundus.” It becomes a readable article of sale; but it is a sort of handiwork, and no longer a spontaneous sally or a faithful report.

On the other hand, it may happen that a jest bears upon some permanent incidence of human society, and passes with merely verbal changes from one age, one language, and one country, to another; like the episode mentioned by Lucian in his Hetairai and likewise by Gellius, of the lady who, when her admirer sent her a cask of wine, commending its age, retorted that it was very small for its age,—where we observe that the conditions, being neither local nor temporary, are capable of universal and perpetual application.

The reduction of pleasantries and satirical thrusts to form must be an outcome of topographical, climatic and social conditions, and is necessarily dependent on habits of life, pronunciation, diet, and dress—nay, on the most trifling minutiæ connected with national usages. The happiness of a witticism or of a taunt hangs on its relationship at some sort of angle to the customs and notions prevalent in a country. It exists by no other law than its antagonism or contrast to received institutions and matters of common belief; and hence what in one part of the world is apt to awaken mirth or resentment, in another falls flatly on the ear.

The essence and property of a saying lie under very weighty obligations to local circumstances and colouring. There can be no more familiar illustration of my meaning to an English reader than the large debt which an Irish or Scottish piece of humour owes to the Irish or Scottish brogue. But it has been the same everywhere from all time. Among the ancient Greeks an Ionian would have found much difficulty in appreciating the point of an Attic sally, while among the modern Italians a Tuscan would listen with unmoved countenance to a jeu d’esprit in the Venetian patois. The turn of a syllable, the inflexion of a vowel, is enough to mar the effect; and a similar observation holds good of the numberless dialects spoken throughout the German Fatherland and the Low Countries.

It is comparatively easy to comprehend a joke, when there is a well-understood acceptation of terms and a community of atmosphere and costume; but to study these matters at a distance both of time and place, and to have to allow for altered circumstances or surroundings is immeasurably more difficult; and this is what I do not think we always remember that we have to do in estimating the good things of our own precursors on this soil, and still more those of individuals governed in all their ways of thinking and acting by considerations which we can never perfectly bring home to ourselves.

Taking the United States, again, the same expression will be treated in one part as of obnoxious significance; in another it will perhaps raise a smile; and in a third it will bear no meaning whatever.

CHAPTER IV.

Justification for the Present Undertaking—Literary Interest of the Subject—The Various Classes of Jest—The Serious Anecdote the Original Type and the Jest an Evolution—Greek and Roman Examples—The “Deipnosophistæ” of Athenæus.

A JUSTIFICATION for the present inquiry may be found, then, in the historical, biographical and literary interest with which it abounds, and in the multiplicity of aspects under which the topic is capable of being contemplated.

The Jest resembles a tree of many branches. It is couched in a wide variety of shapes—namely, the Riddle, the Epigram, the Apologue or Tale, the Repartee, the Quibble, and the Pun.

Of these, the Apologue and the Riddle are the most ancient—the latter being entitled to priority, if we take into account its positive origin in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves, although the jocular or comic development is so much more recent. The same criticism applies to the Apologue which was transplanted from Oriental soil, where it has ever been a favourite method of conveying instruction and amusement, into the oldest Western vehicles for the same twofold purpose, such as the Gesta Romanorum, the Fables of Æsop, and Reynard the Fox. These productions, with many others, were designed as a method of inculcating moral precepts and political lessons under a fictitious or romantic garb. The facetious adaptation was a later growth, and first manifests itself in the French and Latin fabliaux in prose or verse edited for us by Méon and Wright.

Next in the scale of antiquity to the Apologue and Riddle we may be warranted in ranking the Epigram; and this, too, like the two others to which I have been referring, was in its inception and early employment satirical rather than burlesque for the most part. Humour did not enter at first into its composition or design. Any one who looks through the Greek Anthology may see that the productions in that language are serious narratives treated in a terse and condensed style.

The Quibble and Repartee were tolerably popular features and characteristics in the jest-books of the seventeenth century, when the formation of literary clubs, and the increased correspondence between men of parts and wit, naturally led to the growth of that large body of sayings which the printed and MSS. collections have handed down to us. The age immediately succeeding that of Shakespear saw the uprise of the quip and crank, and the retort courteous, “conceits, clinches, flashes, and whimzies,” and all the rest of the merry, motley company. Such utterances they were as undoubtedly appealed with success to their auditors and readers; but so thorough is the change which has stolen over our taste and feeling in these matters, that, in turning over the leaves of a volume of facetiæ, which was once read with avidity and delight, the impression now produced is a mingled one of surprise and disappointment.

The humorous literature, like the coinage, of a particular era, seems as if it were part of it; and it is in a vast majority of instances incapable of assimilation or transfer, as I shall endeavour to prove by a few casual selections from miscellanies which were in prime vogue and favour when James I. was on the throne, and those three renowned hostelries, the Mermaid, the Mitre, and the Devil, were flourishing centres of all that was cultivated and spiritual.

The serious Anecdote naturally took precedence of its jocular evolution or offspring; and indeed the latter, as is obvious enough, could hardly exist as a congener, till artificial and more or less complicated forms of social life had been developed. Even the entries in such books as Plutarch, where he narrates some incident in the biography of one of his heroes of a nature less grave than usual, and of a sufficiently playful or salient nature to have tempted the editors of the ancient collections of facetiæ to include them in their pages, cannot quite properly be said to be exceptions to the rule, that the Jest, as we understand it, was unknown to the ancients, although all civilised nations have in their turn possessed a keen sense of the laughable, and have devised methods of holding up to derision those who deviated from the prevailing standard of decorum, morality, or etiquette; or, again, who exposed themselves to personalities from special causes.

The selections from classic sources in the Merry Tales and Quick Answers, printed in the time of Henry VIII., have on this account a tendency to weight the book, and render it less attractive and readable at the present time than its famous contemporary, entitled A Hundred Merry Tales, which was prepared on a more judicious principle, and excluded all but tales of more or less current interest.

The favourite Greek and Roman authors with compilers of Ana have been at all periods Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Lucian, Athenæus, and Diogenes Laertius. It is very rarely that Homer or Cicero is enlisted in their service by the caterers for popular entertainment; and even in the case of the Merry Tales and Quick Answers the stories about the ancients are appended at the end, as if they had been an afterthought or a stratagem for making out the copy.

There is a coincidence between Lucian and Athenæus in this respect,—that the jeux d’esprit, such as they are, in both writers occur almost exclusively in their remarks on Courtesans; and we ought to be the less surprised at such a circumstance, when we call to mind that the Greek hetairai were precisely the class which chiefly mixed with men of wit, and was most apt to yield subject-matter for pleasant sallies and epigrammatic clinches. Among the Romans, too, as we easily collect from the writings of their amatory poets and the lighter productions of Horace, the women of pleasure were accomplished and attractive; but no type exactly parallel to the Greek hetaira, as she is depicted in the pages of literary history, seems ever to have existed in Italy, and the nearest approach to her socially is perhaps the Parisian grisette, and, in point of culture and mental qualities, the gay female throng which haunted the court of Charles II. Both these, however, were, while presenting features of resemblance, essentially dissimilar from their prototype, who was a natural emanation of the climate, government, and moral atmosphere in which she was born and bred.

Notwithstanding the undoubted presence of a feeling for humour among the Greeks and other remote nationalities, one finds it possible to lay down the Deipnosophistæ and the Hetairæ with an unrelaxed countenance; and one arrives at the conclusion that all the best things have perished, or that much of the comic effect produced at table or on the stage was due to local costume and to evanescent gesture and pantomime,—just as the triumphs of Grimaldi and Liston among ourselves, and Richard Tarlton before them, depended so materially on personal mannerism and extempore grimace.

In Lucian the most remarkable specimen, and that which has been most frequently quoted and borrowed, is the retort of the lady to her lover about the small size of the cask of wine which he had sent to her, considering its reputed age; and this is also in the Deipnosophistæ, where it is related, however, of Phryne.

Perhaps the most interesting feature in the latter work, in connection with the immediate topic, is the notice which we get of the Athenian Club of the Sixty, in the time of Demosthenes. Even the names or sobriquets of some of the members have survived; and Philip of Macedon honoured the institution by the expression of his regret that his other avocations precluded him from joining it, and by a simultaneous request that a collection of all the good sayings uttered at its gatherings should be sent to him. Whether or not this flattering requisition was supplied, there is no record; but in any case it shadows the possibility of a jest-book far more ancient, and presumably also more copious, than that of Hierocles.

It thus appears, moreover, that the earliest companionship of anecdotes of all descriptions is with the feast and the cup; the lost conversational gems of the Attic Sexagint were distilled over the convivial glass; and the pages of Athenæus are put forward in like manner as the gradual progeny of table-talk—table-talk which may have received in not a few instances the polishing touches of an editor.

The student who may be at the pains to consult the Deipnosophistæ and its analogues will probably concur with me in the opinion that such repositories were little calculated to prove advantageous resorts for later compilers of bons-mots. Not merely is it that the bulk of the matter is not with ease transfusible into a modern language, but the spirit and atmosphere of these effusions are foreign to our sympathies; and the wittiest sayings of the wittiest of Corinthian humourists, male or female, are apt to strike us, not having the context, as vapid and pointless.

Athenæus has preserved several of the repartees of Gnathæna, the celebrated courtesan. One of the best of them appears to be her play upon words, when Pausanius, who was nicknamed Laccus, fell into a cask, and she remarked that the cellar (laccus) had fallen into the cask. Another is by no means contemptible. “Once, when a chattering fellow was relating that he had just come from the Hellespont, ‘Why, then,’ said she, ‘did you not go to the first city in that country?’ and when he asked what city, ‘To Sigeum,’ said she.” But in a third, which occurs immediately below, the salt is very thinly sprinkled:—

“On one occasion, when Chærephon came to sup with her without an invitation, Gnathæna pledged him in a cup of wine. ‘Take it,’ said she, ‘you proud fellow!’ ‘I proud?’ ‘Who can be more so,’ said she, ‘when you come without even being invited?’”

Here is one of another hetaira, Nico by name:—

“Once, when she met a parasite, who was very thin in consequence of a long sickness, she said to him, ‘How lean you are!’ ‘No wonder,’ says he, ‘for what do you think is all I have had to eat these three days?’ ‘Why, a leather bottle,’ says she, ‘or perhaps your shoes.’”

Our author adduces these and several other ineptitudes of similar calibre in honest good faith, and assures us that the lady was always very neat and witty in all she said. He adds that she compiled a code of laws for banquets, in compliance with which her friends were required to pay their respects to her and her daughters; but these regulations have not been preserved. It is to be hoped that they were wiser than her jocular achievements.

The same criticism is, in the main, applicable to the gossip which Athenæus has bequeathed to us about three other distinguished members of the sisterhood—Lais, Glycera and Thais. One of these items concerns, however, the dramatist Menander, and awakens an independent interest:—

“Once, when Menander the poet had failed with one of his plays, and came to her house, Glycera brought him some milk, and recommended him to drink it. But he said he would rather not, for there was some γραῦς in it, that word signifying either an old woman or the scum on milk. But she replied, ‘Blow it away, and take what there is beneath.’”

There is a second anecdote, which deserves attention, apart from any merit of its own, because it illustrates the very ancient symbolism of the seal or signet, which survived down to modern times:—

“A lover of hers once sent his seal to Lais the Corinthian, and desired her to come to him. But she said, ‘I cannot come; it is only clay!’”

A certain dramatic interest centres in the famous Phryne, whose adventure in a court of justice is so well known. There is a story that her contemporary, the courtesan Gnathæna aforesaid, once twitted her with her dulness, insinuating that her wit ought to be sharpened on a whetstone; but assuredly the two subjoined bits are quite as good as anything that is cited of Gnathæna herself:—

“Once, when a slave, who had been flogged, was giving himself airs as a young man towards her, and saying that he had been often entangled, she pretended to look vexed; and when he asked her the reason, ‘I am jealous of you,’ said she, ‘because you have been so often smitten.’”

“A very covetous lover of hers was coaxing her, and saying to her, ‘You are the Venus of Praxiteles.’ ‘And you,’ said she, playing on the double meaning of the sculptor’s name, ‘are the Cupid of Phidias.’”

Turning from the fair sex to that which claims no such distinction, we do not find ourselves face to face with any improvement in quality. The following is quoted by Athenæus from Xenophon:—

“Philip the jester, having knocked at the door, told the boy who answered, to tell the guests who he was, and that he was desirous to be admitted; and he said that he came provided with everything which could qualify him for supping at other people’s expense.”

Take another, the pith of which resides in the twofold circumstance that Lysimachus had two prime favourites, Bithys and Paris, and that the performers on the comic stage had, as a rule, short names:—

“Demetrius Poliorcetes was a man very eager for anything which could make him laugh, as Phylarchus tells us in the sixth book of his History. And he it was who said, that the palace of Lysimachus was in no respect different from a comic theatre, for that there was no one there bigger than a dissyllable.”

So Athenæus; but the particular citation goes rather to prove that Demetrius endeavoured to provoke mirth in others, and that if he succeeded in this instance, the risible organs of his friends must have been almost painfully sensitive. Thus much it appeared almost indispensable to furnish by way of warranty for what had been said just before in disparagement of the ancient school of humour.

Nor are the examples cited by Athenæus under Parodies, which might seem at first blush to belong to the same genus or family, more felicitous or impressive. There, as in the other sections devoted to Courtesans and Jesters, the double meaning and the quibble preponderate, and some of the points demand a solution which nearly amounts to a gloss or an essay. There is positively nothing worth copying.

But I have entered into these details because I can then finally dismiss the Deipnosophistæ, which offers no parallels to the modern Ana, save and except the hackneyed tale of the little cask of great age, which Taylor, the Water Poet, in his Wit and Mirth, applies to “a proper gentlewoman” in his own rather clumsy fashion.

Of semi-serious epigrams in prose-form the author of the Deipnosophistæ supplies us with at least one noteworthy specimen, where he speaks of Myrtilus as discoursing on every subject as if he had studied that alone. This fine sentiment is akin to the description of Aristippus:—

“Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res,”

and to the “Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit,” which has been applied to our Goldsmith.

The epigram is by nature and necessity unliteral. It is an ex-officio extravagance or hyperbole, from which you must take a liberal discount. One of the mediæval worthies, Alanus ab Insulis, was designated the Universal Doctor. It was a complimentary façon de parler.

We are here somehow reminded of the account which Macaulay makes Charles II. give of Sydney Godolphin, that he was such an excellent courtier, “because he was never in the way, and never out of the way.”

Then, again, we get it in such forms as “the Admirable Crichton,” “Single-Speech Hamilton,” “Capability Brown,” or “Athenian Stuart,” where a real or reputed specialism is summed up in a word. So that the editor of books of epigrams, who does not go beyond the ordinary familiar types, leaves a good deal of the field unreaped.

The Deipnosophistæ constituted a work, which most naturally suggested to mediæval and later compilers miscellanies formed on an analogous basis, but adapted from time to time to the changing demands of public taste. The most remarkable of these productions, perhaps, was the Mensa Philosophica, of which the authorship is a matter of dispute, but which was constructed to some extent out of the Saturnalia of Macrobius, and of which there is an Elizabethan counterpart, entitled The Schoolmaster or Teacher of Table Philosophy. This, and the Convivial Discourses elsewhere mentioned, seem to breathe the air of a social system, when men lingered over the dinner or supper table, or adjourned, as was not unusual, after the actual meal to indulge in wine and conversation.

I shall now proceed to treat the Greek Anthology, the Noctes Atticæ, and the Lives of the Philosophers, which, like Lucian and Athenæus, are simply of value as the foundations and pioneers of the class of literature which I am examining, and as introductory to the leading purpose in view. It must become evident that the sources of the vein of wit which pervades modern literature and society is to be sought elsewhere—in circumstances and conditions of life altogether different—in our political development, climate and blood.

CHAPTER V.

The “Noctes Atticæ”—Peculiar Value of the Work—The “Lives of the Philosophers,” by Diogenes Laertius—Character of the Book—The Golden Tripos.

TO the same class of production as the Deipnosophistæ belongs the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius. The information which the latter affords is kindred in scope and character; and, though somewhat less voluminous, it is almost equally multifarious and discursive. But the Noctes Atticæ did not profess, like the others, to be the offspring of an imaginary scheme, in the same way as the Decameron and the Arabian Nights; its pages preserve to us, and to all who come after us, the literary Collectanea of a Roman jurist, scholar and antiquary, and it will remain for ever one of the most delightful and instructive of books in any language or any literature. It is certainly remarkable that the same obscurity which surrounds the personal history of Diogenes Laertius hangs over that of the Roman. That they both lived about the same time, in the first or second century of our era, seems to be settled; but a clear approximation, much less any biographical minutiæ, are not forthcoming in either case.

Some few matters the two writers exhibit in common; which is the less surprising when we consider their nearness in time to each other, and bear in mind the plan on which Gellius at least worked. His preface commences thus:—

“More pleasing works than the present may certainly be found; but my object in writing this was to provide my children as well as myself with that kind of amusement in which they might properly relax and indulge themselves, at the intervals from more important business.... Whatever book came into my hand, whether it was Greek or Latin, or whatever I heard that was either worthy of being recorded or agreeable to my fancy, I wrote down without distinction and without order.”

The result to us is, that we possess such a commonplace book as stands fairly by itself without a rival, looking at its date, in Roman literature, in the same way that Athenæus does in Greek.

It would not be possible to offer a complete introductory survey of the subject under consideration without turning back to see what the sources were to which later wits would resort—without inspecting the basement of the edifice, so to speak. Otherwise, vastly interesting as they are on literary and archæological grounds, such relics of antiquity as Athenæus and Gellius yield mainly pure Anecdota in the strict acceptation of the term. The pages of the former are more redolent of the theatre and the gymnasium; those of the author of the Attic Nights breathe the atmosphere of the study, and where he tells a story of some hetaira or dancing-girl, he cites his original. But Gellius has devoted much of his space to topics which were more congenial than the adventures and amours of the gay folks of or about the time; he is more profuse on philological dissertation, serious pieces of personal history, and points relevant to the general costume of the Rome which he knew. Now and then, but not so often as might have been expected and excused, the lawyer peeps out. Here and there, too, he reminds us of the Deipnosophistæ, as in the twenty-second section, which opens with an account of the conversation and readings which took place at the table of Favorinus; and the very following chapter is occupied by a sample of dramatic criticism, in which his opinion is given of some Roman play founded on the Greek comedians, as we now adapt pieces for the stage from the French.

It is a most strangely heterogeneous, and at the same time most charming, miscellany, lacking which our knowledge of Roman literature, society and manners would be far less complete. But, as it has been already indicated in a general way of all the books of the sub-classical period, the Noctes Atticæ does not prove of great service to the gatherer of facetiæ; and the few scattered trifles of that nature which the work contains would not be held of sufficient consequence to find a place in a modern collection. Such as they are, they occur for the most part in the early jest-books, and are precisely such as an editor nowadays would instinctively skip as out of keeping with present notions and demands.

This fact tends to substantiate the position which I have asserted, that our ideas of wit and humour are widely and essentially different from those of the ancients; for it is only, I apprehend, in this single particular that Gellius fails to keep touch with us. He is in most respects, like all eminent writers, remarkably modern and contemporary; and, as a rule, the matters which he judged worth writing down so many centuries ago, we read with gratitude and enjoyment.

The Lives of the Philosophers, by Diogenes Laertius, is a very familiar title and even book. But it is at the same time almost to be regarded and taken as the prototype of literary works based, with every wish on the part of the writer to be accurate and veracious, on hearsay and tradition. Diogenes is the Greek Aubrey. His transactions in conjecture and conflicting opinions are marvellously large; and, as a consequence, his text abounds with uncertainty and confusion. One is reminded nearly at every page of the story of the Southern gentleman who once undertook a journey to the Highlands of Scotland to inquire for Meester Grant; and, singularly enough, the source of the difficulty is very much the same. Diogenes made himself the biographer of a people whose choice of names was limited, and among whom the same name was of common occurrence. So long as the men themselves lived, it signified little or nothing; but if they became famous and historical, or if one out of several did so, the facilities for mixture of identity were, as a matter of course, immense. This circumstance, which is not casual, but is the rule not proving the exception, sensibly diminishes the value of the Lives as an authority; and it is easy to see how the taint has been communicated to the best of our modern Cyclopædias, where the contributors of articles are obliged to own repeatedly, that some fact or other is attributed by half a dozen ancient writers to as many different persons of the same name, nationality and approximate period.

I shall pass over the circumstance that the biography of Diogenes is almost as involved and obscure as his text, for I am merely dealing with him and his celebrated book in a prefatory way. I should be very sorry indeed to undervalue such a unique and fascinating magazine of gossip and tradition; nor have I at present to concern myself with the contradictory statements, not only about men of inferior fame, but about such prominent characters as Thales and Plato; and, besides, in relation to the most important events of their careers and the points most vital to their reputation.

Take, for instance, in the account of Thales, the well-aired anecdote of the Golden Tripos. I quote from the old English translation. “As for what is recorded,” says he, “concerning the Tripos found out by the fishermen, and sent to the Wise Men by the Milesians, it still remains an undoubted Truth.” He then narrates this “undoubted truth”; and when he has done so, he successively furnishes three other versions materially differing; and we have to go only a step further, when we encounter a saying of Thales as to his gratitude for three things—that he was a man, and not a beast; that he was a man, and not a woman; and that he was a Greek, and not a barbarian—which, it seems, is as likely to have been a saying of Socrates. We have all heard something very similar of Dr. Parr and Sir James Mackintosh.

These discrepancies are very thickly sown throughout the Lives, and throughout those of whom it might be conceived that, in the time at least of Diogenes, something like authentic and consistent information would have been preserved in Greece, at all events regarding salient facts. Yet between the era of the biographer and that of many, if not most, of his subjects, the lapse of years was more than sufficient, in the absence of systematic records, to accumulate a vast amount of error and entanglement, especially when so many individuals of the same name flourished about the same date. We perceive that even as to the number of the Wise Men, and who they were, there is a conflict of opinion. But, on the other hand, in his memoir of Solon, Diogenes is remarkably minute, and supplies us with the very words which he employed in addressing the Athenian Assembly and the texts of several letters written to contemporaries, which, to be just, he does also in the case of Thales. His tone, however, in the life of Solon is more confident; and he does not trouble himself or us with parallel traditions and various readings. We may discern equally strong ground for scepticism here and there; but he felt his footing surer, as Homer, in some parts of the Odyssey, evidently writes from report, and in others from personal information. Where, as he does so freely in the case of Thales and others, he lays before us all the theories about an event or a fact, Diogenes reminds us of Herodotus, who so often absolves himself from responsibility by setting down all the accounts which had reached him, and leaving us to pick out the truth among them.

A considerable proportion of the aphorisms ascribed to the Wise Men strike us as rather commonplace; but that may be the result of familiarity. James I. observed that he was a bold man who first ate an oyster; but the attributes of strangeness and courage have alike ceased to exist. Perhaps one of the maxims which still most preserves its verdure is that of Pittacus of Mitylene: To observe the season, which is just our Selden’s Distingue tempora.

The anecdotes with which the pages of Diogenes are plentifully illustrated are, as I have hinted, familiar to the point of indifference; and I believe that they almost invariably suffer from translation into a foreign idiom and epoch. If we are scarcely able to relish the good things which passed current in our own country in the days of the Tudors and the Stuarts, what likelihood is there of a cordial sympathy with such fragments of the wit and wisdom as have survived of men who lived at such an immeasurably greater distance of time under wholly different conditions and influences? From an historical and philosophical point of view we try to make the best of them; but jocularly they amount to very little indeed.

CHAPTER VI.

The Greek Anthology—Greek Epigrams—Herodotus—Aristophanes—Plato.

THE Greek anthology offers to our view, in the main, a body of national sentiment and local costume. The witticisms or smart turns are generally so much a part of the life of the country and period to which they immediately appertain, that an English reader might be apt scarcely to become aware of their true drift, of the inner satirical or humorous sense in the mind and intention of their composers, if he could forget that he had under his eyes the most important productions of ancient Hellas in the way of Epigram and Epigrammatic Inscription collected together for his edification and amusement.

It is perfectly natural and fit that the facetious literature of the Greeks should partake in tone and odour of the genius, climate and society which produced it. We may not appreciate a Greek joke, because the train of associations is broken; but if it does not come home to us exactly as it was meant by the author, it remains as a contributory factor to our knowledge of a never-to-be-forgotten people.

All that I seek to urge here is, that the English school of wit has barely any archaic foreign substrata, but is, to a very large and leading extent, as my learned American acquaintance, Mr. Phelps, lately observed of our law, a product of the region which gave it birth and development. There are certain broad and general features common to all humanity at all times, and independent of conditions and place:—

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,”

and there are cases, of course, where the same happy thought has presented itself bonâ fide to different persons at different periods, to men chronologically and geographically as far removed as an Athenian of the age of Pericles and an Englishman of the age of George III. The same circumstances have a proneness to gravitate to the same issues, where it is some normal trait of human nature that is concerned, or some incident of habitual recurrence.

But the pages of this Greek Anthology, of which I employ for convenience the ordinary English version, have to be winnowed in the same proportion as those of the other classical or quasi-classical books which we have just left behind us, in order to extract matter which is perfectly intelligible without the context. For everybody must feel that a translation has no chemical virtue beyond the exchange of terms. A Greek epigram, in nine instances out of ten, is a Greek epigram none the less though it be clothed in an English dress. It is like a keyless cipher, unless the reader takes up the volume where it occurs with a mastery of the surrounding conditions, which nine Englishmen out of ten do not possess.

On the other hand, how free from temporary feeling and interest are some of the flowers in this poetical chaplet! How superior to all the mutations and vicissitudes which the land of their birth has since suffered! Their motto is Perennis et fragrans.

Take a few illustrations:—

“Said the lame to the blind, ‘On your back let me rise’;
So the eyes were the legs, and the legs were the eyes.”

“A fool, bitten by many fleas, put out the light saying, ‘You no longer see me.’”

“Why do you fruitlessly wash the body of an Indian? Forbear your art.”

“The thin Diophantus, once wishing to hang himself, laid hold of a spider’s web, and strangled himself.”

“Pheidon neither drenched me nor touched me; but, being ill of a fever, I remembered his name, and died.”

A more pungent jest on a doctor was never uttered, perhaps, than this! Nor would it be easy to discover in our modern collections more telling and ingenious skits than the two next:

“’Tis said that certain death awaits
The raven’s nightly cry;
But at the sound of Cymon’s voice
The very ravens die.”

“Lazy Mark, snug in prison, in prison to stay,
Thought confessing a murder the easiest way.”

Then how true to character and how permanent are such epigrammatic jeux d’esprit as these!

“On a Statue of Niobe.

“The gods to stone transformed me; but again

I from Praxiteles new life obtain.”

“Though to your face that mirror lies,

’Tis just the glass for you;

Demosthenes, you’d shut your eyes,

If it reflected true.”

“Some say, Nycilla, that you dye your hair—

Those jet black locks—you bought them at a fair;”

which is exactly the modern quatrain:

“The lovely hair, which Celia wears,

Is hers: who would have thought it?—

She swears ’tis hers, and true she swears;

For I know where she bought it.”

Plato is made to say of a statue: “Diodorus put to sleep this satyr, not carved it”; and Lucian is accredited with the mot that “it were easier to find white crows and winged tortoises than an orator of repute in Cappadocia.”

We come to an item, where Shakespear was unconsciously forestalled by an epigrammatist who lived eleven centuries before him—Palladas the grammarian:—

“This life a theatre we well may call,

Where every actor must perform with art:

Or laugh it through, and make a farce of all,

Or learn to bear with grace his tragic part.”

The old English proverb, “Building is a sweet impoverishing,” has its prototype in the couplet:—

“The broad highway to poverty and need

Is much to build and many mouths to feed.”

But a second strikes the imagination as equally native and verdant, from the supreme faculty which is resident in men of first-rate genius of maintaining their proximity to each successive age:—

“The Muses to Herodotus one day

Came, nine of them, and dined;

And in return, their host to pay,

Each left a book behind.”

It cannot be predicated of what follows that the lapse of years has impaired its application:—

“A boy was crowning the monument of his stepmother, thinking that her temper had been changed. But the stone, falling, killed the child, while he leaned on the grave. Shun, ye children, even the grave of a stepmother.”

There is an epigram on a miser, who calculated, while he was ill in bed, that it would cost a drachma more to live than to die, and refused to see a physician; and a second on a bad poet and a clumsy surgeon, of whom it is said that they had destroyed more persons than “the waters in the time of Deucalion, or than Phaeton, who burned up those upon the earth.”

The Anthology is of a mingled yarn, like our own Miscellanies, in which the most delicate wit and the broadest fun so frequently find themselves next neighbours. The pair which I subjoin belongs to the former and higher category:—

“The Muses, seeking for a shrine,

Whose glories ne’er should cease,

Found, as they stray’d, the soul divine

Of Aristophanes.”

“Three are the Graces. Thou wert born to be

The Grace that serves to grace the other three.”

The first of these is ascribed to Plato, who was better prepared to relish, than we can be reasonably asked to do, the faithful and diverting reflections of contemporary life and Greek human nature from the pens of the dramatists of his country. The value of such masterpieces as literary compositions and pictures of manners remains unaltered and unalterable; but upon us the comic strokes and the byplay are almost lost. Nor would it be possible to fill a small volume with bons-mots from the Greek Theatre, likely to appeal with success to the existing market. For the elements of popularity are clearly and naturally hostile to its endurance; and the narrow extent of the exceptions proves the rule. The bulk of our own popular literature of all kinds is feuille-morte; and no artificial reproduction can make it otherwise than archæologically instructive. To reprint a book which is dead is to make it die twice.

Out of these Lives of Philosophers, this Table-Talk of Athenæus, these Attic Nights, and this Florilegium of satire and wit, the Anthology, what sort of sum-total does the harvestman gather in? But unless by a strange accident the best specimens of the Greek Muse in the present direction or department have unexceptionally disappeared, these must have constituted the staple material with which the Athenian Club of the Sixty amused themselves and their correspondents.

The story about Philip and his connection with this body perhaps sets the father of Alexander before some of us in a rather new light, and in a more favourable one than other anecdotes which are associated with his name. By the way, that where the poor woman is made to appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober, strikes us as having more than a jocular value—as betokening the primitive condition of judicial forms in Macedon at that period.

It forms by no means the least singular of survivals that the names of several of the members of the Sixty Club have been preserved—just a tenth, including that of one who was nicknamed the Lobster. The Sixty were to Athenian society what the Literary Club was to London in the days of Reynolds and Johnson—possibly more; for it was a greater novelty and a fresher influence. But the Literary Club itself was far more than the successor of other institutions, of which earlier men, like Beaumont and Dryden, Addison and Steele, had been the ornament and the life.

The modern manner of epigrammatic wit may be intrinsically similar to that of the Greeks, but certainly diverges from it widely enough in point of detail and colour. I am only at present, however, dealing with the principia of the subject, and shewing, as well as I can, to what extent the ancients laid the foundations of the wealth in this branch of culture of which we find ourselves the possessors.

But the strong influence of local atmosphere and idiom is illustrated by that epigram of Burns to Mr. Ferguson:—

“The king’s poor blackguard slave am I,

And scarce dare spare a minute;

But I’ll be wi’ you by-and-by,

Or else the devil’s in it;”

which strikes both sides of the Tweed as intelligible and clever, but would have fallen as flatly on the ear of a Greek as some of the traditional sayings in Athenæus, at which the Sixty would have clapped their hands, do on that of a modern Englishman.

The epigram lends itself with tolerable readiness to the service of the joking guild, and the rhythmical form often communicates an elegance of turn and a happiness of finish not reachable in prose. The distich of Dr. Joseph Warton on the aphorism of his friend Dr. Balguy, that wisdom was sorrow, is to the point here:—

“If what you advance, dear Doctor, be true,

That wisdom is sorrow, how wretched are you!”

where in a couplet we see combined jest, sentiment, and philosophy: a sparkling antithesis and a compliment worthy of Pope.

Sometimes the epigrammatic jest of later days confines itself to mere verbal quibble; as, for instance:—

“The French have taste in all they do,

Which we are quite without;

For nature, which to them gave goût,

To us gave only gout.”

A small thesis on international pronunciation, for which its metric dress partly helps as a passport: how lamely it would read in prose!

CHAPTER VII.

Formulation of the Jest—Editorial Treatment of Stories—Sophisticated Versions.

THE literary formulation of the Jest, though it seems to be a matter which should go without saying, is, on the contrary, an aspect of the inquiry which presents itself least of all to the mind of the student. The best artificial anecdote in point of structure is apt to be edited material, and does not come to our hands, as a rule, ipsissimis verbis, or in the stage of raw unmanufactured goods. For jokes are customarily delivered by the author rough, as it were, from the quarry, and before they are admissible into type have to undergo certain occult scientific processes known to experts—have to pass through the alembic.

The cue having been given, it does not demand much analytical acumen to discern in the majority of entries in a jest-book the hand behind the scenes, the artist’s touch. It becomes fairly easy to detect the fact that the joke, whatever it is, has not reached the pages which it is intended to enrich direct from the lips of the utterer, but has been in the finisher’s laboratory. Something in the texture of the sentence, or maybe in the wording, seemed to call for amendment. There are cases where, by rounding a corner or sharpening an edge, the dramatic beauty of a mot is enhanced beyond common credibility.

This species of manipulation is one from which originals are calculated to suffer in the ratio of their linear extent; or, in other words, the briefer a jest is, the less likely it is to encounter the transforming or embellishing agency of an editor in ambush. Such monosyllabic flashes as Theodore Hook and Douglas Jerrold were accustomed to discharge on the spur of the moment afford a certain likelihood of being pure from the makers; and, so far as Jerrold at all events is concerned, there are many still living who were absolute earwitnesses of some of his happiest efforts in this way. His perception and grasp were almost electric in their rapidity; and the evenings at the Club, of which he was the co-founder and glory, must rank among the pleasantest recollections of such as had the good fortune to be present.

A curious article might be written, if such a thing were feasible, on the progress of jests and allied productions from the mouths of the authors to the printed page, with a view of the strange scientific processes employed in adapting the rough material for publication. Men of wit are, as a rule, not men of letters, or even persons of literary training and experience; and the prima stamina or germs of their most felicitous utterances and most interesting anecdotes are always apt to require the hand of the rédacteur. There is almost inevitably something in the first draft or skeleton of a bon-mot, or a choice piece of gossip, which a critical eye will detect as inimical to its popularity, as well as to the reputation of the conteur. The editor is the middleman between the manufacturer and the public. He knows better than the former what he really meant, and better than anybody what the latter will find palatable. As genuine sherry is too bitter to be used without a blend, so the ipsissima verba of the ocular oracle are most frequently treated as a nucleus or a cue; and the upshot is a description of mosaic, in which the respective claims of wit and editor are no longer apportionable. The fruitful outpourer of good sayings may have ceased to rank among living celebrities, and the scintillations of his genius are gathered into the workshop; or, if he scatters his treasures during his life, like a prodigal, among his familiars, it is a marvel if there are not one or two deft hands waiting to dress the nuggets for the market, and even to wrap them up so adroitly, that their own father would scarcely recognise them! If the strict truth could be ascertained, there are hundreds of jokes floating in the social atmosphere, which bear to their actual makers a relationship cognate to that between Dame Partlet and the duckling.

Even the merest quips and puns, however, are not exempt from the profanation of the garbler. He mars them, not in the stealing, but in the transcription or report. He is joke-proof, or he misses the point by a hair. He builds an arch, and does not see that he has forgotten the keystone. This criticism holds good both of Jerrold and Charles Lamb, two men who have never been surpassed in their astonishing mastery of the mot in its real meaning and compass. Yet some of Lamb’s happiest hits have been robbed of their vitality by the neglect on the part of his biographers of that nicety which is so imperative in the registration of these casual traits. To omit, alter, or modify a single word is nothing less than sacrilege and death—sacrilege to the author and death to his performance. “Oh,” the culprit on conviction may tell you, “the gist is the same; there is no substantial difference.” Let him take his discretion back. Is a common carrier to foist changelings upon us?

The revision of jeux d’esprit for the sake of augmented effect may be more or less venial; and where the primary object is to amuse, and no vital chord is touched, the reduction of details to an intelligible and impressive shape is possibly a benefit to the public, which might not appreciate the account unground and unpolished. There are so many hazards and drawbacks attendant on vivâ-voce delivery; and the editor, after all, only stands to the humourist in a parallel relation to that which the reporter occupies towards parliamentary proceedings. He does not render them precisely as he had them from the speakers’ mouths, but as the latter would have given them if they had had the opportunity of correcting the proofs. It virtually amounts to an extension of the authority of literature over unwritten matter. The substance and the quantity are preserved, like liquid poured from a tankard into a saucer; but the component parts have changed places, and the record is drafted and printed for future use by a gentleman who considers that he is a finer judge of your meaning than you are yourself.

So far, so good. But we are instinctively led hence to the consideration of a different, yet allied, question—as to the frequent habit, on the part of narrators, from one cause or another, of positively tampering with the text of a saying, and falsifying the sense.

For it is by no means with non-essentials only that your special artist deals, or even with minor accessories alone. He holds his licence to extend to the finding you a new hero—one, possibly, who could never, in his most prophetic mood, have ventured to imagine himself in such a situation or in such company.

Sometimes it happens that in a comparatively late chap-book we detect a rifaccimento of an ancient legend.

At Glasgow appeared a small roughly printed tract in 1700, with the title of The New Wife of Beath, in which we are desired to believe that the text is “Much better Reformed, Enlarged, and Corrected, than it was formerly in the old uncorrect Copy”; and we are farther told that there is “the Addition of many other Things.” The preface adds that the “Papal or Heretical” matter in the former copy has been omitted in this second edition, leaving nothing to offend the wise and judicious, “not being taken up into a literal Sense, but be way of Allegory and Mystical, which thus may edifie.”

We have here, in point of fact, the story and adventures of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath subsequently to her dissolution; and we learn how, after a strange series of vicissitudes, including a visit to his majesty the Devil, who declines to take her in, our heroine finally propitiates Christ by a profession of faith, and is placed among the elect. It is a grotesque tissue of piety and blasphemy, presumably adapted to the Protestant ritual and taste by an anonymous son of the Kirk.

What the reformer suppressed we can only conjecture, since the anterior impression, with the Popish leaven in it, has not fallen under our eyes. In lieu of the Saviour, the Virgin was, perhaps, made the central figure, with the general costume of the piece to correspond. What he added it is easier to judge; for, looking at the archaic narrative of “the Countryman who got into heaven by his pleading,” we perceive that The New Wife of Bath is an amplification of the idea and scheme; and where the original middle-age story-teller was content with the ordeal of the Apostles and the First Person of the Trinity, his presbyterian follower thought it necessary to make the lady run the gauntlet of all the patriarchs and prophets, and even of our first parents, all of whom she triumphantly vanquishes, the concluding parley being with Christ Himself, who is made to come out on hearing the disturbance, and is overcome by her argumentative eloquence and confiding humility.

With the portentous absurdity of the whole notion, both in its succincter and more enlarged shape, we need not occupy ourselves. I merely adduced the circumstance as one of the numerous phases of my subject; for I presume that no one will seriously question its title to a place in the semi-jocular category.

Nothing is truer than the passage in Horace:—

“Multa renascentur, quæ jam cecidere ...”

In the mediæval story of the Man with Wooden Legs, who succeeds in persuading a stranger that his apparent loss was a positive advantage and blessing, there is a property of permanence; for, as recently as 1885, a boat was capsized, and the only one who escaped was buoyed up by his artificial limb. This was a recommendation overlooked by the early conteur, anxious as he was to exhibit the unsuspected superiority of a substructure not prone to casualties, and not only renewable at pleasure, but useful as fuel when discarded from active service.

CHAPTER VIII.

The same Subject continued—The Anecdote-monger.

THE sophistication of anecdotes is undertaken for the sake of constructing fresh material for the entertainment of the general reader without resorting to original sources. It is of course a process which is confined, as a rule, to popular literature, and to literature only; yet I remember having once seen at an auction a large portrait of Charles II., where, without any becoming regard to the costume, a head of Charles I. was painted in, because the Martyred monarch was dearer to connoisseurs than the Merry one.

The writers of the life of Charles Lamb have gone nearly as far by telling a story, in one version of which Benjamin Jonson figures, and in the other Dr. Johnson, as the personage quoted by Lamb. It was a case in which either would serve the turn; and variety pleases.

The statement of Malone about the elder Richardson sounds the keynote to the present argument. It became part of Richardson’s business to collect gossip about his contemporaries and others—in other words, he procured the outlines, and filled in the background and colour, if they were wanting, so far as he judged them requisite for the immediate purpose. He was one of many. Aubrey, Chetwood, Oldys, Walpole, and Malone himself, did much the same. Chetwood is wholly untrustworthy. Aubrey is to be accepted with many grains of allowance. But Oldys, Walpole and Malone were unusually accurate and scrupulous, and took pains to ascertain the truth, or not to set down, at any rate, what they knew to be the reverse.

Valuable as the information and traits preserved by Walpole and Malone must always remain, neither looked much below the surface, or took the trouble to scrutinise very closely the stories which reached their ears,—although we have seen, just above, that the latter, at all events, took true measurement of Richardson.

In the use of made-up tales or gossip, it was doubtless considered that the original outlines were of insufficient interest and dramatic completeness; and we are presented accordingly with a finished scene or conversation built out of a mere meagre skeleton. Like the first sketch of a picture which the artist makes in the fields or on the water, the professional adept in another way obtains his rough material at the club or the dinner-table, and takes it home with him to finish pro bono publico.

A curious glimpse of what may be described as preliminary rumination and subsequent cookery is afforded by Malone in what he says about the celebrated Lord Chesterfield:—

“The late Lord Chesterfield’s bons-mots were all studied. Dr. Warren, who attended him for some months before his death, told me that he had always one ready for him each visit, but never gave him a second on the same day.”

Chesterfield’s utterances, in other words, were second-hand impromptus—clever things which occur to one after the event, to be brought adroitly in next time. They resemble the speech which the man makes to himself on his way home, but which he should have delivered at the meeting or the banquet.

There are producible specimens, not only of the radix, which an artificer elaborates to suit his purposes, but of the converse—where the length of the original saying has been regarded as prolix, and has been shorn of its ample proportions, till it becomes a mot or an epigram. Every one has heard, for instance, of the capital observation of Horne Tooke, in reply to somebody who had stated in his hearing that the law was open to all men: “And so is the London Tavern!” But the more correct version of this matter appears to be one which is given in Joe Miller, 1832, No. 947:—

“John Horne Tooke’s opinion upon the subject of law was admirable. ‘Law,’ he said, ‘ought to be, not a luxury for the rich, but a remedy to be easily, cheaply, and speedily obtained by the poor.’ A person observed to him, ‘How excellent are the English laws, because they are impartial, and our courts of justice are open to all persons without distinction!’ ‘And so,’ said Tooke, ‘is the London Tavern to such as can afford to pay for their entertainment.’”

Here we have an illustration of the imperfect manner in which a presentment in miniature conveys the sense of the speaker. It is by no means multum in parvo. Tooke laid down the principle which Brougham subsequently carried into effect, but which proved a virtual dead letter—the County Court machinery, which was to have brought home justice at a low rate to every man’s door, but which, in point of fact, has been, from beginning to end, nothing but a sham and a juggle.

There is no story within my knowledge which indicates so clearly and amusingly one of the sources of corruption in the present branch of literature as the following:—

“A gentleman had purchased a jest-book, from which having selected a few tolerable stories, he related one of them, stating every circumstance as having actually happened to himself. His youngest son, a boy about nine years of age, who had occasionally got hold of the volume, sat with evident marks of impatience until his father had concluded, when he jumped up and bawled, ‘That’s in the book! that’s in the book!’”

Now, of course it does not require much calculation to arrive at an idea of the peculiar susceptibility of jocular and anecdotal matter to arbitrary treatment at the hands of every comer. It is truly the poet’s mutato nomine de te.

There are instances, again, where the text of a jest has a certain aspect of verisimilitude, yet where the peruser is apt on reflection, I think, to conclude that the cook has done his part. Let me illustrate this by a citation:—

“Two men, who had not seen one another for a great while, meeting by chance, one asked the other how he did. He replied, he was not very well, and had been married since he saw him: ‘That’s good news, indeed,’ said he. ‘Nay, not such good news, neither,’ replied the other; ‘for I married a shrew.’ ‘That was bad,’ said the friend. ‘Not so bad, neither; for I had two thousand pounds with her.’ ‘That’s well again,’ said the other. ‘Not so well, neither,’ said the man; ‘for I laid it out in sheep, and they all died of the rot.’ ‘That was hard, indeed,’ says his friend. ‘Not so hard,’ says the husband; ‘for I sold the skins for more than the sheep cost.’ ‘That made you amends,’ said the other. ‘Not so much amends, neither; for I laid out my money in a house, and it was burnt.’ ‘That was a great loss, indeed.’ ‘Nay, not so great a loss, neither; for my wife was burnt in it.’”

A capital anecdote, assuredly; but the cue is too sustained for a casual encounter. It has the air of a hint taken and worked humorously out.

As there are cases in which matters of fact are edited ad hoc, so does it occasionally happen that a joke is invented to suit certain given conditions. The name of a person or place, coupled with some flexible incident, suggests to an ingenious mind an ex post facto happy phrase or figure, as we see in the commonly accepted tradition of the actor, Andrew Cherry, who informed a manager that he had been bitten by him once, and that he was resolved he should not make two bites of A. Cherry.

The story of Diogenes and Alexander, where the former asks the king as a favour to stand from between him and the sun, is obviously a literary evolution from the accredited character of the so-called cynic; and the same may be predicated of that where Diogenes flings away the cup on seeing some one drink water from his conjoined hands. The office of biographer, from the dearth of material and stock-in-trade, had already become merged in those of inventor and romancist.

I have elsewhere taken occasion to suggest that the philosopher’s so-called tub was some Hellenic pleasantry at the expense of a, no doubt, very humble and contracted dwelling. So we are accustomed to speak of a man living in a box or a crib.

The dits with which we are so liberally regaled about exalted personages and crowned heads, are interesting in their way, and here and there may have come down to us pretty nearly as they left the mouths of the reputed authors—as, for example, the annexed:—

“The town of Chartres was besieged by Henry IV. of France, and capitulated. The magistrate of the town, on giving up the keys, addressed his Majesty: ‘This town belongs to your highness by divine law, and by human law.’ ‘And by cannon law,’ replied the king.”

The only difficulty is, that cannon law is not the phrase which the speaker would have used. An English translator has for once improved his original.

I have stated that the same conditions are apt from time to time to produce identical trains of thought. A little trait of the famous founder of the Bourbon dynasty in France is on exactly parallel lines with an actual incident which occurred within our personal knowledge, and might have done so within that of a thousand others. The rank of one of those concerned in the original anecdote communicates to it, however, an additional zest. It is said that, on one occasion, as Henry IV. was leaning out of window, a fellow about the palace, mistaking him for an intimate, slapped him behind. The king turned round sharply, and the other, in a terrible fright, stammered out that he thought it was So-and-so—Jacques or Jean. “Well,” returned Henry, good-naturedly, “if it had been, you need not have hit so hard.” An involuntary gravitation to a certain portion of our frame seems to be a universal and immemorial instinct of human nature. The truth to say, this choice morceau has been attributed to Sully as well as to his royal master.

But too many sayings are either vamped-up and utterly worthless, or are laid before us in a shape which arises from sheer ignorance of the costume of the subject, like the ridiculous descriptions which occur in the Bravo of Venice and other melodramatic romances. To any one who is conversant to a fair extent with the strict and stern régime under the old French monarchy, what can be more absurd and self-convicting than the subjoined relation?—

“An honest dragoon, in the service of Louis XIV., having caught a man in his house, after some words told him he would let him escape that time; but if ever he found him there again, he would throw him out of the window. Notwithstanding this terrible threat, in a few days he caught the spark there again, and was as good as his word. Sensible that what he had done would soon be known, he posted to court, and throwing himself at the king’s feet, implored His Majesty’s pardon. The king asked what his offence was; on which the soldier told him how he had been injured. ‘Well, well,’ said the king, laughing, ‘I readily forgive you; for, considering the provocation, I think you were much in the right to throw his hat out of the window.’ ‘Yes, please your Majesty,’ said the man; ‘but then his head was in it.’ ‘Was it?’ replied the king: ‘well, my word is passed.’”

There was scarcely a court in Europe with which such an incident could have been less happily associated; and it is almost difficult to call to mind any constitutional system, except perhaps that of the first Napoleon or our own Charles II., where such a tête-à-tête, so to say, could have taken place.

Nearly the whole stock which exists up and down the market of Irish bulls, Sawniana, gasconades, gaulardisms, and Mrs. Partingtoniana, has submitted to the churn. A pattern is produced; and any given or desired number of impressions may be had to order—no two alike exactly, and no two very different.

Which was the absolute jocus princeps about the Scotch, it is probably at this time impossible to discover; but it is obvious that they are all grafted on one parent stem, and scarcely yield a second moral. The entire assemblage forms a satirical exposure of the alleged parsimonious egotism of the nation. Ex uno disce omnes:—

“A Scotch pedestrian, attacked by three highwaymen, defended himself with great courage and obstinacy, but was at length overpowered and his pockets rifled. The robbers expected, from the extraordinary resistance they had experienced, to lay their hands on some rich booty, but were not a little surprised to discover that the whole treasure which the sturdy Caledonian had been defending at the hazard of his life, consisted of no more than a crooked sixpence. ‘The deuce is in him,’ said one of the rogues; ‘if he had had eighteenpence, I suppose he would have killed the whole of us.’”

And it is the same with another group, to which I have lately adverted:—

“‘Soldiers must be fearfully dishonest,’ says Mrs. Partington, ‘as it seems to be a nightly occurrence for a sentry to be relieved of his watch.’”

Mrs. Partington was nothing more than a lay-figure, on which the ingenious could pass off the jeu de mot, which begins to form an element in the facetiæ of the seventeenth century. She was a convenient personification, like her successors Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Brown.

CHAPTER IX.

The Marred Anecdote—Gaulardisms—M. Goussaut—The Retort and the Pun—“Maloniana”—Metrical Adaptations—Second-hand Facetiæ—Parallel Versions.

A SINGULAR lusus artis is the marred anecdote, of which the most familiar specimen is the threadbare story of Goldsmith and the stale greens. But this was a very old Joe, and seems to have been first narrated in connection with a couple of scholars, of whom one laughing at the other because his garment was too short, his companion remarked that it would be long enough before he got another. The next person whom he met became the recipient of a version of the matter immaterially varied, yet so as to give the death-blow to the witticism. “Jack,” quoth he, “I’ve just heard such a capital joke.” “What was it?” “Why, I told Tom that his coat was too short, and he answered that it would be a long time before he got another.” “Well, I don’t see anything in that.” “Ah! well,” returned the first, “it seemed a very good joke when he made it.”

Nearer, however, to Goldsmith’s day a very similar pleasantry used to be current about Archbishop Herring when he was at college. Herring, having fallen into a ditch near St. John’s, a wag, passing by, called out, “There, Herring, you are in a fine pickle now!” A Johnian, overhearing this, went back to his college, and was asked by some of his friends what made him so merry. “Oh,” says he, “I never met with such a good story before. Herring of Jesus fell into the ditch, and an acquaintance said, as he lay sprawling, ‘There, Herring, you are in a fine condition now.’” “Well,” observed some one, “where is the wit in that?” “Nay,” replied the first, “I am sure it was an excellent thing when I heard it.”

Here, in good faith, was a crassitude which Joe Miller himself would have hardly surpassed in his most Bœotian and opaque moments.

The Gaulardism, borrowing its name from a certain Sieur de Gaulard, who was remarkable for the negation of everything savouring of intelligence, strikes one as of an analogous complexion to this jocular gaucherie; and both are intimately allied to the Gothamite drolleries and ineptitudes, of which the most ancient types have very probably and very naturally disappeared by escaping registration. The gaulardisms and their analogues pursue a uniform vein:—

“The Sieur Gaulard, being told by somebody that the Dean of Alençon was dead, said, ‘Don’t believe it; for, if it were so, I should have heard from him, as he keeps no secrets from me.’”

“A person, seeing a great heap of stones, said to a friend how much he would like to have them at home. ‘How so?’ demanded the other. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘then I would build a good handsome brick wall round my house with them.’”

The mantle of Gaulard must have descended on the President Goussaut, who, if the anecdotes about him are to be credited, must have adorned his lofty official position. The rest are as by sample exhibited:—

“Monsieur Goussaut, President of the Chamber of Accompts, was celebrated for stupidity. One day standing behind a player at piquet, who did not know him, the player throwing a foolish card, exclaimed, ‘I am a mere Goussaut!’ The president, enraged at finding his name used as a proverb, said, ‘You are a fool.’ ‘True,’ said the other, without ever looking back, ‘that is just what I meant to say.’”

Had Goussaut been an English, instead of a French, name, we might have looked upon it as an inadvertent felicity.

Of course these merriments have their equivalents or survivals in the later life and literature; and I may adduce as a specimen the question raised in some company as to the age of Lord Chesterfield, when one of the party suggested that his lordship must be older than was generally supposed, as he would be at least one-and-twenty when he signed the bond which was forged by Dr. Dodd!

Then, once more, there is Mrs. Malaprop, the celebrated persona in Sheridan’s Rivals, who shares with her creator the honour of having said many things for which neither has any actual responsibility. That so familiar aphorism, “Comparisons are odorous,” is in a play printed more than a century before Sheridan was swaddled.

In other words, the gaulardism and Malapropism are of all, time, just as the intellectual abortions which produce them are. An inadvertence which may be thought to merit classification among gaulardisms, is recorded of a German writer (F. von Raumer) upon England as it was, or seemed to him to be, in 1835, where he speaks of becoming acquainted with the famous Vicar of Wakefield, and describes his gooseberry wine as quite answering to the description of it given in the book!

It is very far from being generally apprehended, indeed, how plentiful and how varied this description of gaucherie always has been and still remains. Two instances, separated by a wide interval of time, and entirely distinct in their character, occur to me. In 1615 an anonymous personage reproduced a tract which Robert Greene, the dramatist, published in 1592, under a new title and with an original preface, purporting to be by Greene, in which he refers to works belonging to a date long posterior to his decease.

My second illustration is from another field and from modern life. Mr. Alma Tadema exhibits a picture representing a room in ancient Pompeii, with all the supposed coeval appurtenances; and among these we recognise patinated bronze vases, the property, not of the Pompeian, but of the R. A.

This may be as appropriate an opportunity as I shall have of noticing an analogous type of solecism. In the farce of High Life Below Stairs one of the characters inquires who was the author of Shakespear, to which a second responds, Kolley Kibber. We are here face to face with a piece of small wit, which belongs to the same family as that where surprise is expressed by some sapient individual at the literary activity of Mr. Finis and M. Tome; or where the foolish Duke of Gloucester envied the good fortune of that rich fellow Co., who seemed to be a partner in so many firms.

I once saw a copy of Thomas May’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, on the flyleaf of which some simpleton had written, “Ben Jonson, from Thomas May,” in order to lead to the supposition, of course, that the book had been presented by one poet to the other. This was a sort of compromise between a jest and a fraud; but an equally ludicrous inconsistency may be found in Joe Miller’s Jests, 1832, No. 1107, where the familiar anecdote about Randolph being identified by Jonson at the Devil Tavern is given; and the dramatist, when Randolph had delivered his extempore rhyme about John Bo-peep, is made to exclaim: “By Jasus, I believe this is my son Randolph!” and we are gravely informed by the editor that By Jasus! was Jonson’s “usual oath.”

But the complexion of the story, as a whole, is fictitious; and while I do not for a moment believe that the verse is a contemporary impromptu, I am strongly sceptical as to its claim to the character even of a contemporary production. There is no ground for accrediting the poet with the degree of poverty presumable from the description of his clothes and his need of a trifling gratuity; and the very texture of the lines is apocryphal. Besides, the narrator first makes us understand that Randolph was unknown to Jonson and the rest of the company, and then alleges their identification of him from a specimen of poetry which could have furnished no clue whatever to the improviser.