aggressors, the soldiers swearing that the sailors assaulted them with an oath, and with this exclamation, 'Who stops the line of march there?' while the sailors swore that the soldiers in first attacking them burst in upon them, calling out, 'Heave-to, you lubbers! or we'll run you down!' From the reciprocal imputation to each other of their own professional slang, it was plain that both were lying, and both to blame.

In the examples of the ludicrous which we have hitherto noticed, the absurdity attaches to the hero of the piece or the speaker of the saying. We shall now notice another and quite different class, where there are two parties to the drama, and where the failure or discomfiture consists in the defeat of one of them by the ready retort, the dexterous evasion, or the disappointing answer of the other. A rather vulgar, but really good specimen of this kind, is found in the well-known epigram, Jack eating rotten cheese,' etc., the jest of which consists in the second party acquiescing in the boast of the first as to killing his thousands like Samson, and then improving the parallel by suggesting the identity of the weapon used.

Mr. Burton, in his very pleasant book The Scot Abroad, gives us some examples of the wit and good breeding of Lord Stair, the ambassador. One of these, Mr. Burton tells us, 'rests on his remarkable resemblance to the Regent Orleans, who, desiring to turn a scandalous insinuation or jest on it, asked the Ambassador if his mother had ever been in Paris? The answer was, 'No; but my father was!' 'There is perhaps,' it is added, 'no other retort on record so effective and so beautifully simple. If the question meant anything, that meaning was avenged; if it meant nothing, there was nothing in the answer.'

Whether this anecdote happened with Lord Stair, we shall not attempt to determine; but it would be strange if he had all the merit of it, as the jest was already on record. Macrobius gives it as having been directed against the Emperor Augustus: Intraverat Romam simillimus Cæsari, et in se omnium ora converterat. Augustus adduci hominem ad se jussit, visumque hoc modo interrogavit: Dic mihi, adolescens, fuit aliquando mater tua Romæ? Negavit ille; nec contentus adjecit: "Sed pater meus sæpe." Nor is the witticism left buried in the obscurity of Macrobius, for it appears as No. 52 of Lord Bacon's Apophthegms. But even Macrobius's story about Augustus is not the first edition of the joke; for Valerius Maximus tells it of a Roman proconsul, who found in his province a Sicilian very like him, and, on suggesting a similar question, received the same answer.

It really seems very difficult to say an original thing upon any subject whatever. Few sayings have been more admired

than that which is ascribed to Louis XII., when urged to resent an offence which he had received before his accession, ' Ce n'est point au roi de France à venger les injures faites au Duc d'Orléans.' Now, what says Mr. De Quincey on this subject? In a 'Letter addressed by him to a Young Man whose Education has been Neglected,' and which, we believe, appeared first in the London Magazine in 1823, he introduces a Frenchman taking credit to his nation for the sublimity of the French king's saying, and asking De Quincey what he thought of it. Think! said I, why I think it is a magnificent and regal speech, and such is my English generosity, that I heartily wish the Emperor Hadrian had not said the same thing fifteen hundred years before.' He then gives in a foot-note his authority for this answer, and which runs thus: Submonente quodam ut in pristinos inimicos animadverteret, negavit se ita facturum, adjecta civili voce-Minimè licere Principi Romano, ut quæ privatus agitasset odia-ista Imperator exequi. Spartian in Had.-Vid. Histor. August.'

This seems at first sight pretty much to the point, and we confess that, though with some misgivings as to the Latinity, we had such confidence in De Quincey's acquaintance with the Augustan History, that we long considered the French king's claim to be held the first and true inventor of the saying in question, as at an end. But lately, on turning over several editions of the Augustan collection, and looking particularly at Spartian's life of Hadrian, we were surprised to discover that no such anecdote is there to be found, nor is there a trace of any such words as De Quincey quotes. It is true that Spartian mentions the fact that Hadrian took no notice of his old enemies: 'Quos in privata vita inimicos habuit, imperator tantum neglexit; ita ut uni quem capitalem habuerat, factus Imperator, diceret Evasisti.' The question at issue, however, between the Frenchman and De Quincey, was not as to the originality of Louis's conduct, but as to the novelty of the peculiarly dignified form of words in which the sentiment was announced. Many princes have acted in the same magnanimous manner, and it is not likely that any man in modern times will find out a new virtue. Hadrian himself was not original in this kind of clemency, for Suetonius describes Vespasian as 'Offensarum inimiciarumque minime memor executorve;' and speaks of his portioning out in a munificent manner the daughter of Vitellius his old enemy. But neither Vespasian nor Hadrian is reported to have expressed the feeling which influenced them in any speech that can approach to the moral sublimity which is admitted to mark the French king's saying. It is remarkable, too, that Casaubon, in a note on the passage from Spartian which we have quoted, notices the resemblance

of Hadrian's conduct to that of Louis XII., and then gives in Latin the French king's saying as a vox aurea: Nam cum illum sui stimularent ut Ludovicum Trimolium, qui sibi olim multum nocuisset, pro meritis acciperet, Ego vero, inquit, non faciam neque enim Galliarum regem decet offensas inimicitiasque Aurelianensis Ducis meminisse aut exequi.'

It is possible that a Roman prototype of this saying may be found somewhere, but we have not yet succeeded in tracing it; and in that state of matters, looking to the failure of the only authority on which De Quincey proceeds, we think Louis entitled (at least ad interim) to the merit, not of having first practised this princely generosity, but of having first embodied in a beautiful form, what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.' Our theory of De Quincey's statement is, that he wrote the Letter in question at a distance from his books, or under an invincible repugnance to consulting them; that writing to an unlearned correspondent, and probably to a not very learned circle of readers, he thought he might trust his memory and take some liberties; that he remembered the parallel in conduct and character between Hadrian and Louis, with Casaubon's note on the subject, and that he either dreamed or imagined the rest, and wrote down in Latin as original what is in truth a mere reflex and paraphrase of the French saying. We are the more inclined to this view, from finding another inaccuracy in the same Letter, where he ascribes to Trajan, with misplaced magniloquence, the deathbed saying which Suetonius reports of Vespasian, 'Imperatorem stantem mori oportere,' and which Vespasian seems to have uttered, as he did other things, with a strange mixture of jest and earnest.

De Quincey has a more amusing and more accurate passage on the subject of this kind of plagiarism in a little paper on War, which first appeared, we think, in an Edinburgh periodical. He there points out how bare the modern sayers of good things would be left, if stripped of all the borrowed plumes with which they are invested. Universally it may be received as a rule,' he says, that when an anecdote involves a stinging repartee, or collision of ideas, fancifully and brilliantly related to each other by resemblance or contrast, then you may challenge it as false.' He denounces the Greeks as the principal parties who have forestalled us by saying our good things before ourselves, and he instances Talleyrand as having been extensively robbed by the Greeks of the second and third centuries,' as may be easily ascertained by having the said Greeks searched, when the stolen jewels will be found upon them. 'But one,' he adds, ‘and the most famous in the whole jewel-case, sorry am I to confess, was nearly stolen from the bishop, not by any Greek, but by

an English writer, viz., Goldsmith, who must have been dying about the time that the Right Reverend French knave had the goodness to be born. That famous mot about language as a gift made to man for the purpose of concealing his thoughts is lurking in Goldsmith's Essays.' This is nearly correct. Not strictly in what are called his Essays, but in a paper of Goldsmith's in The Bee, there is a passage where he says that whatever may be thought by grammarians and rhetoricians, men of the world hold that the true use of speech is not so much to express our wants, as to conceal them.'

To return to the case of repartees involving a quid pro quo: it is told of Lord Braxfield, with probably the same truth as pervades other stories imputed to him, that on a thief pleading in extenuation that he could not help stealing when he had an opportunity, the Judge answered, That is just the way with us: for we can't help hanging a thief when we get hold of him.' But this rejoinder, too, is old, and is substantially the same as one told of Zeno the philosopher, with whom a pilfering slave had tried to excuse himself by the Stoic doctrine of fate. 'Zeno philosophus, quum servum in furto deprehensum cæderet, atque ille diceret, fatale sibi esse furari: Et cædi, inquit Zeno.' We add the Greek of Diogenes Laertius : Δοῦλον ἐπὶ κλοπῇ ἐμαστίγου τοῦ δὲ εἰπόντος, Εἴμαρτό μοι κλέψαι. Καὶ δαρῆναι, ἔφη.

A recent writer upon Lawyers has expressed a doubt whether Sir Nicholas Bacon really uttered, to a criminal who claimed kindred with him, the answer which he is said to have made, that Hog was not Bacon until it was hung; but as the story is among Lord Bacon's Apophthegms, we see no reason to question its authenticity.

A great many other well-known jests consist in this apparent acquiescence in the view suggested by the first speaker, and in then turning the argument against him on his own premises. Thus we have the story in the Chevræana, where Masson, having applied to a brother collegian for the loan of a book, is told that it cannot be lent out, but may be read in the owner's rooms, and has then an opportunity of making a similar reply to his friend when he asks him for the loan of his pair of bellows; Or, take the other instance, where the officer, on the eve of a battle, asked leave of absence of the Marshal de Toiras, that he might see his father, who was ill, and immediately had his request granted, with the observation, 'Père et mère honoreras afin que tu vives longuement.' One of the best and most effective retorts of the kind is that of the Spanish ambassador to Henry IV. of France, which is more original, and not less pungent, than Lord Stair's reply. It is found in the Menagiana: Henri IV. pour rabatre l'orgueil d'un Ambassadeur

Espagnol, lui dit que s'il lui prenoit envie de monter à cheval, il iroit ouir messe à Milan, déjeuner à Rome, et diner à Naples. Sire, lui répondit l'Ambassadeur, votre Majesté allant de ce pas pourrait le même jour aller ouir vêpres en Sicile,' alluding to the massacre of the French in Sicily in 1282. An old repartee of a similar kind is one of Cicero's, who, when asked by Pompey where his son-in-law was, answered, With your father-in-law;' and a good modern one is the French dialogue between the Comte who had no territory and the Abbé who had no convent, where the Count, inquiring for the locality of the other's Abbey, is answered, 'Don't you know? it is in your own County.' Somewhat of the same character, but in a more genial spirit, is the reply of Marshal Turenne to the servant who excused his having slapped him, from mistaking him for a fellow-servant,— 'Et quand c'eût été Georges, eût-il fallu frapper si fort?' Trait charmant,' says Marmontel,' qu'on ne peut entendre sans rire et sans être attendri.' A common modern jest of this class, as to a lady's age, is one of Cicero's: Fabia Dolabellæ dicenti, triginta se annos habere: "Verum est," inquit Cicero, “nam hoc viginti annis audio."

A happy example of evasion is given by the Edgeworths in the story of the old beggar woman who besieged General V and his wife for charity: for, sure, didn't I dream last night that her ladyship gave me a pound of tea, and that your honour gave me a pound of tobacco!" But, my good woman," said the General," do not you know that dreams always go by the rule of contrary? "Do they so, plase your honour?" rejoined the woman; "then it must be your honour that will give me the tea, and her ladyship that will give me the tobacco!"'

Some of our readers may still remember the amusement afforded by the late Sir William Allan's story of the Minister and the Cuddie, which most of us, in the days when he told it, believed to be of Scotch extraction. It happens, however, to be a very old joke, not traceable perhaps to classical times, but a great favourite, and a standing jest against the clergy from the middle ages downwards. The general idea, or as we may call it, the algebraic expression of the incident, seems to be this: 'Vanity, when fishing for praise, catches nothing but mortification.' A monk, chanter, or preacher, while exercising his function with a stentorian power of voice, is flattered to see in the church an elderly female in tears, and apparently much affected by his performance. On afterwards asking the cause of her emotion, he finds it arises from the likeness between his voice and that of an ass or 'cuddie' which she or her husband had lately lost. We meet with this story in Bonerius, a German writer of metrical fables in the fourteenth century, in whose collection it