The Project Gutenberg eBook of Studies in jocular literature
    
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Studies in jocular literature
        A popular subject more closely considered

Author: William Carew Hazlitt

Release date: May 29, 2024 [eBook #73723]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Elliot Stock

Credits: Susan E., David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN JOCULAR LITERATURE ***


[Illustration]




  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._

  [Illustration]

  LONDON:
  ELLIOT STOCK, 62 PATERNOSTER ROW
  1890




CONTENTS.


  CHAP.                                                            PAGE

      I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE REAL USE AND IMPORTANCE OF
           JESTS AND ANECDOTES                                        1

     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                                                    13

    III. LITERATURE AND THE DRAMA AS CONTRIBUTORIES TO JOCULAR
           LITERATURE--DEPENDENCE ON SURROUNDINGS AND
           CIRCUMSTANCES                                             22

     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                              29

      V. THE “NOCTES ATTICÆ”--PECULIAR VALUE OF THE WORK--THE
           “LIVES OF THE PHILOSOPHERS,” BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS--
           CHARACTER OF THE BOOK--THE GOLDEN TRIPOS                  46

     VI. THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY--GREEK EPIGRAMS--HERODOTUS--
           ARISTOPHANES--PLATO                                       57

    VII. FORMULATION OF THE JEST--EDITORIAL TREATMENT OF
           STORIES--SOPHISTICATED VERSIONS                           69

   VIII. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED--THE ANECDOTE-MONGER             79

     IX. THE MARRED ANECDOTE--GAULARDISMS--M. GOUSSAUT--THE
           RETORT AND THE PUN--“MALONIANA”--METRICAL
           ADAPTATIONS--SECOND-HAND FACETIÆ--PARALLEL VERSIONS       92

      X. AFFILIATION OF STORIES--PARALLEL ILLUSTRATIONS--THE
           LITERARY CLUB--REYNOLDS, JOHNSON, AND GARRICK--TWO
           TUDOR JEST-BOOKS--EUROPEAN GRAFTS ON ORIENTAL
           ORIGINALS--MARTIN ELGINBROD--PARSON HOBART--THE
           “BRAVO OF VENICE”                                        111

     XI. THE BALLAD AND THE NURSERY RHYME--PHILOSOPHICAL SIDE
           OF THE QUESTION--“JACK THE GIANT-KILLER”                 129

    XII. CONTINENTAL INFLUENCE--THE “ANA”--THE “CONVIVIAL
           DISCOURSES”--WHIMSICAL INVENTIONS--SHAKESPEAR
           JEST-BOOKS--CHANGE IN PUBLIC TASTE                       142

   XIII. THE “HUNDRED MERRY TALES”--THE AUTHORSHIP DISCUSSED        156

    XIV. “MERRY TALES AND QUICK ANSWERS”                            162

     XV. FACETIOUS BIOGRAPHIES                                      168

    XVI. ANALECTA                                                   177

   XVII. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED                                      183

  XVIII. “JOE MILLER’S JESTS”--HISTORY, CHARACTER, AND SUCCESS
           OF THE PUBLICATION--JOHN MOTTLEY THE EDITOR              188

    XIX. JEST-BOOKS CONSIDERED AS HISTORICAL AND LITERARY
           MATERIAL--THE TWOFOLD POINT ILLUSTRATED--LOCALISATION
           OF STORIES                                               200

     XX. THE SO-CALLED “TALES OF SKELTON”--SPECIMENS OF
           THEM--SIR THOMAS MORE AND THE LUNATIC--THE FOOLISH
           DUKE OF NEWCASTLE--PENNANT THE ANTIQUARY--THE
           “GOTHAMITE TALES”--STORIES CONNECTED WITH WALES AND
           SCOTLAND                                                 210


[Illustration]




STUDIES IN JOCULAR LITERATURE

[Illustration]




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.




[Illustration]




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.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




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.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




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.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




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.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




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!




[Illustration]




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.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




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.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




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.

I have dwelt on this point because the biographical scrap, so far from
standing alone or being a rare type, is a member of an exceedingly
numerous family, and the stricture has a common application to it and
its congeners.

The Retort and the Pun, and indeed the entire _genus_ of succincter
jests, are least prone to editorial treatment. But, on the other hand,
there are two classes which, from their nature, have a peculiar and an
inherent liability to sophistication--namely, the _Epigram_ and the
_Story_; and in fact the very structure of these ought to be, as a
general rule, a sufficient indication and evidence of their artificial
development. The droll and amusing tales in the old English jest-books
have been obviously woven into a narrative shape by the original
recipient of the particulars, or by some one else more experienced
in the science of literary _cuisine_. The inimitable account of John
Adroyns, who, after performing on some provincial stage the part of
his Satanic majesty, walked home in his theatrical garb, and met with
a complication of mishaps, is an excellent specimen of the professed
jocular compilation by a third person, as distinguished from a piece of
humour delivered to us exactly or approximately in the terms which the
actor or actors employed. So long as a pleasantry presents itself to
notice with honest credentials, there is no ground for complaint and no
source of difficulty; but it is where an anecdote is introduced under
fictitious colours, that the critical inquirer is apt to feel, if not
embarrassment, at least annoyance.

I shall transcribe one illustration of this kind of cross-bred
offspring from _Maloniana_:--

  “Few classical quotations have ever been more neatly applied than the
  following. Mr. Burke had been speaking in the House of Commons for
  some time, and paused. He soon proceeded, and some time afterwards
  paused again, so long (which with him is very uncommon) that Sir
  William Bagot thought he had done, and got up to speak. ‘Sir’ (said
  Mr. B.), ‘I have not finished.’ Sir W. B. made an apology, and
  said, ‘As the hon. gentleman had spoken a long time, and had paused
  unusually long also, he imagined that he had concluded, but he found
  he was mistaken. Some allowance, however, he hoped, would be made for
  him as a _country_ gentleman, for--

  ‘_Rusticus_ expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille
  Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum.’”

If the process by which the passage from the poet, “so neatly applied,”
was, subsequently to the event, spliced to it, is not apparent to the
reader, I confess that it is so to myself; and few things are less
probable than the pronunciation of such an _impromptu_ under such
conditions. Yet we find Malone, a man of the world and a sagacious
critic, setting down the passage in undisturbed credulity and absolute
good faith as a fact within his knowledge and as a spontaneous
performance in its integrity. It may seem very remarkable that its
superficial unlikelihood should not have struck him; but it is the case
that entertaining gossip or laughable traits concerning celebrated
people usually pass unchallenged, even when a slight scrutiny would
suffice to expose their spuriousness either in whole or in part; and
it must be remembered that the bulk of our _Ana_ have come to us
through channels infinitely more open to corrupting agencies and less
discriminating than Malone. But the Jest, in its many varieties, is
indulgently regarded, whether by the general public, which takes the
matter as proven, or by the literary fraternity itself, for whom it
serves as a pleasant relaxation from severer studies.

As it is with the Story, so also it fares with the Epigrammatic
_bon-mot_ or facetious notion thrown into the metrical form. There is
a tolerably familiar one, which carries plainly enough on its front,
when we approach the subject in an inquiring temper, the traces of its
parentage:--

  “A fisherman one morn display’d
    Upon the Steine his net;
  Corinna could not promenade,
    And ’gan to fume and fret.

  “The fisher cried, Give o’er the spleen,
    We both are in one line:
  You spread your net upon the Steine,
    Why may not I spread mine?

  “Two of a trade can ne’er agree,
    ’Tis that which makes you sore:
  I fish for flat fish in the sea,
    And you upon the shore.”

The frequenters of Brighton fifty years ago would have been familiar
with the scene portrayed in these lines, which might be founded on
an actual incident or a possible one. The stanzas were, of course,
the composition of a wit of the time, and bring before us a glimpse
of London-super-mare, before it had parted with all the pleasant
characteristics of a Sussex fishing village--when the fisherman could
still come up Pool Valley, and lay his nets to dry on what is now an
ornamental square!

It is now time to turn to another aspect of this many-sided and, so
to speak, ramified subject, and to consider a different phase of the
vicissitudes and metamorphoses which this branch of literature not only
has undergone, but preserves a constant tendency to undergo. It is the
invaluable art of attiring the fresh hero or favourite in the disused
habiliments of his predecessors. It affords a signal exemplification of
the strange and unexpected fortunes which may attend an adventure or a
witticism, as well as of the surprising diversity of uses to which a
capable artificer may apply a single suit of motley. We are looking at
the genealogical side of the question, the heraldic point of view.

No. 67 of the _Hundred Merry Tales_ (1526) treats “of the Scholar of
Oxford that proved by sophistry two chickens three.” In the Jests of
Scogin we similarly encounter “How Jack by sophistry would make of
two eggs three.” It is the identical invention lamely repeated, and
a jest-book of the eighteenth century reproduces it once more as an
episode in the life of the Merry Monarch, where he, Nell Gwynne, and
the Duchess of Portsmouth are the actors, and the Duchess is made the
sufferer.

Again, No. 57 of _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_ discourses “of him
that would give a song for his dinner,” reminding us of the popular
farce, _No Song, no Supper_. Let us set before the reader the version,
as it stands in the volume just quoted, side by side with a second
which is better known. The parallel is curious; and I confess that I am
sceptical as to the later text being more than a literary adaptation
after Jonson’s time. If it was a veritable coincidence, it was an
extraordinary one:--

    “There came a felowe         “Ben Jonson, owing
  on a tyme in to a            a landlord some money,
  tauerne, and called for      kept away from his
  meate. So, whan he           house. The vintner,
  had well dyned, the          meeting him by chance,
  tauerner came to reken       asked him for what
  and to haue his money,       was owing to him; but
  to whom the felowe           at the same time told
  sayde, he had no money,      him, that if he would
  but I wyll, quod             come to his house, and
  he, contente you with        answer him four questions,
  songes. Naye, quod           he would forgive
  the tauerner, I nede no      him the debt. To this
  songes, I must haue          proposal Ben very
  money. Whye, quod            readily assented, and
  the felowe, if I synge       at the time appointed
  a songe to your pleasure,    waited upon the landlord,
  will ye nat than be          who produced a bottle of
  contente? Yes, quod          wine, and then put to him
  the tauerner. So he          these questions: ‘First,
  began, and songe thre        What pleases God?
  or foure balades, and        Secondly, What pleases
  asked if he were             the devil? Thirdly,
  pleased? No, sayde           What best pleases the
  the tauerner. Than           world? And lastly,
  he opened his pourse,        What best pleases
  and beganne to synge         me?’ ‘Well,’ says
  thus:                        Ben, directly:

  “‘Whan you haue dyned        “‘God is best pleased
      make no delaye,              when man forsakes his sin;
    But paye your oste,          The devil’s best pleased
      and go your waye.’           when men persist therein;
                                 The world’s best pleased
  Dothe this songe please          when you do draw good wine;
  you, quod he? Yes,             And you’ll be best pleased
  marye, said the tauerner,        when I pay for mine.’
  this pleaseth me
  well. Than, as couenant        “The vintner was so well
  was (quod the                pleased with this impromptu
  felowe), ye be paide         that he gave Ben a receipt
  for your vitaile. And        in full for his debt, and
  so he departed, and          treated him with a bottle
  wente his waye.”             into the bargain.”

The details, it will be at once observed, are slightly varied; but
the germ is the same, and the truth appears to be, that a copy of
the _Merry Tales_ had fallen in Jonson’s way, and that he wished to
reproduce a drollery which tickled his fancy, and more or less suited
his case.

       *       *       *       *       *

To the same group may be thought to appertain Old Merrythought’s song
in the _Knight of the Burning Pestle_:--

  “For Jillian of Berry she dwells on a hill,
  And she hath good beer and ale to sell;
  And of good fellows she thinks no ill,
  And thither will we go now, now, now,
        And thither will we go now.

  “And when you have made a little stay,
  You need not ask what is to pay,
  But kiss your hostess and go your way,
  And thither will we go now, now, now,
        And thither will we go now.”

It may seem to some unkind to disturb this and other such traditions
about distinguished persons; but the blame rests elsewhere--with the
bookseller or author, who thought fit to propagate these fictions
and _variæ lectiones_; and the restitution of literary property to
its legitimate owners is among the functions and obligations of the
antiquary.

It was natural for the old booksellers to draw into their service, in
offering a popular volume to the public, some more or less magnetic
name, which might play the part of foster-parent to the jocular
collections of an obscure literary adventurer; but it seems incredible
that any reader or editor should have been found so wanting in
perception as to set seriously down to Archibald Armstrong a jest-book
and a tract, which passed current as his at the time of their original
appearance. _Archy’s Jests_ and _Archy’s Dream_ were palpably the
productions of two professional writers, who followed the common
practice of utilising the capital resident in a departed celebrity.

The rejoinder of Frederic the Great to Dr. Franklin, when he sought
his aid in establishing freedom in America, to the effect that he was
born a prince, had become a king, and would never do anything to ruin
his own trade, is so far entitled to the priority over a somewhat
similar trait preserved of Joseph II. of Germany, “Je suis par métier
royaliste, Monsieur,” that Frederic preceded Joseph in order of time.

The majority of our books of _facetiæ_ contain, however, a reasonable
percentage of matter special to themselves; the unacknowledged recourse
to other authorities is only an incidental form of transgression; and
the cases of wholesale piracy, the extent of the series considered, are
not numerically important. The recommittal to the press of forgotten
miscellanies, with a mere change in the title or the hero, is almost
countable on the fingers.

Some allowance is to be made, as I have said, for the intuitive
recurrence of the same idea, moreover; as where, in _Scogin’s Jests_,
one of the stories--“How the Scholar said that Tom Miller of Oseney
was Jacob’s father”--is the original of the joke enunciated with a
probable unconsciousness of plagiarism or anticipation by the Christy
Minstrels; and, again, as where the account of the gruff old gentleman
and the boy Sheridan is forestalled in that highly succulent collection
brought out under the auspices of Jack of Dover.

In the latter, a physician and a boy enter into conversation; and when
the boy has, as we should say, chaffed his senior pretty freely, the
doctor testily observes: “Thou art a rare child for thy wit; but I fear
thou wilt prove like a summer apple, soon ripe, soon rotten; thou art
so full of wit now, that I fear thou wilt have little when thou art
old.” “Then,” said the boy, “I gather by your words that you had a good
wit when you were young!” The students of _Sheridaniana_ will recognise
a familiar acquaintance here in a strange dress.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER X.

  AFFILIATION OF STORIES--PARALLEL ILLUSTRATIONS--THE LITERARY
    CLUB--REYNOLDS, JOHNSON, AND GARRICK--TWO TUDOR JEST-BOOKS--EUROPEAN
    GRAFTS ON ORIENTAL ORIGINALS--MARTIN ELGINBROD--PARSON HOBART--THE
    “BRAVO OF VENICE.”


But it must not be supposed that those who have interested themselves
in the manufacture of these agreeable diversions made any rule of
waiting for the objects of appropriation to grow old. The account of
Dr. Parr mistaking his saturated wig, as it dried at the fire, for
_rothe gothe_, was equally narrated and believed of his contemporary
Dr. Farmer; and that about Bishop Watson and the Old Cock at Windermere
is nothing more than a re-issue, with a change in the bill, of the
Duke of Cumberland and the Original Old Grey Ass. It demanded in
neither case the possession of archæological insight to detect the
double paternity; for the two versions and the two men were living
nearly abreast.

Where a certain type is before the world as a model, it seldom fails
to multiply itself with trivial variations. Take, for example, three
articles from sources dated between 1640 and 1790; the same thing, too,
is recorded of Sydney Smith:--

    “‘That fellow,’         “A man being          “A man was
  said Cyrano de          rallied by Louis      asked by his
  Bergerac to a           XIV. on his           friend when
  friend, ‘is always      bulk, which the       he last saw
  in one’s                King told him         his jolly comrade
  way, and always         had increased         ----?
  insolent. The           from want of          ‘Oh,’ said he,
  dog is conscious        exercise, ‘Ah,        ‘I called on
  that he is so fat       sir,’ said he,        him yesterday
  that it would           ‘what would           at his lodgings,
  take an honest          your Majesty          and there
  man more than           have me do?           I found him
  a day to give           I have already        sitting all
  him a thorough          walked three          round a table
  beating.’”              times round the       by himself.’”
                          Duc D’Aumont
                          this morning.’”

The affinity between these is unmistakable. The same train of thought
may produce the same fruit with an absolute freedom from indebtedness.
It is a rather interesting problem, of which the solution will,
perhaps, never be forthcoming. A second illustration is admissible,
shewing the same process at work at a different angle:--

  EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.                NINETEENTH CENTURY.

    “Sheridan told his                 “When Sydney
  son that he thought                Smith’s physician
  it was high time for               (Abernethy) told him
  him to take a wife.                that he ought to take
  ‘_Whose_ wife shall I              exercise on an empty
  take, sir?’ was the                stomach, he inquired,
  inquiry.”                          ‘upon whose?’”[1]

  [1] There can be no doubt that the faulty or varying versions of
  stories of modern origin are often ascribable to the neglect of
  immediate registration, and the subsequent oral or written repetition
  from memory.

It is not in the least degree a ground for astonishment, that _jeux
d’esprit_ appertaining to old times have descended to our own in a
decomposed or mutilated condition, when we find such fugitive trifles
connected with men, who were all but our contemporaries, already
parting with the bloom of the mint. Two of the biographers of Charles
Lamb offer to public consideration simultaneously a _mot_ from his
lips, in terms beginning to be fairly devious, but which, when a
few more years have run out, will by possibility have ceased to be
recognisable by the author. _Ecce!_

     “MR. PROCTER.                 “MR. FITZGERALD.

    “An old lady, fond of          “A lady once bored
  her dissenting minister,       him a good deal. ‘Such
  wearied Lamb by the            a charming man! I know
  length of his praises. ‘I      him! Bless him! I know
  speak, because I _know_        him!’ To her Charles, wearied
  him well,’ said she.           with repetition of this
  ‘Well, I don’t,’ replied       encomium,--‘Well, I
  Lamb, ‘I don’t; but            don’t; but _damn him
  damn him at a venture.’”       at a hazard_.’”

The two records are approximately similar; yet the discrepancies are
rather serious, taking into calculation the nearness of Lamb to us and
to the literary gentlemen who have made it their business to chronicle
his good sayings. The editorial setting has somewhat overlaid the
mounted jewel.

None of our Shakespearian students has hitherto addressed himself to
the special task of tracing to, their sources the few pieces of gossip
about the poet, save, perhaps, the deer-stealing episode. The _Richard
III. and William the Conqueror_ story, in which Burbage and Shakespear
are made to figure, is recorded by Manningham in his Elizabethan
Diary, and no earlier analogue has fallen in my way. The scandal about
Davenant is another item of the same class, which we are almost ashamed
to find ourselves cherishing, even though it be, as it were, _formâ
pauperis_, from sheer lack of better matter. It seems lamentable that,
while the anecdote-hunter was on the trail, he did not appropriate, for
the benefit, instruction and delight of every intelligent individual
coming after him, some particulars of Shakespear’s private and literary
life, once so easy of access, now so irretrievably lost! How many
thousand biographies of all kinds of nonentities might not be exchanged
for an account of Shakespear by an educated contemporary!

Malone refers to the foundation of the Literary Club and to a little
episode about Garrick and Johnson in connection with that event:--

  “Not very long after the institution of the Club,” he says, “Sir J.
  Reynolds was speaking of it to Garrick. ‘I like it much,’ says he;
  ‘I think I’ll be of you.’ When Sir J. Reynolds mentioned this to Dr.
  Johnson, he was much displeased at the actor’s conceit. ‘He’ll be of
  us!’ says Johnson; ‘how does he know we will permit him? The first
  duke in England has no right to hold such language.’ However, when
  Garrick was regularly proposed, some time afterwards, Johnson warmly
  supported him....”

“On the former part of this story,” adds Malone, “it probably was
that Sir John Hawkins grounded his account that Garrick never was of
the Literary Club, and that Johnson said he never ought to be of it.
And thus it is that this stupid biographer, and the more flippant
and malicious Mrs. Piozzi, have miscoloured and misrepresented every
anecdote that they have pretended to tell of Dr. Johnson.”

The reader does not require to have the story of Raleigh, questioning
the cause of some disturbance under his window in the Tower, retold.
Tradition is too indispensable to be cut away, yet too treacherous to
believe without misgiving or without some convergence of proof. I have
been turning over the pages of the _Hundred Merry Tales_ and the _Merry
Tales and Quick Answers_ in quest of a few specimens of what might be
adduced and regarded as original matter, and how thin is my harvest!
Yet, onerous as are the obligations even of these ancient collections,
the debt, it must be owned, is of a character and degree differing
very essentially from that under which their successors lie to them
again. For where there is loan or trespass, it is almost exclusively
from obscure foreign sources unknown to the generality of readers, and
betwixt we certainly get many an enjoyable bit of downright home-grown
merriment or rascality. Among these I may be permitted to commend to
attention the tales “Of the miller that stole the nuts of the tailor,
that stole a sheep,” a piece of masterly structure, “Of the fat woman
that sold fruit,” “Of the courtier that bad the boy hold his horse,”
“Of him that healed frantic men,” which is cited both by Sir John
Harington and Robert Burton, and “Of the two young men that rode to
Walsingham.” These, and a dozen more scattered over the two books, have
an insular air, although they may not be without their continental
analogues. They look as if they had first seen the light on British
ground, circumscribed by the waves which wash our cliffs; but anyhow
they in their turn formed part of the general stock-in-trade, out of
which a totally distinct class of men from More and Heywood here,
and Erasmus abroad, carried on for ever and for ever the business of
amusing a not very fastidious and not very critical constituency.

The gratification at meeting once in a way with an anecdote in its
pure and pristine state, is like the feeling when one secures an old
picture with which the cleaner has not tampered, or a coin exempt from
_tooling_ and corrosion.

There is, comparatively speaking, a handsome residuum after all
deductions of genuine English _Ana_ in the two Tudor books, in which
I elsewhere intimated a suspicion that Sir Thomas More and John
Heywood had a hand; and there are also a few exceptions to the almost
universal rule, that the old jest is by nature intractable--that is to
say, archaic--not merely in language and orthography, but in temper,
structure and blood. If one arranges in parallel columns the original
text of the greater number, or rather the mass, of these relations, and
a modern version, the alteration is merely external. The costume and
tone in both are alike obsolete. Conspicuous and valuable illustrations
of the contrary occur, however, in No. 7 and No. 48 of the _Hundred
Merry Tales_, and No. 14 of the companion book. Nothing can be less
dependent upon time than the account “Of the friar that told the three
children’s fortunes”: if it is out of date, Boccaccio and Chaucer
are; and in that other, “Of the chaplain, that said Our Lady’s matins
a-bed,” there is a piquancy worthy of Sydney Smith.

Items are frequently inserted in jest-books by the editors or
collectors without the most distant suspicion of their veritable
origin and character; and it also happens to this sort of literary
composition, as it is known to do to engravings, that they exist in
various stages of recension and in various degrees of divergence from
their _prima stamina_.

The process of affiliation, as I venture to call it, is necessarily
cognate to that of corruption. The emigrant tale, whether from one
part of the world, or from one book, to another, is bound to undergo
a change of garb or one in the _dramatis personæ_. I shall proceed to
exemplify this:--

  “In a village of Picardy, after a long sickness, a farmer’s wife
  fell into a lethargy. Her husband was willing, good man, to believe
  her out of pain; and so, according to the custom of that country,
  she was wrapped in a sheet and carried out to be buried. But, as ill
  luck would have it, the bearers carried her so near a hedge, that the
  thorns pierced the sheet and waked the woman from her trance. Some
  years after, she died in reality; and as the funeral passed along,
  the husband would every now and then call out, ‘Not too near the
  hedge, not too near the hedge, neighbours.’”

This is not the version of the incident usually current, for that
substitutes a hearse for the bearers, a coffin for the sheet, and
a tree against which the carriage was run, overturning the supposed
corpse, and causing her to revive.

But, first removing this latter superincumbent _stratum_, or ignoring
it, let us examine the particulars, as I have just printed them. Have
we not before us a mode of sepulture unknown to Western Europe in the
conveyance of the woman to her grave simply enveloped in a cloth? That
is, of course, Mohammedan, and is precisely the method pursued in India
by the disciples of that creed at the present moment.

One doubt begets another; and the presence of a hedge appears to betray
the revising touch of one of my own countrymen, as it is so infinitely
more characteristic of the narrow gorge-like lanes of rural England
than of the route which a similar procession would be likely to have
followed on the other side of the Channel.

So it seems as if we had before us an Oriental tradition or invention,
first introduced into French literature at a period when the languages
and learning of the East were more cultivated in that country than
among ourselves, and finally Anglicised, first with the hedge, and
secondly with the bearers and the coffin, as novel and improving
ingredients.

But the whimsical anecdote of Martin Elginbrod perhaps even more
strikingly exhibits the longevity of certain tales or apologues, the
curious phases through which they pass, and the need of approaching
them, for their full appreciation, in a critical temper. Here we
have, for instance, what appears superficially to be a mere piece of
grotesque incongruity and irreverence on the part of a sober-minded
Caledonian, who figures as the composer of his own epitaph:--

  “Here lie I, Martin Elginbrod:
  Have mercy on my saul, Lord God!
  As I wad do, were I Lord God,
  And ye were Martin Elginbrod,”

which constitutes at first sight a libel on parity of reasoning and
the law of proportion, and at the same time a piece of speculative
licence unusual among the disciples of the Kirk; but on closer scrutiny
the lines present to us perhaps the most successful attempt ever
made in the way of a revival. The inscription itself is probably an
immediate transfer from the Dutch, in which language it occurs _mutato
nomine_; but the idea was mooted three thousand years ago in the sacred
books of the Hindoos. In its modern dress the notion is, of course, a
pure extravagance; but such an inversion of established doctrine and
belief in the Vedas becomes less startling, when we reflect that the
theological system there developed is of a less sublime and immutable
type than our own, and does not so entirely forbid this hypothetical or
imaginative change of relationship.

These transmitted relics of Elginbrod and of the coffin seem to shew in
a pronounced manner how a sentiment or idea which is implanted in our
very nature is susceptible of reproduction and adaptation without an
obvious betrayal of its original appurtenance to former ages and other
creeds.

The story in _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_ of the woman who lifted
up her nether garments to conceal her head has the air of having
voyaged from Egypt or some other Oriental country, where it would be
the instinct of any female, even at the present day, to do exactly the
same thing at all risks, the exposure of the face being contrary to
religious canons. The author of the _Englishwoman in Egypt_ relates an
anecdote to this point.

Shakespear’s witty notion of the black flea on Bardolph’s red nose, to
which the modern anecdote of Sambo and the mosquito appears to be under
obligations, is circumscribed by the introduction of the doctrine of
eternal punishment as to date. I have thought that the same idea might
have occurred to any one philosophically contemplating the dark specks
in a blazing coal fire.

The _fons et origo_ of witticisms is often very difficult to
reach--nearly as much so as the source of the Nile. In one of his
Letters, Charles Lamb quotes, as a good saying of Coleridge, the joke,
“That summer has set in with its usual severity.” The curious point is
that Byron had made the same facetious remark just before; but Lamb
and he belonged to different sets. It matters little, however, for
Walpole had anticipated them both; and the present _mot_ appears to
be the Joseph Miller query, “When did you ever see such a winter?” To
which a wag retorts, “Last summer.”

An almost exact parallel to this is found in the comparison by
Coleridge of the pure and undefilable mind of Charles Lamb to
“moonshine which shines on a dunghill, and takes no pollution.” In
the _Life of St. Agnes_, by Daniel Pratt, 1677, the saint is made to
liken God to the _sun_, shining on a dunghill without being defiled;
and in the _Lives of the Philosophers_, by Diogenes Laertius, Diogenes
the Cynic is made to employ the same figure of speech. Whence did _he_
borrow it?

Another singular case of affiliation presents itself to our notice
in the sermon preached before thieves by Parson Hobart, to whom his
uncustomary congregation, after he had done what they required to their
satisfaction, returned the money whereof they had relieved him on the
road, adding six shillings and eightpence as a fee for the discourse.
This occurs in a tract of the time of Charles I., which bears the
following quaint title:--“Forced Divinity, Or Two Sermons preached by
the Compulsion of two Sorts of Sinners, viz. Drunkards & Thieves. The
one by Certain Ale-Bibbers, who having heard a Minister teach much
against Drinking, afterwards met with him, and compelled him to make a
Sermon upon one word. The second, by a Crew of Thieves, who after they
had robbed a Minister, forced him to make a Sermon in Praise of their
Profession, and when he had done, Returned his Money, and Six Shillings
Eightpence for his Sermon.”

Now, this very tale about Parson Hobart is in an early MS. printed
in _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, and is in fact a mere resuscitation for the
nonce, which is made additionally manifest from the sum named as the
gratuity--six and eightpence or a noble, a species of currency which
had gone out of use in the seventeenth century; so that, had we not
known that the story was far older than it purports to be in the
tract above quoted, there is a kind of internal clue to its superior
antiquity--one considerable enough, but insignificant when we measure
it against the distance between Martin Elginbrod and the Vedas.

Into certain works of fiction, not professedly or specifically jocular,
the humorous side or element has been unwittingly introduced by the
authors in connection with the treatment of their topics; and in one
or two cases at least it is so much so, that the whole production
amounts to little better than an elaborate and tedious jest. The
_Bravo of Venice_, by Monk Lewis, to which I allude elsewhere, is, by
way of example, from first to last a solemn absurdity. It purports to
narrate a series of extraordinary adventures in the city by an Italian
prince in disguise; and Lewis, who seems to have been exhaustively
ignorant of the institutions, habits, and costume of the Republic,
paints with the utmost nonchalance a succession of scenes in which
his hero is the central figure, and not one of which could have
possibly occurred under the strict and vigilant oligarchical government
ruling there supreme--an administrative machinery so thorough and
so omnipresent, that no one could raise a finger or utter a sound
unobserved and unreported. Yet in this serio-comic romance the Bravo
performs a variety of thrilling and marvellous exploits, bespeaking
the existence of an executive of the loosest type, with an _éclat_ and
an impunity possible only in a melodramatic performance or a South
American democracy. He even represents to us, in one of his theatrical
tableaux, the lovely Rosabella of Corfu, the Doge’s own niece, seated
alone in an arbour attached to some public gardens, and as rescued
from assassination by the Bravo, who is discovered at the last moment,
not by the Venetian officials, but his own act, to be somebody totally
different from the character which he had originally assumed. It is
not too much to say that on that soil such a mystery would not have
outlived one round of the clock.




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XI.

  THE BALLAD AND THE NURSERY RHYME--PHILOSOPHICAL SIDE OF THE
    QUESTION--“JACK THE GIANT-KILLER.”


The normal jest-book limits itself to stories of the ordinary jocular
cast relative to incidents either of the current or past time. Neither
the compiler nor the peruser, as a rule, concerns himself with any
other aspect of the question than the utility of the volume as a source
of immediate amusement. The existence of a philosophical side to the
matter remains unsuspected.

But I have already tried to demonstrate that this is an intrinsically
valuable body of literary material, with which we have to deal, and
that it lurks in a wide variety of forms. I have illustrated some of
them; but there are yet others--namely, the BALLAD and the NURSERY
RHYME.

The taste for burlesque in composition set in at a very early period,
as will become evident from a perusal of these pages, and may be
regarded to some extent as a counter-movement to the practice of
_moralising_ secular productions which were thought to be of an
irreligious tendency, and to be susceptible of a different kind of
treatment, like the _New Nutbrown Maid upon the Passion of Christ_,
the _Court of Venus moralized_, the _Gude and Godly Ballets_ of our
Northern neighbours, and _Come over the bourne, Bessy, to me_. Of the
last, singularly enough, there are two parodies--one political, in
which Queen Elizabeth is the heroine, and the other allegorical, in
which the speaker is Christ, and Bessy, Mankind. But the original was
of an amatory complexion.

Certainly, on the whole, one of the ballads in a printed collection of
the reign of James I., entitled _Deuteromelia_, 1609, affords the most
powerful and diverting example of the manner in which our own ancestors
handled the present class of undertaking, as well as a proof of the
appreciation of the ludicrous by the readers of those days. It is an
extremely clever production, which I am tempted to transfer hither
entire:--

  “Martin said to his man,
            Fie! man, fie!
  Oh, Martin said to his man,
            Who’s the fool now?
  Martin said to his man,
  Fill thou the cup, and I the can;
  Thou hast well drunken, man:
            Who’s the fool now?

  “I see a sheep shearing corn,
            Fie! man, fie!
  I see a sheep shearing corn;
            Who’s the fool now?
  I see a sheep shearing corn,
  And a cuckoo blow his horn;
  Thou hast well drunken, man:
            Who’s the fool, now?

  “I see a man in the moon,
            Fie! man, fie!
  I see a man in the moon,
            Who’s the fool now?
  I see a man in the moon,
  Clouting of St. Peter’s shoon.
  Thou hast well drunken, man:
            Who’s the fool now?

  “I see a hare chase a hound,
            Fie! man, fie!
  I see a hare chase a hound,
            Who’s the fool now?
  I see a hare chase a hound,
  Twenty mile above the ground;
  Thou hast well drunken, man:
            Who’s the fool now?

  “I see a goose ring a hog,
            Fie! man, fie!
  I see a goose ring a hog,
            Who’s the fool now?
  I see a goose ring a hog,
  And a snail that bit a dog;
  Thou hast well drunken, man:
            Who’s the fool now?

  “I see a mouse catch the cat,
            Fie! man, fie!
  I see a mouse catch the cat,
            Who’s the fool now?
  I see a mouse catch the cat,
  And the cheese to eat the rat;
  Thou hast well drunken, man:
            Who’s the fool now?”

Of course, it is easy to condemn such lines as foolish or
old-fashioned; but there is nothing else exactly like them in our
literature, and they shew the relish for humorous travesty on the part
of the English public in the sixteenth century. They obviously do not
respond to the later and existing notion of what a Jest is; but they
may be regarded as forming an antique type of the songs introduced into
the modern extravaganza and burletta, and they fall within the present
category as representing one of the shapes which facetious literature
assumed, before the _Ana_ existed as a distinct branch of research and
source of entertainment.

In ballad-lore there are many other relics of a playful or comic turn,
which do not involve any jocular sense or plot, as the _Wedding of the
Frog and the Mouse_, the _Wedding of the Fly_, and some of the familiar
pieces in the _Drolleries_ by the wits of the court of the Stuarts. A
playwright once offered a MS. farce to a manager, and assured him, by
way of recommendation, that it was no laughing matter. That was a bull;
but a story or an idea may be funny without fulfilling the conditions
of a jest; and, paradoxical as it may appear, there are cases where
jests may be fairly admissible as such without offering a direct
provocation to laughter. I refer to the nature, not to the quality, of
the performance.

In the Nursery Rhymes of this country, of which Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps
has made an excellent collection, there is a good deal that seems
suggestive beyond the mere jingle of the verse or even the oddity
of the subject. The editor himself, indeed, has indicated numerous
instances in which an historical or archaic interest underlies the
surface; and it is curious that this is usually latent. The rhymes upon
the oldest themes, such as King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Tom Thumb, are
by no means the most ancient compositions.

A little quatrain:--

  “Three wise men of Gotham,
  Went to sea in a bowl;
  And if the bowl had been stronger,
  My song would have been longer”--

is a remarkable survival of the familiar traditions about the
Gothamites, and may be commended for its elliptical succinctness. It
is within the bounds of possibility that the author of _Jack a Nory_
had this before him as a model. The conception and structure are so
similar. How much is told in a few words! The brush of a Turner could
not have wrought a result so instantaneous and impressive. The writer,
a true poet, shrinks from harrowing details, and tells the tale with a
simplicity almost Druidical.

The next is of a varying texture:--

  “Hush thee, my babby,
  Lie still with thy daddy
    Thy mammy has gone to the mill,
  To grind thee some wheat,
  To make thee some meat,
    And so, my dear babby, lie still.”

We here find ourselves thrown back on a period when each district or
village had its common mill; and all the racy stories about the jolly
miller and his golden thumb, and his tricksome toll-dish, and his
amours with the fair sex, come into our heads. How dull and pithless
some of our earliest books of facetiæ would have been without the
miller and his brother-rogue, the priest! The drollest anecdotes are of
one or the other of these two. How many homes must have been rendered
wretched by the visits of the goodwives to Dusty-poll and their
intrigues with the sly rascal; and if the husband went in lieu of his
spouse, the priest was at hand, in the grey of the morning even, to
take his place. It was Scylla or Charybdis--between the devil and the
deep sea.

The nursery epic of _Jack the Giant-killer_, of which we do not possess
any archaic text or form, displays in a sort of allegory the protest of
the people against the oppression of their feudal lords. This tyranny
survived perhaps longest in such regions as Cornwall and Wales, or
the Cornish and Welsh were unusually intolerant of it. The two-headed
giant, whom Jack exterminates in Wales, may be taken to be a landlord
or seigneur of a more than commonly malignant type.

Here is a final sample of a relic ostensibly recent in origin, yet on
closer examination with the crust of antiquity collected upon it:--

      “A cow and a calf,
      An ox and a half,
  Forty good shillings and three;
    Is that not enough tocher
    For a shoemaker’s daughter,
  A bonny lass with a black e’e?”

Agricultural statistics would shew one, no doubt, how long ago--how
many kings’ and queens’ reigns ago--it was that a cow and a calf could
be had for £2 3_s._ That is the key to the date of the rhyme, in fact;
for the difference in the value of money merely goes to establish that
the personage who espoused the shoemaker’s daughter had no reason to
complain of the fortune given with her. But the pecuniary equivalent
has ceased to be quoted these two centuries or so; and the lines thus
carry within themselves a proof of their appurtenance by birthright to
a prior era.

There is another class of tale, comprised in the Nursery Series, which
resembles a new dwelling built out of old materials. It is the one
beginning,--

  “There was an old man, who lived in a wood,
      As you may plainly see;
  He said he would do as much work in a day
      As his wife could do in three.”

The idea was used by the author of a farce called _Domestic Economy_,
in which that eminent comedian, Mr. Edward Wright, formerly signalised
his genius; but the true original, both germ and substance, is a
jocular invention of at least the fifteenth century, and what we see
before us is an elaborate amplification, reminding us of the difference
between a country and the map of it drawn to scale, or between a
tragedy in five acts and the slender plot.

The evidence which the Nursery Rhyme so often supplies of having once
belonged to a remote literature and society, is not directly relevant
to the present subject. But it seemed to enter into my scheme to draw
attention to this among the many repertories in which the all-pervading
JEST is to be found in new attire--to the hidden properties which may
reside in popular trifles, and to the strange mutations which a certain
section of folk-lore has undergone in the process of transmission
to us. A _jeu d’esprit_ of Ben Jonson, which was not impossibly an
affiliation in his case, leaves its last echo, as it were, in a
witticism still more degrees below proof,--_videlicet_, the following:--

  “I’ll sing you a song,
  Though not very long,
    Yet I think it as pretty as any;
  Put your hand in your purse,
  You’ll never be worse,
    And give the poor singer a penny.”

Here the soul of the humour is, that the preamble is the text--the
house is all portico, or like the shop-frontage in a pantomime.

But occasionally items present themselves which are jests without any
attempt at disguise, and appear more properly, indeed, to belong to Joe
Miller’s Miscellany than to Aunt Louisa’s. Is this not a retort pure
and simple, thrown into metrical form, rather than a little poem for
little masters?--

  “The man in the wilderness asked me,
  How many strawberries grew in the sea?
  I answered him, as I thought good,
  As many red herrings as grew in the wood.”

This cross-bred effusion, with its share of epigrammatic character,
is traced backward to the last century but one; it is in reality of
unascertained age; it bears no chronological stamp; it is precisely a
_mot_, which might have been uttered to-day or five hundred years ago.
It alludes to the wild berry mentioned by Shakespear, with a probable
stretch of poetic licence, as cultivated in the Bishop of Ely’s garden
near Holborn in the fifteenth century; it may have been so in Gerarde
the botanist’s time, a hundred years after. But the small sylvan
variety must be of great antiquity.

In the entire body of nursery literature, however, the humorous element
seldom exceeds a sportive under-meaning; for the fully developed joke
it is an uncongenial atmosphere; and the interesting constituency to
which it addresses itself would not be capable of penetrating the drift
of a thorough-paced _Joe_. Where such features occur in a collection
of children’s rhymes, they are to be treated as waifs and strays,
which have smuggled themselves in under some disguise, and require an
experienced eye to single them out. All that can be said is, that the
book is not much the better for them, and would not be much the worse
without them. They have a bizarre air. They are apt to strike a jarring
chord.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XII.

  CONTINENTAL INFLUENCE--THE “ANA”--THE “CONVIVIAL
    DISCOURSES”--WHIMSICAL INVENTIONS--SHAKESPEAR JEST-BOOKS--CHANGE IN
    PUBLIC TASTE.


The influence of Erasmus, More, and a few of their illustrious
contemporaries, at the revival of learning, contributed a good deal
to make extracts from the ancient writers popular among the limited
reading community, and to draw the literary thought of the sixteenth
century into harmony for a time with that of the later Roman era.
This renders it less difficult to understand why the first makers of
jest-books thought fit to intersperse their collections with choice
passages from Plutarch and the rest. They appealed to a current taste
and a sure market. The great Rotterdam wit and philosopher appreciated
sallies and strokes of humour which, in a modern English club or at
a modern dining table, would scarcely stir a muscle; and he almost
killed himself with laughing over the _Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum_,
in which it is hard to discern where the peculiar piquancy ever lay.
It is certainly fair to recollect that we cannot transfer ourselves
to the intellectual air in which Erasmus and his friends lived. We
are unable to look at things of this kind from their seeing-point.
What does not strike us as very droll might strike a Dutchman three
centuries since very naturally and very forcibly as being so. We know,
of course, how much depends in these cases on a turn of phrase, a trick
of pronunciation, or any other subsidiary element; and so far as the
_Epistolæ_ are concerned, it must be borne in mind that such a travesty
was then a novel experiment in literature, and was apt enough to tickle
the fancy of a man who was at once so good a classical scholar and
modern Latinist as Erasmus.

The taste for selections of Anecdotes, historical, literary, and
miscellaneous, must appear more intelligible; and long before anything
on the same scale was attempted in England, or even in Southern Europe,
the Basle press found a sufficient demand for this sort of light,
gossiping literature, freely salted with _gaillardise_, to exhaust
at least four editions of a work three volumes strong--namely, the
_Convivial Discourses_, a Latin compilation, which lays down the lines
on which our own early books of the same class were modelled, and which
profess to have been gleaned over the dinner-table, from the private
conversation of friends, from ordinary hearsay, and out of books. It is
observable that the second and third volumes signify--which the first
does not--the special value of the miscellany _Omnibus verarum virtutum
studiosis_; which, as many of the examples and anecdotes given are
conspicuously licentious, must be taken in a deterrent sense.

But the ingredients of these evidently popular _Discourses_ bespeak
the prevalent tolerance in the country of their birth, and on the
Continent generally, for a robust freedom of tone and expression
parallel with that which made jest-books cast in a similar mould
acceptable to the early Englishman--not, perhaps, so much for the
virtues which they inculcated, as for the pervading vein of comicality
and diversion from severer reading. The old-fashioned school of humour,
which the Continental _literati_ may be considered to have established,
long survived its founders, and was still in a tolerably flourishing
condition when Shakespear wrote. It did not die thoroughly out till
the end of the last century; but the Georgian period in England saw
the rise of a different taste and style, which largely resulted from
constitutional and social changes in our system, and which gradually
elbowed out of favour the archaic jocular spirit and the multitudinous
_Ana_.

To that revolution I shall have an opportunity of adverting presently;
and I must now call attention to the collection of Old English
Jest-Books which I edited in 1864.

This was a fairly representative _Corpus_, embracing the best
productions of the class, in all its varieties, during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. It was advertised by the publishers as
_Shakespear Jest-Books_, because Shakespear mentions one of them
casually in one of his dramas; but the volumes seem to connect
themselves with him in a more direct and sympathetic manner, when we
examine them side by side with his own comic episodes and creations,
and see how the old-world, quaint fun of the plays is in unison with
that of the books.

Both are emanations from the time; and they occupy a middle
station between the Dutch school and our own. Shakespear and his
fellow-dramatists placed upon the stage familiar types, employing
familiar language; and the setters-out of jest-books and they had,
commercially speaking, one mission--that of putting forward only what
use had stamped current.

There was still one remaining class of jest, which was once a very
favourite form of pleasantry, and which, if it survives at all,
survives under an altogether changed aspect. This is the Whimsical
Invention, such as--

_The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham._

_The Sackful of News._

_Jack of Dover his Quest of Inquiry for the Veriest Fool in
Christendom._

_Pasquil’s Jests, with Mother Bunch’s Merriments and a Brown Dozen of
Gulls._

One of the Puritan writers denounces the first article on our list as
one of the “witless devices” of the Elizabethan age; and he is very
near the truth. Of course, they are far older than that reign, and are
mentioned in the _Hundred Merry Tales_; nor does the small book which
holds them, contain them all, or represent the original date of their
introduction to the public notice in a printed shape. They belong to
the family of Noodledoms, Gaulardisms, and Gasconades, which seems to
have enjoyed such general acceptance for a great length of time both in
England and on the Continent; and while they are no doubt prodigiously
silly, I am quite serious in my assurance, that I should be very sorry
not to have them, and that I would liefer spare many literary memorials
than this and the other Fooleries, with which they are on terms of
relationship. Any one who chooses to refer to _Old English Jest-Books_,
1864, will understand my idiosyncracy, for there, at a much earlier
period of my life, I took considerable pains to illustrate both their
former acceptability and their to-day’s use. I have seen them described
as ineptitudes; but that was by such as lacked critical insight, and
left the mineral treasure ungotten. A superficial examination will not
do; the divining rod must be applied. We must break the surface, and
within are wonders surpassing those of the cave of Aladdin.

I would not have it to be supposed that these Gothamite and other
drolleries are altogether destitute of point or legibility; but for my
present purpose I have no space to linger over them, and hardly any
occasion, as they offer no original types. They are, for the most
part, _bis cocta_--an unconscious homage to preceding authors, with
the subsidiary features varied for the nonce. Even _Mother Bunch_ is
nothing more than Elinor Rumming revived with certain additions and
melodramatic embellishments; and _Jack of Dover_ offers little that is
novel to our consideration beyond the conception of a jury of penniless
poets--reaching, so far as it is possible to make out, the abnormal
number of twenty-eight--as a vehicle for a series of thin, vamped-up
jokes, in the majority of which we easily identify old friends, and not
improved by a change of clothes.

The present rarity of the bulk of this species of literature, and even
disappearance in not a few cases of works or editions which must once
have existed, are to be explained indeed by the insatiable hunger for
novelty in external presentment and the neglect of discarded favourites
quite as much as by the other more usual incidence of popularity.

When we cross over from an investigation of the older literature in
order to make a general survey of the modern school, it is like the
migration to a different climate. Something resembling an organic
revolution has occurred in this sphere of action and ingenuity.
New literary and theatrical agencies have been in operation. Great
political convulsions and the overthrow of dynasties have made their
secondary effects sensible. The Georges have turned everything
upside down. Grandfather’s jest-book is equally out of date with his
opinions and his costume. Joe Miller has won a victory more signal and
more enduring than Blenheim. He is the jocular laureate of the new
Hanoverian time, and of all time to come. His book, if he only knew it,
is to see as many editions as the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and to have as
many readers as the Bible. He is to become in his way a colossus--a
cyclopædia in himself.

What more could the most aspiring solicit or desire?

Soberly speaking, the appearance of _Joe Miller’s Jests, or the Wit’s
Vademecum_, under fortuitous circumstances in the time of George II.,
marked the new era in this description of industry, and was an English
Hegira.

It was as if the jest-books of all prior epochs had been gathered
unexceptionally up, and burned by the common hangman, to let the
British community start afresh. So broad was the line of demarcation
between the Old _régime_ and the New; and it is not difficult to see
that this truly marvellous change is an evolution from novel phases and
developments of social life, and was just what was to be anticipated.
In this special way, perhaps, a more complete alteration had taken
place since the Tudor period than has taken place between the last
century and the present one; or, in other words, in the last hundred
and fifty years. We cannot believe that an ordinary reader of Henry
VIII.’s days would have had any relish or value for the fun of the
earlier half of the eighteenth century; but an ordinary reader of
the present time perfectly appreciates the anecdotes and humour--not
exactly of the primitive lean _fasciculus_ to which _Joe Miller_ was at
the outset limited, but of the wits who flourished under Walpole and
side by side with Pope.

This group of men, authors, actors, dandies, and _bons viveurs_--is
the true lineal ancestry of Sheridan and Matthews, Sydney Smith and
Jerrold; and, _mutatis mutandis_, the form, temper, and tone of the
school have suffered no material variation, since its first rise into
an immortal existence under the auspices of Miller within the genial
precinct of Clare Market.

It is upward of two decades since I launched the so-called “Shakespear
Jest-Books”; and, looking at them to-day, I cannot help saying that I
see in them a means supplied to the inquirer of forming a comparative
estimate between the ancient school and the early English on the one
hand, and the modern English on the other. The volumes form a selection
of types from 1526 to 1639, and embrace within their limits almost
every variety of jocular invention. Even in the miscellany which passed
under the name of _Tarlton’s Jests_ there had been commencing symptoms
of a change of fashion and requirement; and in Taylor the Water Poet’s
budget of _facetiæ_, which he christened his _Wit and Mirth_, 1629, we
perceive that the revolution has reached a farther stage. The strokes
of fun, which delighted the contemporary readers of the _Hundred
Merry Tales_, still preserved their place; but with them are mingled
anecdotes more redolent and characteristic of the Stuart period,
preparing us for those still later and still grosser publications which
marked the reign of the second Charles.

The _Hundred Merry Tales_, with which the series naturally and properly
opens, sets the example of plagiarism by adopting stories from still
earlier sources; but the obligations of the book to ready-made or
convertible material are relatively slight, and the best portions,
including the inimitable account of the “Miller that stole the nuts of
the tailor that stole a sheep,” and the dramatic story of the Maltman
of Colebrook, seem, so far as one has the means of judging, to be
founded on actual incidents.

The tales bear constant and unmistakable testimony of having been
composed by some one who possessed a keen sense of humour and a hearty
relish for the ludicrous; that they were from the hand of a literary
man and a scholar of no mean ability, is not to be reasonably doubted;
and if we were informed on credible authority that some of them offered
to us the fruits of the leisure of even so distinguished a public
character as Sir Thomas More, we should receive the ascription without
misgiving, and feel that there were among his graver works some which
we could better spare.

Not only the relationship subsisting between More and the Rastells,
but the peculiar tone and cast of the tales, long since induced me to
speculate on the possible concern of the author of _Utopia_ in their
production; and every one is aware that More was noted for his pleasant
and facetious conversation, although it may not be so generally
familiar that he signalised himself as a versifier, and as the writer
of the droll tale of the tipstaff who tried to pass himself off as a
friar. Yet of course there is not a tittle of direct evidence in this
direction; and, again, it is impossible to avoid the persuasion that
not indeed the mere fatherlessness of the work or absence of a name on
the title, but the complete silence of the biographers and literary
critics of and after the time on this point, tell against the idea.
On the other hand, the official position of More, in an even greater
measure than his religious tenets as a strict upholder of the Romish
hierarchy, made the open association of his name with an enterprise
so uncomplimentary to the Catholic priesthood eminently impolitic and
inexpedient either as actual part of the title or as mere matter of
hearsay.

But if it was not More himself, it was a person of congenial
temperament, of whose identity he must have had some shrewd hint from
the printer, and who had no taste for literary notoriety or for the
ordinary bookseller’s garnish in the way of seductive forefronts. For a
title-page more laconic and uncommercial was probably never bestowed on
a book of the kind.




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XIII.

THE “HUNDRED MERRY TALES”--THE AUTHORSHIP DISCUSSED.


There is, however, a second hypothesis bearing on the parentage of the
_Tales_. In the _Interlude of the Four Elements_, which came from the
same press a few years before, there is the following passage:--

  _Sensual Appetite._ Canst get my master a dish of quails,
  Small birds, swallows, or wagtails?
  They be light of digestion.

  _Taverner._ Light of digestion? For what reason?

  _Sen._ For physic putteth this reason thereto,
  Because those birds fly to and fro,
  And be continual moving.

  _Ta._ Then know I a lighter meat than that.

  _Sen._ I pray thee, tell me what?

  _Ta._ If ye will needs know in short and brief,
  It is even a woman’s tongue,
  For that is ever stirring.

Now, the ninth story in the Jest-book, in the edition of 1526, is “Of
him that said that a woman’s tongue was lightest of digestion”; and we
have exactly the same notion reproduced. Conversely, the nineteenth
story in the _Tales_ treats “Of the four elements, where they should
soon be found”; and here very curiously an analogous notion about the
qualities of the female tongue discloses itself thus: “The wind said,
‘If ye list to speak with me, ye shall be sure to have me among aspen
leaves or else in a woman’s tongue.’” Water and fire were to be found
in a woman’s eye and in her heart; the earth alone was stationary and
steadfast. And even in the moral we are told that “by this tale ye may
learn as well the property of the four elements as the properties of a
woman.”

These are rough indications, which must go for what they are worth.
And in the same way, No. 3 of the _Tales_ relates an adventure in
connection with the performance of a stage-play in Suffolk, in which
the devil was a person of the drama. Theatrical exhibitions in the
provinces were not of very usual or frequent occurrence in those days.
This particular one is alleged to have taken place in a certain market
town; but, perhaps to prevent the possibility of giving offence, the
name is withheld. But the narrative strikes me, from its minuteness of
detail, as emanating from somebody who was on the spot, rather than
from a secondary source, and from the pains and skill with which the
plot is elaborated as the composition of a professional writer. And the
question arises whether the reporter of the two jests was not also the
author of the stage-play in Suffolk and of the _Interlude of the Four
Elements_.

I submit this suggestively and experimentally, since it appears to me
that, next to More, JOHN HEYWOOD is the most probable candidate for
the honour of having furnished Rastell with the MS. of the _Tales_;
and if he did so, we may have a sort of clue to the authorship of two
dramatic productions not hitherto comprised in the list of his writings.

Nor does the connection of More himself with the _Tales_, even under
such circumstances, absolutely fall to the ground, as Heywood and he
saw a good deal of each other; and Gabriel Harvey, Spenser’s friend,
and an affectionate student of the curious literature of the period,
informs us that some of his (Heywood’s) epigrams were founded on
conceits and devices of More.

There are, nevertheless, clear grounds for regarding this Century of
good things as a gathering to which More and Heywood were contributors,
rather than as the exclusive property of either of them, or of any
one else. For we see, for instance, that in the fortieth story a man
so celebrated and even notorious as Skelton, and at the time of the
publication of the _Tales_ still living, is described as “one Master
Skelton, a poet laureate,” which seems to argue the presence behind the
scenes of an editor not very conversant with contemporary literature
or literary history; and this might be possibly true of Rastell the
printer, but could not be so of More or of Heywood.

But then, only a little way farther--in the forty-eighth anecdote--we
are confronted with the admirable apologue “Of the friar that told the
three children’s fortunes,” where, after declaring to the horrified
mother that of her family one should be a beggar, a second a thief, and
the third an assassin, he consoles her by saying that she might make
the one who was to be a beggar _a friar_, the one who was to be a thief
_a lawyer_, and him who was destined to be a murderer _a physician_.
Here we recognise the touch and individuality of no ordinary pen, and
discover an additional explanation of the reluctance which the compiler
or contributors felt to couple any names with the volume. Attacks
on the Romish Church were treated in 1526 with a larger measure of
toleration than heretofore; but in this jest three obnoxious callings,
including that of More himself, are exposed to satire.

One drawback to the dramatic completeness of the anecdote is the
aspersion which the Friar Mendicant is made to cast on his own cloth;
and we at the same time cannot avoid discerning a trace of the root of
the incident in some _fabliau_ composed in far more primitive times
than those of the appearance of the first English jest-book. For we are
introduced to the wife of a very rich man, standing at the entrance of
her husband’s dwelling, accompanied by her children, and subsequently
with her own hands spreading the repast, of which the friar partakes.
The intention was to create a laugh at the cost of the three vocations;
but the _rédacteur_ neglected to observe all the conditions necessary
to render the hit perfectly true to art.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XIV.

“MERRY TALES AND QUICK ANSWERS.”


But there is a second work which, in point of date and character, is
sufficiently near to that which we have just quitted to warrant a
conclusion that the editor had in its production an eye to the earlier
book. Many of the jests in _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_, printed
about 1530, resemble those which I have almost convinced myself that
Sir Thomas More and John Heywood contributed to the volume from
Rastell’s press; but, on the whole, the collection is of inferior
interest and value, and owes more to foreign and classical sources.

There is even here, however, a curious coincidence between the
fifty-third story and a feature in the Interlude before referred
to. In the anecdote the man, who is not worthy to open the gate to
the king, proposes to fetch _Master Couper_ to do it, while _Tom
Couper_ is introduced in the same sort of casual way into the dramatic
performance. Among these tales the fellow who entertained so humble an
opinion of his worth was a true coeval type, while he who elsewhere
could only see in his sovereign lord “a man in a painted garment” was a
Radical born out of his time. Yet both jests bespeak such a liberality
of temper as could enjoy a laugh at the two pieces of bucolic ignorance
alike, which makes our thoughts return naturally to More.

In indelicacy there is not much to choose between the two series; but
it has always been a misapprehension to deduce from the equivocal
situations and language, which go so far to make the marrow of these
popular compilations, a proof of the tolerance among our ancestors
of a freedom of speech no longer admissible. The grossness of early
English literature is not displayed, after all, most conspicuously
in jest-books, but in the drama; and we have assuredly nothing which
parallels in obscenity the old popular literature of the French.

There is, however, one important consideration to be taken into
account when we enter on the study of this class of material, whether
prose, poetical or dramatic,--and that is, the social station of
the individuals into whose mouths these broad pleasantries are put.
Occasionally, no doubt, expressions are ascribed, rightly or wrongly,
to men, and even to women, in an exalted rank of life, which seem
revolting to modern taste; but, although such traits do not, as a rule,
find their way into type, distinguished persons of the present day
are capable of a good deal in this direction, and in the last century
high-born dames delivered utterances which would certainly be now
viewed as extremely improper, without concealment or a consciousness of
having said anything unconventional.

The standard of politeness has perhaps been raised, if that of morality
has not. We confine ourselves in our vices to the closet, and observe
good behaviour in the street, and even, on the whole, at the theatre.
But, to return to the more immediate subject, the coarseness and
ribaldry which distinguish and season the early jest-books principally
emanate from the lower strata of the population--from the folk, in
fact--which is no whit superior at this moment to the use and enjoyment
of a similar phraseology and a similar description of merriment. Place
the carter and the bargeman, the market-woman and the orange-wench, of
the reign in which we live, side by side with the analogous characters
when the _Hundred Merry Tales_ appeared, and see whether in three
centuries and a half refinement has made much progress! _Pares cum
paribus._

I insist on this point a little, because the moral and virtuous ladies
and gentlemen of the Victorian era are in the habit of averting their
faces from the lamentable depravity of former ages, as if it were some
once rampant monster now defunct, and because the change in our manners
is vulgarly attributed to the influence of the Court. The latter
delusion arises from the common error of mistaking cause for effect;
the open profligacy of former reigns is discarded in the same way as
that of our literature and theatre; the _modus vivendi_ of the Georges
is archæological; if such doings and sayings are any longer, they are
under the rose.

But it is a pharisaical absurdity to give out that there is no such
matter as low life upstairs nowadays. Alas! it is too rife; and, it
being so, we have surely no right to be so very hard on Whitechapel and
the New Cut. That the general tone of the British community is higher
and purer proceeds from the influential preponderance of the middle
class; and the court, and in general the aristocracy, conform to the
march of civilisation.

Queer stories must be _inter nos_. Altered circumstances have rendered
it impracticable to bring them into print or to introduce them upon
the boards. Be thankful for small mercies; but do not, my dear
contemporaries, flatter yourselves that you are, warp and woof, much
better than those who read on their first appearance the _Hundred
Merry Tales_ and the _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_, or that by
reading them you would be made much worse!

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XV.

FACETIOUS BIOGRAPHIES.


Leaving behind us these two admirable productions, we encounter an
interesting group of compilations, which differ essentially from
them in structure and treatment. They constitute a sort of family of
books, and are of a biographical cast, with an imperfect attempt at
chronological sequence. I shall enumerate some of them:--

  _The Jests of the Widow Edith._
  _The Merry Tales of Skelton._
  _The Jests of Scogin._
  _Tarlton’s Jests._
  _The Merry Conceited Jests of George Peele._
  _The Pleasant Conceits of Old Hobson._
  _Dobson’s Dry Bobs._

The original motive for associating a particular individual with
a publication was obviously the stimulus which his reputation was
expected to lend to the sale. The real tie between a facetious
miscellany and its god-parent was, in nine cases out of ten, absolutely
nominal. In the reputed adventures and pranks of the Widow Edith,
Skelton and Scogin, there is the largest share of verisimilitude; but
the printed accounts, especially in the case of Scogin, are so long
posterior to the epoch at which the heroes flourished, that there was
infinite opportunity for laying to their credit any current jokes or
tricks of a suitable complexion.

Of the three, the tracts dealing with the poet and the widow leave the
impression, on perusal, of being narratives of authentic incidents in
a far greater degree than the _Scoginiana_; and some of the anecdotes
of Skelton are superlatively funny,--for instance, that which narrates
“how the cobbler told Master Skelton it is good sleeping in a whole
skin.” But it is unfortunately too lengthy for transcription. There is
not only a stronger air of probability about the anecdotes which we
here find of the parson of Diss than in those which occur of Scogin,
but an agreeable exemption from grossness, although it has been
surmised that both came from the same pen--that of Dr. Andrew Borde, of
Pevensey.

Shakespearian readers are familiar with the passage in _Henry IV._,
Part I., Act ii., where Falstaff is discovered asleep behind the
arras, and his pockets are turned out, disclosing a tavern account, in
which the charge for sack is the principal item, and for bread only
a halfpenny is set down; whereupon Prince Hal exclaims to Poins, “O
monstrous! but one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of
sack!” The germ of this passage seems to be in the story relating “how
the Welshman did desire Skelton to aid him in his suit to the king for
a patent to sell drink”; and another point is that the song “Back and
side go bare, go bare,” etc., introduced into _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_,
embodies the same idea.

Chaucer makes his Sumner describe himself as “a man of little
sustenance,” but does not let us hear whether his predilections were
for liquids or solids.

Apart from their dubious personality, the jests of Scogin have their
clear utility and worth as a picture of archaic social life; they
furnish glimpses of obsolete manners and notions with merciless
candour, and eclipse almost the entire body of _Ana_ in unrestrained
licence of expression. But, as I have hinted, Scogin is more or less
of a lay-figure, and some of the achievements for which he enjoys the
credit are of foreign origin. At least two of them meet the eye in the
“Book which the Knight of the Tower made for the Use of His Daughters,”
printed by Caxton, and not unknown to Dr. Borde; and this, while it
may detract from their originality, is a plea on their behalf, as some
of the borrowed matter, which was thought fit reading for young ladies
by a noble French author and their parent, is certainly among the less
decent portions of a not very decent volume.

The good knight himself, however, was part of a world less verbally
or outwardly prudish than ours. He had only to dip into the written
literature of his time to find plenty of such anecdotes as he
introduced into his book, and as have become familiar to us through the
collections of _fabliaux_, where numerous examples offer themselves to
our view of the identical conditions of ancient domestic life. I shall
not attempt to decide whether the moral atmosphere of France in the
thirteenth century was better or worse than that which we breathe; but
the knight and his family were surrounded by it, and knew no other.

Of the other jest-books falling within the biographical category, the
_Jests of George Peele_ and the _Conceits of Hobson_ are palpable
_réchauffés_--warmed-up dishes of stale viands. The same is to be
predicated of _Dobson’s Dry Bobs_, which claims on the title-page to be
a kind of sequel to Scogin.

_Tarlton’s Jests_ present the aspect of a tolerably contemporary, if
not homogeneous and individual, assortment of witticisms and exploits.
They are chiefly redolent of the court and the theatre, the two scenes
of his activity and triumphs; and if all the things which they make
him say or do were not said or done by him, it is not easy to point
out the sources to which the editor of the original book went. Tarlton
was undoubtedly a man of rare powers, and his celebrity must have long
outlived him. He died in the plague-year 1588, before Shakespear came
to settle in London, yet not before the great dramatist might have seen
him and spoken to him; and for some time I have entertained a suspicion
that he may be the Yorick of _Hamlet_.

The _Jest of the Widow Edith, the lying Widow which still liveth_,
is an early Tudor book (1525), which, though not dissimilar in its
nature from Skelton and Scogin and the German _Eulenspiegel_, varies
distinctly from them all in being a history in doggerel rhyme, composed
by one of the dupes of a licentious and unprincipled adventuress, named
Edith, whose stratagems and impostures are rehearsed in this quaint
metrical record with graphic minuteness. The date of the tract--the
first quarter of the sixteenth century--its popular tenor, and its
uniqueness of type, may together do something to disarm our anger at
its literary poverty and its occasional latitude,--although, were not a
lady in the question, it is not so offensive as the low buffoonery of
Scogin, or as some of the items which found their way into the Tarlton
volume.

The relations of Skelton with his parishioners in Norfolk form a
curious chapter in the ecclesiastical annals of the reign of Henry
VIII. His eminence as a writer and celebrity as a humourist have
doubtless contributed to preserve for our edification a tolerable
salvage of his sayings and doings while he held preferment in the
Church; but it is the circumstance that he was something more than a
loose parson which has given such prominence to his irregularities,
just as there were, in the time of Shakespear, deer-poachers whose
names we have not been enabled to recollect.

The so-called _Merry Tales of Skelton_ amount, in reality, to a slight
biographical sketch strung together in sectional form. There even
appears a sort of attempt at chronological propriety, as they begin
prior to his instalment at Diss and close at a point in his life when
he was under the displeasure of Wolsey--not for his profligacy of
behaviour, but for his vituperative writings against that powerful
minister.

As a picture of the manners of the time, without a study and knowledge
of which it is obviously futile to try or presume to judge Skelton
or anybody else belonging to it, the narrative of the mistress whom
the poet kept at his living, his reprehension by the bishop, and the
scene in Diss church when (according to the jest-book) he rated his
congregation for complaining of him and openly exhibited the child,
baffles competition, when one takes into account the relations of the
pastor to his flock, the severity of ecclesiastical discipline, and the
rebuke which Skelton had suffered immediately before at the hands of
his spiritual chief. It is when we contemplate such social phenomena
that we become more and more forcibly convinced that the Reformation
was not a crusade against immorality, but a political fight between the
Church and State. In the case of Skelton himself, his licentiousness
would probably have never involved him in serious trouble had he not
chosen to attack Wolsey.

But the entire texture of this small miscellany of humour, scandal
and libertinism is cross-woven; and its serious value is, to my
apprehension, greater than its comic. For it not only sheds light on
certain points in the career of the singular man with whose name the
tales are directly associated, but on the whole surrounding atmosphere.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XVI.

ANALECTA.


It was not till the Greeks and Romans had arrived at an advanced stage
of civilisation that scope was afforded to the class of writers of
whom we are accustomed to regard Athenæus and Aulus Gellius as typical
examples; and somewhat on a similar principle the development of the
jest in the more modern acceptation is traceable back only to a certain
stage of social order, when a perception of the ridiculous or eccentric
was quickened into life by the establishment of an artificial standard
among us of politeness and opinion.

Another and distinct section of jest-books consists of what may be
treated as the pioneers of the English Ana--collections made by editors
from other books and from hearsay among their friends or in company;
and of these I shall content myself with adducing as specimens--

  1. _Wits, Fits, and Fancies_, by Anthony Copley, 1595.

  2. _Certain Conceits and Jests_, 1614.

  3. _Wit and Mirth_, by John Taylor the Water Poet, 1629.

  4. _Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimzies_, by Robert
  Chamberlain, 1639.

  5. JOE MILLER’S _Jest-Book_, 1739.

A century and ten years elapsed between the publications of Taylor and
Miller; but the earliest edition of the latter was barely more than a
pamphlet, and would not be at first sight recognised by those who are
only familiar with the more recent issues, in which the original text
has been amplified and overlaid, till the slender proportions of the
shilling book of 1739 are completely effaced.

The copious title of Taylor’s performance speaks for itself: “Wit
and Mirth, chargeably collected out of Taverns, Ordinaries, Inns,
Bowling Greens and Alleys, Alehouses, Tobacco-shops, Highways, and
Water-passages, made up and fashioned into Clinches, Bulls, Quirks,
Yerks, Quips, and Jerks.” The arrangement closely follows that of
_Tarlton’s Jests_ and the _Conceits and Jests_; but the plan is widely
dissimilar, since Taylor has comparatively little to say about himself,
and the work, such as it is, is his own; whereas Tarlton stood to the
book which carries his name merely in the relation of sponsor, and the
whole is devoted by the actual editor to him and his real or putative
extravagances.

The self-evident truth is, that Master Taylor jotted down every smart
saying or racy passage which fell in his way by road or river, or
wherever his professional and private engagements happened to take him.
He was rather indiscriminate and not very squeamish; and his budget
exhibits wares of all sorts as well as of all shades of quality and
every variety of character, new and old, original and borrowed, prose
and verse. Yet, taken as a whole, the farrago has very great general
merit; and we must be content to set what is dull and dirty, clumsy
sophistications or inferior variants, against the moderate residue of
valuable permanent matter, where we get unique touches of contemporary
persons or little insights into the thought and habits of the age. The
whole, if the author is to be believed, underwent at his ingenious
and experienced hands a sort of churning process; and, altogether, it
is a book which we lay down, as we do all others of the kind, with an
uncertain and dissatisfied sensation.

If I transcribe three samples from the _Wit and Mirth_, it must be with
the proviso that no one shall blame me if, on resorting to the work,
they do not meet with much more of equal excellence:--

  “Master Thomas Coriat (on a time) complained against me to King
  James, desiring his Majesty that he would cause some heavy punishment
  to be inflicted upon me for abusing him in writing (as he said I
  had); to whom the King replied, that when the lords of his honourable
  privy council had leisure, and nothing else to do, then they should
  hear and determine the differences betwixt Master Coriat the scholar
  and John Taylor the sculler; which answer of the King was very
  acceptable to Master Coriat.”

  “A soldier upon his march found a horse-shoe and stuck it at his
  girdle, when, passing through a wood, some of the enemy lay in
  ambush, and one of them discharged his musket; and the shot by chance
  lighted against the fellow’s horse-shoe. ‘Ha! Ha!’ quoth he, ‘I
  perceive that little armour will serve a man’s turn, if it be put on
  in the right place!’”

  “A chorister, or singing-man, at service in a cathedral church, was
  asleep when all his fellows were singing; which the Dean espying,
  sent a boy to him to waken him, and asked him why he did not sing.
  He, being suddenly awaked, prayed the boy to thank Master Dean for
  his kind remembrance, and to tell him that he was as merry as those
  that did sing.”

There is a story about Barkstead, the poet and actor, which is hardly
suitable for repetition, although it reminds us of one narrated of St.
Louis of France; and there is a second of Field the dramatist, which is
not worth quoting. The account of the drowsy chorister really refers to
Richard Woolner, who belonged in the early years of Elizabeth to the
choir at Windsor, and whose propensity for somnolence was doubtless
occasioned or aggravated by his voracious appetite. This Richard
Woolner was a pleasant fellow in his intervals of consciousness; and
in 1567 an account of him and his oddities, no longer known, appears to
have been printed. Sir John Harington mentions him in his _Brief View
of the State of the Church_.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XVII.

THE SUBJECT CONTINUED.


The taste for these _Analecta_ grew with the supply. They proved
popular and easy reading, and did not exact much reflection on the part
of the peruser or a large amount of literary skill in the compiler. No
operation is perhaps simpler than the construction of a book out of a
series of paragraphs found at intervals and strung together at random.
_Tarlton’s Jests_ seems to have led the way and set the fashion, and
the press has been busy with such _olla podrida_ ever since.

Judgment in selection is, of course, the grand postulate in this as in
every department of art, and it is precisely there that the workman
in all times has fallen short of success; so that the whole mass of
pirated matter, from first to last, is capable of yielding scarcely
more than sufficient to fill a volume of fair compass.

For instance, I discern only a single scrap in the _Certain Conceits
and Jests_, 1614:--

  “There was a certain fool that always, when the sun shone, would
  weep, and when the rain rained would laugh; and his reason was, that
  sunshine followed rain, but rain sunshine.”

So, again, in the _Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimzies_, of 1639,
where the arrangement is similarly in paragraphs, but where at the same
time the contents answer better to the title than to the Ana, there are
287 heads, and to discover half a dozen passable illustrations is a
task of difficulty. These _bijoux_, which the author, a Lancashire man,
carefully garnered up as they struck his own fancy, or fell from the
society which he kept, are after the following style:--

  “An antiquary,” says one, “loves everything (as Dutchmen do cheese)
  for being mouldy and worm-eaten.”

  “A simple fellow in gay clothes is like a cinnamon-tree; the bark is
  of more worth than the body.”

  “Another said, a woman was like a piece of old grogram, always
  fretting.”

A few more might be added, not for their wit, but for their casual
elucidation of some obsolete word or custom; but we must not deny
the writer the credit of introducing the PUN. Better have been made
since; but, after all, we are here in the days of Charles I. N^{o.} 145
inquires why few women loved to eat eggs? _Answer_: Because they cannot
endure to bear _the yoke_. A far from brilliant effort spoiled in the
wording!

  “Why are tailors like woodcocks? _A._ Because they live by their long
  bills.”

Perchance, the best in this indifferent medley is N^{o.} 177, which
depends on the different meanings of _liber_ and _libra_:--

  “A rich bookseller wished himself a scholar, and one said to him:
  ‘You are one already, being _doctus in libris_.’ ‘Nay,’ replied the
  other, ‘I am but _dives in libris_.’”

These classical essays do not suit our climate very well, yet nothing
is to be objected to them where, as in the one just cited, they are
_pure_. But I strongly dislike hybrids, by which I intend such a
retort as the Oxford Don is alleged to have made to the youths who
hissed him as he passed--_Laudatur_ AB HIS; and the quotation of a line
from the Eclogue of Virgil, where a lady’s dress is torn by a fiddle,
is barely more than a verbal conceit, though incomparably preferable
to the aggravating _all-us jelly-us_ of Brother Crug, which is a mere
phonetic abortion.

Whatever verdict may be pronounced on their successors, as they
approach our own period, it must be said of the assemblages of
_facetiæ_, made public by former generations down to the last century,
that they leave us no alternative but this conclusion--that, with
exceedingly few exceptions, considering the space of time involved,
the genuine, enjoyable, laughable, recallable jest was unknown to
antiquity, and is the offspring of modern thought and conditions.

Of the _jeux d’esprit_ and humour of the olden days the archaic cast
is not merely in the spelling or in the matter, but it is in the bone
and blood; and just as it would be idle to imagine that an Englishman
of the Tudor epoch could be converted into a modern Englishman by
arraying his person in modern clothes, so it is futile to attempt to
draw the jocular literature of passed centuries into harmony with our
own by adapting the orthography and language to the prevailing mode.

Save in a few rare cases, where the life of the subject is
indestructible, the entire body of old-fashioned wit and wisdom is as
exotic as a tropical plant within the Arctic circle.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XVIII.

“JOE MILLER’S JESTS”--HISTORY, CHARACTER, AND SUCCESS OF THE
PUBLICATION--JOHN MOTTLEY THE EDITOR.


Possibly it might be more correct to regard _Joe Miller’s Jests_ as
marking a new era in this branch of literature and department of
ingenuity than as a work possessing pretensions to rank as a model to
succeeding editors of similar collections. I am speaking of the little
shilling volume originally issued under the care of John Mottley in
1739, and not of the modern publication which bears the same name, and
has little beyond the name in common with it.

Mottley’s book appeared just when the stage and the literary world
were beginning to assume an importance and to exhibit a development
favourable to the formation of coteries and centres; and as the
conditions and spirit of contemporary life govern so completely the
facetious and satirical speech of an age or a century, the social and
political changes which accompanied the accession of the Hanoverian
dynasty introduced a new school of wit among the frequenters of the
theatres, clubs and coffee-houses. In fact, the popularity and success
of _Joe Miller’s Jests_ at the commencement mainly arose from their
association with a defunct actor and their share, such as it was,
of dramatic flavour. There had been, and was, an abundance of books
dedicated to a similar object, in the market; but this particular one
was supposed in some special and mysterious manner to depict, in the
first place, the hitherto unknown and unsuspected humorous side of
Joe’s character, and, secondly, to embody master-strokes of other great
wits of the day and brother comedians of Drury. The new Court and
Government of the Georges were to have their own fresh appointments
and effects throughout, authors and actors included; and the light
literature of the time shared the universal influence. The merriments
and drolleries of the Stuart era were discarded to make room for a
different style of production, of which Joe Miller happened to be the
first in the field, though by no means so in order of excellence.

Yet, in spite of the shortcomings of this famous volume, there remains
the important consideration, that it contained a certain enduring
element in its cast and tone, and that substantially all those books
which have poured incessantly from the press since that day follow
the same lines and general principle. The older collections are
archæological and pre-historic; the precedent _Ana_ and _Facetiæ_
are as saurians to the ordinary reader; and Miller and his humble
imitators--the Sheridans, the Footes, and the Sydney Smiths--shut out
from observation, so far as the community at large goes, the jocular
treasures and triumphs of ante-Millerian Britain.

In the last century, among Dr. Johnson and his friends, the Elizabethan
and Jacobean literature of all kinds met with limited acceptance and
lukewarm admiration; its principal utility and interest were from the
point of view of the adapter or plagiarist; and innumerable appeals
to public favour presented themselves in forms with which the reader
and the buyer had more immediate touch and sympathy. The rarest and
most precious editions of Shakespear and other writers of his epoch
were to be had for a smaller sum than the _Life of Joe Hains_, the
_Jests of Polly Peachum_, or any other fugitive performance damp from
the printers. Malone tells us that Dr. Johnson could not admire the
Duke of Buckingham’s _Rehearsal_, and thought that “it had not wit
enough to keep it sweet, nor sufficient vitality to preserve it from
putrefaction”--a truly Johnsonian pleonasm, but also a key to the
sentiment of the generation to which Johnson belonged, and of which he
was decidedly a more than average representative. But here we have
a case where the writer could hardly have been viewed as obsolete or
illegible in the same manner and sense as the older playwrights; but
Johnson nevertheless--and thousands would have concurred with him--did
not relish the humour of a piece produced only some twenty years before
he was born. The context and atmosphere were wanting; and if such was
the feeling about the _Rehearsal_--of which the merit has recommended
it, by-the-bye, to a recent editor--what prospect of survival could
exist for the swarm of popular cates with which the English press had
teemed from the reign of Henry VIII. to the Revolution?

Malone preserves an anecdote which helps to illustrate the difference
between the old and modern schools tolerably well:

  “Mr. Lock, of Norbury Park, well known for his collection of
  pictures, statues, etc., was a natural son. On his marriage with the
  daughter of Lady Schaub, who had been very gallant, Horace Walpole
  said very happily, ‘Then everybody’s daughter is married to nobody’s
  son.’”

The _jeu d’esprit_ was reserved for Walpole, though the circumstance
on which it was founded had happened often enough before; but in point
of fact it was a saying strictly characteristic of the period, and in
the author of it we recognise a signally representative type of the
latter-day, as contrasted with the old-world, wit.

Walpole, indeed, belonged to the modern school of humourists, which may
be said to date back to the era of the Restoration, but which did not,
so to speak, attain adult growth till the fuller development of the
club and the coffee-house as aids to the theatre in the establishment
of new jocular canons and doctrines.

The book called _Joe Miller’s Jests_ was, both in its inception and its
progress, an emanation from the altered state of feeling in regard to
such matters. The early editions were, in a literary aspect, wretched
enough, and destitute alike of judgment and taste on the part of the
compiler. But if the sponsorship of Miller was originally of a nominal
and shadowy character, it must be said that, as the volume received
from time to time additions, which doubled and trebled its bulk, from
an endless variety of fresh sources, the fatherhood of the worthy actor
became by degrees absolutely fictitious--a mere _nom de plume_; and
it is not too much to allow that, with all its weaknesses, the work
in its augmented shape, as the ordinary reader is accustomed to come
across it, is a creditable sample of its kind, and will probably yield
a better insight into the particular field of inquiry than any other
single publication in our language.

Of course, the first impression of 1739 and the current text are so
distinct from each other as to have practically little in common
between them beyond the name and the tradition. It started by being
a strange tissue of deceptive pretences; but it hit the nail on the
head; the notion tickled the public fancy; and the title is almost
part of the British constitution. The ancient lines have long been
obliterated; the pamphlet of seventy pages has swollen into a volume
of five hundred; and the editor and publisher are recollected only by
the curious; while in all literary centres and among nearly all classes
of readers the man whose name was affixed to the venture without his
consent or knowledge, and whose personal capabilities in the joking way
were below zero, remains a household word from century to century, like
the superscription over a venerable house of business of partners who
have been dead and buried these hundred years, and survive above the
door and on the bill-heads from considerations of expediency.

John Mottley, who strang together the _editio princeps_ of Joe
Miller in 1739 for a bookseller, cannot be commended for the skill
and care with which he executed his task. It is a singular jumble
of anecdotes of all complexions about persons in various walks of
life. The seventy-two pages were reckoned, no doubt, dog-cheap at a
shilling, under all the imposing circumstances and seeing the choice
nature of the miscellany, and the highly distinguished personages to
whose _memorabilia_ it strictly limited its cognisance--_videlicet_
and to wit, King Charles II., Mr. Gun Jones, Sir Richard Steele, the
Duchess of Portsmouth, a country clergyman, Ben Jonson, Mrs. C----m,
Sir William Davenant, two free-thinking Authors, a very modest young
gentleman of the County of Tipperary, Tom Barrett, Lord R., Henry IV.
of France, the Emperor Tiberius, and others. A richer bill of fare
was barely possible, and it is difficult to understand why Mottley
should not have been proud to associate himself with such company and
with such a feast of delights, instead of employing the pseudonymy of
Jenkins. This playful piece of _supercherie_, however, was outdone by
the courageous declaration that the contents were mostly “transcribed
from the mouth” of Joe himself, and the remainder collected in his
society; for, as a serious matter of truth, the sole item in the thin
octavo, which the collection makes, really attributable to the then
recently deceased comedian, is of a nature calculated to inspire us
with satisfaction that the title-page is less veracious than it ought
to have been, and almost as much a truant in an opposite direction as
was perhaps practicable. The material gathered by Mottley in the first
instance was indifferent enough surely; but the solitary specimen which
he actually furnishes of the facetious vein of his hero must induce
everybody to feel thankful that he stopped short there:--

  “Joe Miller sitting one day in the window of the Sun Tavern, in Clare
  Street, a fishwoman and her maid passing by, the woman said, ‘Buy my
  soles, buy my maids!’ ‘Ah, you wicked old creature!’ said honest Joe.
  ‘What! Are you not content to sell your own soul, but you would sell
  your maid’s too?’”

The benevolent forbearance of Mottley was advantageous to the sale of
the book confided to his editorship; and the best jest of all was the
title and conception. To put forward as the author of all good things
a poor fellow who could not make a joke, or even see it when it was
made by a friend, was an idea as happy as if some speculative genius
were to announce a jest-book by Mr. Spurgeon or the philanthropic Earl
of Shaftesbury. But the most popular of preachers or philanthropists
would not have answered the purpose so well at the moment as a defunct
theatrical performer, equally impervious to humour, but to the
play-going public infinitely more familiar, not as a wit, nor even as
the cause of it in others, but on purely negative grounds. A notable
piece of triumphant charlatanry, as this _Joe Miller_ in the first
beginning was, has happened, from a singular caprice of fortune, to
overshoot the original design and proportions, to change its fugitive
and perishable nature, and to accommodate itself from time to time to
enlarged and different requirements.

The circumstance must be treated as accidental; for, looking at the
question on every side, the book has had from the commencement a host
of competitors, possessing at least equal merit, at least equally
inviting forefronts, and even the superstitious prestige of the
green-room. But these, one and all, unaccountably disappeared from the
public view; and Miller proved the only phœnix, the only sterling
coin, the only lasting trademark.

Spiller’s Jests, Penkethman’s, Quin’s, nay, Garrick’s, were things of
a season, the _nugæ canoræ_ of their day. Joe witnessed their coming
and going; and he is with us yet! He will endure as long as the earth’s
crust--as long as Shakespear, and longer, perchance, than Milton.

One of the consequences of this huge and matchless renown is that, in
the amplified _Vade Mecum for Wits_ of Joe the Great, a considerable
assortment of comic incidents is enrolled under that talismanic name an
age or twain after the date, when all that was soluble of the Miller of
Millers had been lifted across from the purlieus of Clare Market to the
hospitable shelter of St. Clement’s opposite.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XIX.

  JEST-BOOKS CONSIDERED AS HISTORICAL AND LITERARY MATERIAL--THE
    TWOFOLD POINT ILLUSTRATED--LOCALISATION OF STORIES.


Having now dealt at reasonable length with those points of view which
have reference to the sophistication and affiliation of Jests, let us
proceed to regard this highly fruitful topic from one or two other
aspects; and firstly I propose to invite attention to the valuable
material which the writer on old English manners and institutions
may find here ready to his hand. There is barely a custom or an
idea prevalent among our forefathers which the vast body of printed
_Ana_, and especially the _Shakespear Jest-Books_, 1864, do not
afford the means of illustrating and facilities for more clearly
comprehending. The stories embraced within the entire range of jocular
literature are so multifarious in their origin and drift, while they
so largely partake of a popular character, that they richly reimburse
our examination of them, even when, as so frequently happens, their
literary and artistic claims are slender to excess.

In the _Hundred Merry Tales_, 1526, there is the story of the lad who
took his shoes to be mended, whence comes the information to us that
the charge for this kind of work was at that period threepence. Then,
in another item of the series, which in its totality is decidedly
unconventional, we perceive how young fellows just emerging from
boyhood wore the hair on the upper lip as well as the beard. The story
_Of the Courtier and the Carter_ aptly serves to throw light on a point
which does not appear to be sufficiently understood--the application
of the terms _cart_ and _carter_ to ordinary vehicles for the
conveyance of travellers of all degrees,--so much so that the rough,
old-fashioned lawyer, desirous of an audience with Queen Elizabeth,
while she was on a journey, cried out to her coachman, “Stop thy cart,
good fellow, stop thy cart!” and the ancient French hunting chariots
were merely an evolution from the primitive agricultural model.

It is difficult to resist the temptation to smile at the whimsical
suggestion of the curate “who preached the articles of the Creed,” that
such as were not satisfied about them from his communication had better
go to Coventry and see them on the stage at the Corpus Christi play.
What a vivid glimpse rises before us of the feeling and costume of
three or four centuries ago, when we read the account given in another
of the _Tales_, “of the man that desired to be set on the pillory,” in
order that, while he was there, his confederates in the crowd might
pick the honest folks’ pockets and empty the butchers’ aprons, as they
gaped at the spectacle!

The expedients for swindling which formerly throve, enter not a
little into these miscellanies; and the drollery of the incidents of
a fraud naturally outlive the temporary elements. The narrative of
a sharper, who is, by the way, described as “a merry man,” and who
distributed bills announcing the performance of a play, belongs to the
earlier years of Elizabeth; but it was a trick repeated, doubtless,
more than once. The particular story is laid somewhere about 1567,
and it establishes several curious details respecting the theatrical
exhibitions of that date. The scene was Northumberland Place, in the
city of London, and the proceedings were to commence at two in the
afternoon. Two men were stationed at the gate with a box to take the
money--a penny or a halfpenny at least--and as soon as the fellow
conceived that there was no likelihood of collecting more, he sent the
two box-keepers in to “keep the room,” mounted a horse which waited for
him at an adjoining inn, and rode off to Barnet.

This episode is additionally curious and interesting, because it
anticipates by almost forty years a precisely similar adventure placed
on record by Chamberlain the letter-writer as having occurred within
his knowledge in 1602. In both cases the actors were advertised to be
_amateurs_, which, as the piece was to be presented on a scaffold in
the market-place, was a novel attraction and a happy stroke.

The epigram of Sir Thomas More on one who took the fly out of a glass
of water, and replaced it when he had done drinking, has been made the
basis for a jest; but was itself founded on the common superstition
that such an act was lucky.

The current pronunciation of an early West of England name underlies
the pleasantry that Master You having wedded Mistress You, he was ever
afterwards known as Master W. The old Devonshire Yeos were probably
called _Yous_ by their provincial neighbours.

There is an abundance of historical sayings with a facetious vein
or tag; and some of them are highly interesting little traits and
sidelights. During the Wars of the Roses, an unfortunate man met in
succession with two parties, of whom one was for Edward IV. and the
other for Henry VI. To the inquiry of the first he replied that he was
Henry’s man, wherefore they beat him; and to the second that he was
Edward’s, which brought him the same luck. So the next time, to be
quite safe, he declared himself to be the Devil’s man; and when they
said, “Then the Devil go with thee!” “Amen!” quoth he: “he is the best
master I’ve served to-day.”

There are two survivals about a priest just at the epoch of the
Reformation; they are evidently little touches from life. This learned
clerk is made to preach a sermon on Charity, and in it to avouch that
no man can get to heaven without charity, except only the King’s Grace,
God save him! Then, when the royal visitors came down to his parts to
make their report, he was interrogated as to what he did and how he
passed his time. “I occupy myself in reading the New Testament,” says
he. “That is very well,” say the Commissioners; “but prythee, Sir, who
made the New Testament?” “That did King Henry the Eighth,” replies the
priest, “Lord have mercy on his soul!”

There is a strong air of verisimilitude in the salutation of Richard
III., as he was collecting his forces in Thicket’s field, by the
Northern man: “Diccon, Diccon, by the mis, I’se blith that thaust
king”; and there are in the same tract (_Merry Tales and Quick
Answers_) a couple of characteristic scraps, the only remaining
footprints, as it were, of the Canon of Hereford, whose deficiency in
intelligence and scholarship they celebrate.

Gossip and satire concerning the priesthood seem, from a very remote
period, to have been received with relish and tolerance; but tales
exposing the rapacity, ignorance and licentiousness of the cloth were
circulated from political motives with even greater eagerness and
immunity just prior to that grand climax which abrogated the papal
supremacy in England for ever.

It is necessary, and not difficult, to distinguish between narrated
incidents, which veritably belong to a specific vicinity, and such
fictitious variants as are merely localised for the nonce. Of the
latter the jest-books, which contributed so largely to the activity
of the press from the accession of the Stuarts to their restoration,
are rich in examples, as I have already pointed out. _Pasquil’s Jests_
is one of the worst offenders in this way. “How a merchant lost his
purse between Waltham and London” is nothing more than a new-birth
of the account in _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_, where Ware is the
place specified; and “How mad Coomes of Stapforth, when his wife was
drowned, sought her against the stream,” reproduces No. 55 of the
same older miscellany, which is itself copied and varied from a Latin
_fabliau_. Manchester, Hertfordshire, Kingston, Lincolnshire, and
other neighbourhoods are fixed as the theatres of adventures in these
books, without the slightest eye to topographical fitness. The anterior
publications had perhaps set the fashion to some extent, and notably
so the Gothamite Tales; but the resuscitation of used matter with some
superficial investiture of novelty became a sort of necessity, when
the popular demand for these wares increased out of proportion to the
supply.

In certain of the collections, on the contrary, and most especially
and largely in the two Tudor ones so often quoted, we meet with little
dramatic scenes, laid here or there, with a fair accompaniment of
probability in support of the attribution. I shall take the course of
referring those who may care to follow this part of the argument to the
_Hundred Merry Tales_,--

  No. 29. Of the Welshman, who said that he could get but a little mail.

  No. 33. Of the priest, who said Our Lady was not so curious a woman.

  No. 40. Of Master Skelton, who brought the Bishop of Norwich two
  pheasants.

  No. 71. Of the priest that would say two gospels for a groat.

  No. 87. Of Master Whittington’s dream.

And to _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_,--

  No. 54. Of Master Vavasor and Turpin his man.

  No. 94. Of the Cheshire man called Evelyn.

  No. 132. Of him that sold two loads of hay.

  No. 134. How the image of the Devil was lost and sought.

I think that all the articles which I have just indicated manifest a
realism of portraiture and complexion which should commend and endear
them to the studiers and lovers of the old English life; in the edition
of the _Hundred Merry Tales_ which the Royal Library at Göttingen owns,
and which I have lately reprinted in facsimile, there is a further item
falling within the same category--the highly amusing and doubtless
veracious tale of the Maltman of Colebrook, which may be appropriately
bracketed with the one “of him that sold two loads of hay.”

Both are, in fact, relations of actual events thrown into a readable
shape with a modicum of colouring.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




CHAPTER XX.

  THE SO-CALLED “TALES OF SKELTON”--SPECIMENS OF THEM--SIR THOMAS
    MORE AND THE LUNATIC--THE FOOLISH DUKE OF NEWCASTLE--PENNANT THE
    ANTIQUARY--THE “GOTHAMITE TALES”--STORIES CONNECTED WITH WALES AND
    SCOTLAND.


Besides these two repertories, the _Merry Tales of Skelton_ contain a
racy and diverting account of a trick played by the poet on a Kendal
man, with whom he was riding from Oxford to London. They baited at
Uxbridge, and while his companion was out of the room, Skelton took his
cap, which he had left behind on the table, inserted some butter inside
the lining, and put it back in its place. When the owner returned, he
placed it on his head, of which the warmth soon had the anticipated
effect. The butter ran down the fellow’s face and neck, and Skelton
assured him that he had the sweating sickness. The Kendal man was in
great terror of his life, and Skelton advised him to go to bed at once.
A little hot water applied to the cap and its proprietor set matters
right; the joke was explained and forgiven, and the two rode on to town
the next morning. Such practical hoaxes were doubtless frequent enough;
and the laureated parson of Diss was never, one is apt to apprehend, so
thoroughly at home as when he had something of the kind in hand.

The modern works offer in a similar manner, and perhaps, on the whole,
to a greater extent, authentic examples of local occurrences. There is
the celebrated adventure of Sir Thomas More with the lunatic on the
flat roof of his house at Chelsea, which runs somewhat parallel to one
which the Duke of Wellington had with a crazy fellow at Apsley House:--

  “When Sir Thomas More was one day on the flat-leaded roof of his
  house at Chelsea, a lunatic succeeded somehow in getting to him, and
  tried to throw him down, crying, ‘Leap, Tom, leap!’ The Chancellor
  was in his dressing-gown, and, besides, was too old a man to have
  any chance against the madman. Sir Thomas had a little dog with him.
  ‘Let’s throw him down first,’ said he, ‘and see what good fun that
  will be’; so the fellow took up the animal, and threw him down.
  ‘Now,’ said More, ‘run and fetch him back, and let us try again, for
  I think it is good sport.’ The madman went, and as soon as he had
  disappeared, More rose and secured the door.”

As representatives of the same class, belonging to different periods,
the subjoined must serve:--

  “A gentleman, who possessed a small estate in Gloucestershire, was
  allured to town by the promises of the Duke of Newcastle, who, for
  many months, kept him in constant attendance, until, the poor man’s
  patience being quite exhausted, he one morning called upon his
  patron, and told him that he had at length got a place. The Duke very
  cordially shook him by the hand, and congratulated him on his good
  fortune, telling him that in a few days a good thing would have been
  in his gift; ‘but pray, sir,’ added he, ‘where is your place?’ ‘In
  the Gloucester coach,’ replied he: ‘I secured it last night.’”

  “Pennant, the antiquary, had an unaccountable antipathy to wigs.
  Dining at Chester with an officer who wore this covering for the
  head, when they had drunk pretty freely, after many wistful looks,
  Pennant started up, seized the caxon, and threw it into the fire.
  The wig was in a moment in flames, and so was the officer, who
  immediately drew his sword. Downstairs flies Pennant, and the officer
  after him, through all the streets of Chester; but the former escaped
  through superior local knowledge.”

  “A quack-doctor, haranguing the populace at Hammersmith, said, ‘To
  this village I owe my birth and education; I dearly love it and
  its inhabitants, and will cheerfully give a present of a crown to
  every one who will accept it.’ The audience received this notice
  with infinite satisfaction. ‘Here, ladies and gentlemen,’ added he,
  putting his hand into a bag, and taking out a parcel of packets,
  ‘these inestimable medicines I usually sell for five and sixpence
  each, but in favour, of this, my native village, I will take sixpence
  apiece.’”

Where the profusion of illustrative matter is inexhaustible, a survey
of a subject is bound to limit itself to suggestion and sample. But
the remarks and indications which have been afforded, must testify at
any rate to the residence in these vast stores, on which I have been
drawing, of a utility and dignity in numerous cases beyond their value
as mere temporary vehicles for distraction and mirth, and to their
claim to a subsidiary place among historical and social monuments.

The localisation of interest in an adventure or incident does not seem
at first to have struck those who laboured for the public entertainment
as a commercial expedient deserving of study and trial. But as the
volume of jocular and anecdotal literature swelled, and the competition
for favour and novelty grew keener in proportion, the resort to new
devices for imparting a relish and edge to old properties comprised
the association of jests which had weathered numberless seasons,
with some fresh person or neighbourhood. Hence arises the multitude
of collections and headings identifying books of the present class
or portions of their contents with particular places and particular
individuals, such as the _Cobbler of Canterbury_, the _Footpost of
Dover_, and the _Gravesend Tilt-Boat_, or, in the case of personality,
the numerous entries in _Pasquil’s Jests_ of stories of Merry Andrew
of Manchester, Coomes of Stapforth, and so on, all of which are
resuscitations of stale and bygone material.

The work which led the way and set the mode in this direction was
perhaps _The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham_, by Andrew Borde.
It was a dexterous and attractive method of substituting for the vague
generalisations of anterior compilers “a local habitation and a name.”
It fixed the geography of the event, and established its authenticity
beyond dispute; for, as the phrase is in the narratives of early
murders and other phenomena, any gentleman, who doubted the veracity of
the writer, might go and inquire for himself on the spot.

The idea of lending a local colouring and flavour to anecdotes
originated, however, probably among the early Italian collectors
of _burle_ and _facetie_, of which some are transferred to our own
miscellanies; and the practice dates back to a period when the literary
life was bounded by the walls of capitals, or did not at most overstep
their outskirts.

The stories, which present themselves in this class of book about the
inhabitants of Scotland and Wales, generally bear on the pilfering
propensities occasioned by poverty, facilitated by geographical
position, and justified by the sense of wrong. Their habits of
parsimony were acquired by the Scots during centuries of miserable
and oppressive misgovernment, and survived the stern necessity out of
which they arose. The Welsh borderer, if one judges from the tales
current about him in the old _facetiæ_, and from what history itself
reveals, combined with an addiction to “lifting” and drunkenness a
certain pusillanimity of spirit, which may be less injurious to the
community, but is more to be contemned in the individual. He was too
often, besides being a thief and a sot, a sneaking rascal. The nursery
rhyme about Taffy is a piece of veracious tradition, an accurate reflex
of the state of society in the lower grades in the Principality down to
the last century, or even until Wales was brought within the operation
of more stringent laws and a more efficient police. The humorous side
of the numberless legendary anecdotes about the Cambro-Britons has
been rendered abundantly visible by the gatherers of _Ana_; but when
we regard this material in the aggregate, and explore a little beneath
the surface, we arrive at the interesting discovery that in this, as in
every other group of similar relics, there is a good deal deserving of
careful study and collation, and that the whole body of such literature
ought henceforth to be, much more than it has, I think, hitherto been,
treated as a branch of the national Folk-lore.

The merriments at the expense of Taffy, if they do not turn on his
dishonesty, are pretty sure to deal with his passion for liquor and
toasted cheese. Congruity and fitness are seldom respected in this
line of literary work; and in one of the Hundred Merry Tales, St.
Peter, upon the representation of God that the Welshmen in heaven,
with their noisy ways, were a nuisance to all the rest, engages to
get rid of them. He goes to the entrance-gates and shouts _Cause
bobe!_ and forthwith every Cambro-Briton rushes out to see where his
favourite delicacy is to be had. The sly apostle, the moment they are
all outside, closes the door, and the Christian Elysium is its old self
again.

This whimsical piece of invention may be bracketed with a second
narrated in the so-called _Tales of Skelton_, in which the other
gastronomic failing of the Principality is amiably depicted; although
the two stories are of different types, the one being a pleasant
extravagance, while the other, which I now give, may have been an
actual incident.

It professes to be an account “how the Welshman did desire Skelton to
aid him in his suit to the king for a patent to sell drink.”

  “Skelton, when he was in London, went to the King’s Court, where
  there did come to him a Welshman, saying, ‘Sir, it is so, that many
  do come up out of my country to the King’s Court, and some get of
  the King by patent a castle, and some a park, and some a forest, and
  some one fee and some another, and they live like honest men; and I
  should live as honestly as the best, if I might have a patent for
  selling good drink. Wherefore I pray you write a petition for me to
  give into the King’s hands.’ ‘Very good,’ said Skelton. ‘Sit down,’
  said the Welshman, ‘and write, then.’ ‘What shall I write?’ asked
  Skelton. The Welshman said, ‘Write _Drink_. Now write _More drink_.’
  ‘What now?’ said Skelton. ‘Write now _A great deal of drink_; and put
  to all this drink _A little crumb of bread, and a great deal of drink
  to it_, and read out what you have written.’ ‘_Drink, more drink, and
  a great deal of drink, and a little crumb of bread, and a great deal
  of drink to it._’ Then quoth the Welshman, ‘put out _the little crumb
  of bread_, and set down _all drink and no bread_; and if I might have
  this petition signed by the King, I care for no more, as long as I
  live.’ ‘Well, then,’ said Skelton, ‘when you have got yours passed,
  I will try to get another for bread, that you with your drink, and I
  with my bread, may seek our living together with bag and staff.’”

Whether Andrew Borde, the pleasant Sussex Doctor of Physic, really
wrote the little book of stories about Skelton, whom he might very well
have personally known, must be numbered among the uncertainties; but
Borde’s estimate of Taffy is cognate to that of Skelton himself, as
delivered to us in the book and in the _Hundred Merry Tales_. For in
his _Introduction of Knowledge_, 1542, the Doctor puts into the mouth
of his Cambro-Briton these lines:--

  “I am a Welshman, and do dwell in Wales;
  I have loved to search budgets, and look in mails,”

which seems to portray the predatory borderer and the thief by breeding
and instinct.

It is perhaps, at the same time, a matter for speculation whether these
traits of Welsh character were not more current after the accession of
the Tudors. Henry the Seventh, as his _Privy Purse Expenses_ establish,
was very lavish in his presents to his countrymen; and the royal
partiality tended very possibly to render them unpopular in England,
and to bring their foibles and frailties into print. The very tale
above given reads like a burlesque on the importunity of Taffy for
privileges and monopolies at Henry’s hands, and at the same time jeers
pretty broadly at his propensity for intemperance.

There is a story of a Scottish minister who went South, and was invited
to stay to dinner at an acquaintance’s. After they had dined, the
whiskey was brought in; the minister took to it kindly, and accepted a
proposal to remain till the morning. As the spare bed had to be aired,
and there was not time to prepare the warming-pan, the lady of the
house told Jenny the maidservant to undress, and get into the bed to
warm the sheets for their guest; but Jenny unluckily (or otherwise)
fell asleep, and when the visitor went up, he found her still in
possession. “Well,” said he to himself, “the dinner was good; the
whiskey was capital; but--this is hospitality indeed!”

We will not pursue the narration further. It is obviously a parody
on the conventional order of things, having by possibility some
indebtedness to the simple manners of a bygone time and less fastidious
sleeping arrangements. The improvised warming-pan might have suggested
itself to the guidwife; but we cherish a suspicion that the _ex
post facto_ improver is answerable for the pleasantry as it stands.
In jocular history everybody is at angles to real life; people do
precisely what they ought not to do, say what they ought not to say,
are found where they ought not to be found. That is the soul of the
matter; and therein lies the cunning of the wire-puller. He is for
general purposes what Grobianus is for Cato and Mrs. Grundy. He seldom
invents; he has a preference for ready-made material which he can
employ as a groundwork or starting-point; for a familiar name goes a
long way. The artist has to be wary how he deals with his puppet or
lay-figure; he treads upon eggs a little; much depends on the turn
given; the anecdote which he tells need not be true, God knows; it may
be naughty within bounds; but it must be amusing. That is peremptory.

The _Bull_, in its jocular acceptation, has been commonly viewed as a
genuine Irish product; but may it not be, on the contrary, of Italian
and ecclesiastical descent? The papal brief, in the first place,
borrowed its name from the leaden seal which was attached to it; the
odium under which Popery and its supporters fell in the time of
Elizabeth next led to the passage of the _bull_ into our vocabulary
as a term of ridicule or contempt; and, finally, when the strong
political feeling had subsided, the expression stood for any piece of
harmless extravagance or hyperbolical bravado. These side-growths of
meaning are curious and instructive enough, and present many strange
and unsuspected survivals. To go no farther than the word before us,
the modern Italian attaches to his letter a _bolla_ without reflecting
on its actual and archaic significance, just as he perpetuates bygone
methods of locomotion by continuing to call the railway carriage a
_poste_.

Perhaps the characterisation of an imperial German decree of 1356 as
“_a golden bull_” is not more alien to the original sense and function
of the word than its pressure into service by the Italian of our day to
signify a postage-stamp.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]




INDEX.


  Adroyns, John, 94.

  Æsop, 30.

  Affiliation of Stories, 111.

  Alanus ab Insulis, 43.

  Ana or Analecta, 177 _et seqq._

  Anecdote, Serious, 32.

  Aristippus, 43.

  Aristophanes, 64.

  Armstrong, Archibald, 108.

  Artistic origin of the Jest, 13-14.

  Athenæus, 33, 34, 37-43.

  Atmosphere and costume, 25.

  Aulus Gellius, 33, 46-50.


  Bagot, Sir W., 101.

  Balguy, Dr., 67.

  Bardolph, 124.

  Barkstead, William, 181.

  Bartholomew’s (St.) Hospital, 1.

  Boccaccio, Gio., 119.

  Borde, Andrew, 19, 170.

  _Bravo of Venice, The_, by Monk Lewis, 88, 127-8.

  Brighton, 103.

  Bull, the Jocular, 222.

  Burbage, Richard, 115.

  Burke, E., 101.

  Burns, R., 67.

  Burton, Robert, 118.

  Byron, H. J., 10.

  Byron, Lord, 124.


  Chamberlain, John, 204.

  Chamberlain, Robert, 178, 184.

  Charles II., 2, 79.

  Chaucer, 7, 119.

  Chesterfield, Lord, 81-2, 95.

  Church, the Early, and the Jesters, 20-1.

  Cibber, Colley, 97.

  Cicero, 33.

  Colnbrook, Maltman of, 153.

  Coleridge, S. T., 124.

  _Conceits and Jests, Certain_, 178, 184.

  Continental influence, 142-5.

  _Convivial Discourses, The_, 44.

  Copley, Anthony, 178.

  Crichton, James, the “Admirable,” 43.


  _Deipnosophistæ_, 36-7, 43-4.

  Devil Tavern, The, 32, 98.

  Diogenes and Alexander, Story of, 86.

  Diogenes Laertius, 33, 50-6.


  Edith, The Widow, 168, 173.

  Edward IV., 19, 205.

  Egyptian artists, 16.

  Elginbrod, Martin, 122-3.

  Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature, Neglect of, in the Last Century,
    191-3.

  Engraving, Influence of the, 15.

  Epigram, The, 67-8.

  Erasmus, 118.

  _Eulenspiegel_, 173.


  Fabliaux, 30.

  Farmer, Dr., 111.

  Foote, S., 10.

  Formulation of Jests, 69.

  _Four Elements_, Interlude of, 156-8.

  Franklin, Benjamin, 109.


  Garrick, David, 116.

  Gaulardisms, 94.

  _Gesta Romanorum_, 30.

  Gillray and Rowlandson, 15.

  Godolphin, Sydney, 43.

  Goldsmith, O., 43, 93.

  Gothamite Tales, The, 215.

  Goussaut, M., 94-5.

  Greek Anecdotes, 37-43.

  ---- Anthology, The, 45, 57-65.

  ---- Epigrams, 59-64.

  ---- Parodies, 42.

  Greene, Robert, 97.

  Grimaldi, Joseph, 12, 35.

  Grisette, Parisian, 34.

  Grotesque and caricature, 6, 14.

  _Guid and Godly Ballats, The_, 131.


  Harington, Sir John, 118, 182.

  Harvey, Gabriel, 159.

  Hawkins, Sir John, 116.

  Henry VII., 2, 220.

  Henry VIII., 21.

  Henry IV. of France, 86-8.

  Herodotus, 63.

  Herring, Archbishop, 93.

  Hetairai, the Greek, 34, 38, 40.

  Heywood, John, 112, 158-60, 162.

  _High Life Below Stairs_, 97.

  Hobart, Parson, 126.

  Hobson, Old, 168, 172.

  Homer, 33.

  Hood, Thomas, 10.

  Hook, Theodore, 11.

  _Hundred Merry Tales_, 7, 98, 111, 113, 153-61, 167, 201, 208.


  Jack of Dover, 141, 149.

  Jack the Giant-Killer, 136.

  Jerrold, Douglas, 11, 73.

  Joe Miller, 6, 7, 98, 178, 188 _et seqq._

  Johnson, Dr., 116.

  Jonson, Benjamin, 98, 105, 107.


  _Knight of the Burning Pestle, The_, 107.

  _Knight of the Tour Landry_, 171.


  Lamb, Charles, 73, 79, 114, 124.

  Liston, 35.

  Literary Club, The, 115-16.

  Literature and the Drama, 22.

  Lock, Mr., of Norbury, 192.

  London Tavern, The, 82-3.

  Lucian, 33, 35, 62.


  Mackintosh, Sir James, 53.

  Macrobius, _Saturnalia_ of, 44.

  _Malaprop, Mrs._, 95-6.

  Malone, E., 24, 80-81, 101, 115-16, 192.

  _Maloniana_, 20, 101.

  “Martin said to his man,” a ballad, 131.

  Matthews, Charles, 10.

  May, Thomas, 98.

  _Mensa Philosophica_, 44.

  Mermaid, The, 32.

  _Merry Tales and Quick Answers_, 33-4, 105, 117, 119, 123, 162-7.

  Mitre, The, 32.

  More, Sir Thomas, 118, 154-67.

  Mother Bunch, 149.

  Mottley, John, 188-99.

  Myrtilus, 43.


  _New Wife of Beath_, 75-7.

  Newcastle, Duke of, 212.

  Nithardus, 1.


  Oriental influence, 16, 121-4.


  Parallelisms, 105-7, 112-14.

  Parodies, Greek, 42.

  Parr, Dr., 53.

  Partington, Mrs., 90-91.

  Pasquil’s Jests, 147.

  Pausanius Laccus, 37.

  Peele, George, 168.

  Pennant, Thomas, 212-13.

  Philip of Macedon, 36.

  Phryne, 36, 40.

  Piozzi, Mrs., 116.

  Plato, 64.

  _Plutarch’s Lives_, 32-3.

  Pool Valley, Brighton, 105.


  Quin, 10.


  Rahere, 1.

  Raleigh, Sir Walter, 116.

  Rameses dynasty, 16.

  Randolph, Thomas, 98-9.

  Rastells, The, 154, 158, 162.

  Raumer, F. von, 96.

  Ravenscroft’s _Deuteromelia_, 130-31.

  _Reynard the Fox_, 30.

  Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 116.

  Richard III. and the Northern man, 206.

  Richardson, Jonathan, 24, 81.

  Roses, Wars of the, 204-5.


  Sackful of News, The, 147.

  _Schoolmaster, The, or Teacher of Table Philosophy_, 44.

  Schools of humour, old and modern, 193.

  _Scogin, Jests of_, 19-21, 109, 168.

  Scottish minister, Story of a, 220-21.

  Scottish stories, 90, 215.

  Shakespear, 7, 115, 124, 146.

  ---- Jest-Books, 152-67.

  Sheridan, R. B., 110, 113.

  Shoes, mending of, 201.

  Sixty, The Athenian Club of the, 36, 65-6.

  Skelton, John, 159, 168, 174-6, 210, 218.

  Smith, Sydney, 9.

  Spenser, 7, 159.

  Strawberry, 140.


  Tadema, Alma, R.A., 97.

  Talfourd, Frank, 10.

  Tarlton, Richard, 35, 152, 168, 172, 179, 183.

  Tavern-life, 32.

  Taylor the Water Poet, 153, 178-82.

  Testament, New, Anecdote of the, 205.

  Thales, 52-3.

  Tooke, John Horne, 82-3.

  Turanian art, 16.

  Typography, 15, 17.


  United States, 28.


  Wales and the Welsh, characteristics of, 217-19.

  Walpole, Horace, 125, 193.

  Walworth, 1.

  Warton, Joseph, 67.

  Wellington, Duke of, 211.

  Whittington, Sir Richard, 1.

  Wooden Legs, The Man with, 78.

  Woolner, Richard, 181.

  Wright Thomas, 5.


  Yeo, an ancient Devonshire family, 204.

  Yorick, 173.




_THE BOOK-LOVER’S LIBRARY._


On Antique paper, cloth, 4_s._ 6_d._; hand-made paper, Roxburgh, 7_s._
6_d._ net; large paper, 21_s._ net.


  _Newspaper Reporting in Olden Time and To-day._ By JOHN PENDLETON,
    Author of “A History of Derbyshire,” etc.

      SECOND EDITION. Price 4_s._ 6_d._, and 7_s._ 6_d._

  _How to Catalogue a Library._ By HENRY B. WHEATLEY, F.S.A., Author of
    “How to Form a Library.”

      SECOND EDITION. Price 4_s._ 6_d._

  _The Enemies of Books._ By the late WILLIAM BLADES, Author of “The
    Biography and Typography of Wm. Caxton.”

  _Foreign Visitors in England, and What They Thought of us._ By EDWARD
    SMITH.

  _The Book of Noodles_; Stories of Simpletons; or, Fools and their
    Follies. By W. A. CLOUSTON.

  _The Story of Some Famous Books._ By FREDERICK SAUNDERS.

  _Gleanings in Old Garden Literature._ By W. C. HAZLITT.

  _The Dedication of Books._ To Patron and Friend. By HENRY B.
    WHEATLEY, F.S.A.

  _Modern Methods of Illustrating Books._

  _The Literature of Local Institutions._ By G. L. GOMME, F.S.A.

  _Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine._ By W. C. HAZLITT.

  _How to Form a Library._ By HENRY B. WHEATLEY, F.S.A.

      In demy 8vo, tastefully printed and bound, price 6_s._ net (450
        copies).

  _The Earlier Writings of William Makepeace Thackeray._ By CHAS. P.
    JOHNSON, Author of “Hints to Collectors of Thackeray’s Works.”

      Tastefully printed, handsomely bound, price 15_s._; hand-made
        paper, Roxburgh gilt top, 21_s._ net.

  _The Library of Mary Queen of Scots._ By JULIAN SHARMAN. With a
    Photogravure Reproduction of a rare Portrait, and a Facsimile
    Signature of the Queen.

      In small fcap. 8vo size, antique paper, appropriately bound in
        contemporary binding. Published at 5_s._

  _A Book for Boys and Girls; or, Country Rhymes for Children._ By JOHN
    BUNYAN. First published in 1686. With an Introduction by Rev. JOHN
    BROWN, D.D., Author of “John Bunyan, his Life, Times, and Work.”

      In crown 8vo., cloth, price 4_s._ 6_d._

  _Govett’s King’s Book of Sports._ A History of the Declarations of
    King James I. and King Charles I.

      Tastefully printed, cloth, 4_s._ 6_d._; hand-made paper, 9_s._
        net.

  _The Diversions of a Bookworm._ By J. ROGERS REES, Author of “The
    Pleasures of a Bookworm.”

     In fcap. 8vo., Second Edition, price 4_s._ 6_d._

  _The Pleasures of a Bookworm._ By J. ROGERS REES.

     In fcap. 8vo., price 4_s._ 6_d._, post free; large paper, 21_s._
       net.

  _The Brotherhood of Letters._ By J. ROGERS REES. Being Chapters on
    Notable Meetings of Literary Men.

      In fcap. 8vo., olive cloth, price 4_s._ 6_d._

  _Stray Leaves of Literature._ By FREDK. SAUNDERS, Author of “Story of
    Some Famous Books.”


LONDON: ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Superscripted characters are preceded by a caret character: N^{o.}.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.





*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN JOCULAR LITERATURE ***


    

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.


START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
    other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
    whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
    of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
    at www.gutenberg.org. If you
    are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
    of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
  
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:

    • You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
        the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
        you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
        to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
        agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
        within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
        legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
        payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
        Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
        Literary Archive Foundation.”
    
    • You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
        you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
        does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
        License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
        copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
        all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
        works.
    
    • You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
        any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
        electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
        receipt of the work.
    
    • You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
        distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
    

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™

Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.