Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN 1 HANDY-BOOK LITERARY CURIOSITIES. BY WILLIAM S. WALSH, AUTHOR OF "FAUST: THE POEM AND THE LEGEND, "PARADOXES OF A PHILISTINE," ETC, LONDON: GIBBINGS & COMPANY, LTD., 18, BURY STREET, W.C. 1894. Stack Annex PREFACE. PRIMARILY the aim of this Handy-book is to entertain. If it suc- ceeds in instructing as well, there is no harm done. But a sugar coat- ing of grateful gust has been quite as much an object with the compiler as the tonic which it may envelop. It is obvious that in so large a field as is afforded by the curiosities of literature the embarrassment has been mainly that of riches. No single volume nor a dozen volumes of this size could exhaust the material. Nevertheless, if the compiler has been even approximately successful, if his gleanings from the rich harvest-field have been fairly judicious, a gain in interest and even in value has been achieved by consulting the limitations of space. At one time he had thought of disarming a certain kind of criticism by calling this " A Dictionary of Things Not Worth Knowing," the bulk of the matter herein contained being either in substance or in detail that which is deemed below the dignity of encyclopaedias, dictionaries, or literary manuals. However, we are gradually coming to learn that there is no great and no small in the achievements of the human in- telligence ; that what has ever interested men in the past must preserve an interest for the student of human nature at all times ; that the liter- ary trifling which pleased the keenest wits at particular periods of mental development has a distinct historical value in the retrospect; that the blunders of great minds are worth preserving as successive steps towards the altar of Knowledge ; that in proverbs is embodied the wisdom of many as well as the wit of one ; and that the vagaries of slang are dignified by the fact that slang may become the scholarly language of the future, just as the slang of the past is nearly the richest and most idiomatic portion of the current speech of to-day. Even the tracing of literary analogies, which is held in some disrepute by those who see in it merely a low detective cunning, a joy in convicting nobler minds of larceny and of discrediting the gifts of Nature's bounty, even this is an exercise which, reverently conducted, is full of instruction and profit as well as curious interest. To learn that there is nothing new under the sun is to take to heart the lesson that the right direction of human achievement is to co-ordinate and harmonize the disjecta 3 4 PREFACE. membra, of the old and ever young, and thus arrive at the sum and essence the very heart of things. He is the poet, the creator, the mighty man, who does this, just as he is the great sculptor who liber- ates from the marble the image of all conceivable beauty that already resides therein. And, to run the analogy to the ground, one might trace the history of that block of marble up to its native quarry with nothing of invidious reflection on the sculptor. A certain proportion of the articles, long and short, which are here collected appeared in various periodicals, in Lippincotfs Magazine and the American Notes and Queries of Philadelphia, in the Illus- trated American and Belford's Magazine of New York. This fact is mentioned not only as an acknowledgment of courteous permission to reproduce them, but also as affording an opportunity to remark that, in the last year or so, some of these articles have been pretty _ freely levied upon by makers of literary manuals, whose apparent priority of publication might confuse the unwary as to which was the follower and which the leader. The point is not worth insisting upon, however, for, in a less flagrant way, most of us compilers are indebted to our predecessors. As to myself (let us drop all awkward locutions), I honestly acknowledge that I have found great assistance in such books of reference as Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations," Bent's "Fa- mous Short Sayings," and Norton's "Political Americanisms," also in such collections of bibelots and curios as Brewer's " Dictionary of Phrase and Fable," Bombaugh's "Gleanings for the Curious," and Wm. T. Dobson's and Davenport Adams's various compilations. More than this, I have consulted the English Notes and Queries with predatory aim, and have carried on a war of conquest amid the files of old periodicals. Where credit was possible, it has been given ; but where (as does happen occasionally) a particular article is almost a cento made up from a dozen different authorities, it is well-nigh impos- sible properly to apportion the credit. This general confession, there- fore, must suffice. In conclusion, I must record my indebtedness to Mr. Stephen Pfeil, who contributed the articles on " Epigrams," " Impromptus," and " Quodlibets," as well as a number of the shorter articles embodying political Americanisms, etc. And a special debt of gratitude is due to Mr. Joseph McCreery, the scholarly proof-reader in the establishment of Messrs. J. B. Lippincott Co., whose corrections and suggestions went far beyond the limits of mere proof-reading. WM. S. WALSH. A TABLE OF THE LONGER ARTICLES. PAGE Acrostic 10 Advertising, Quaint and Curious ... 17 Agony Column 28 Alliteration 34 Alphabetic Diversions 40 Ambiguities 47 Anagram . . , ;z Autographs and Autograph-Hunters . Bathos . . Bibles, Curious 90 Biblioklept 93 Bibliomania 05 Binding 100 Bookplate 112 Bouts-rimes 115 Bulls, Irish and not Irish 124 Catch . . 141 Charade , Chronogram , Ciphers or Cryptograms Claimants, Literary Coincidences Collaboration Compliments Criticism, Curiosities of Dedications Dictionary Echo Verses Emblematic, Figurate or Shaped Poems Emendation, Conjectural English as she is spoke Enigma Epigrams Epitaphs, Curiosities of Errors, Vulgar Etiquette Forgeries, Literary French as she is spoke Handwriting and Writers History, The Incredibility of Hoaxes, Some Famous * Hyperbole Ignorance, Humors of Ignorances, Our Small PAGE 508 Impromptus ............. 525 Index ................ 543 Interrupted Sentences ........ 550 Interview .............. 554 Irony ................ 561 Jesuitical Compositions or Equivoques . 574 Laconic ............... 598 Lion-Hunter, The .......... 638 Lipograms . ............. 643 Literal Sense, In a .......... 646 Lost Treasures of Literature ..... 658 Macaronic Literature ......... 670 Meiosis ............... 696 Memoria Technica .......... 698 Metaphors, Mixed .......... 708 Mistakes of Authors ......... 723 Monosyllable ............. 735 Mosaics or Centos .......... 744 Mystification and Imposture ..... 760 Names, Curiosities of ......... 778 Names in Fiction .......... 786 Nonsense, Verse and Prose . . 808 1* Numbers, Curiosities of 824 Oaths and Curses 831 Palindrome 851 Paradoxes and Puzzles 855 Parody 86* Plagiarism and Plagiarists 891 Poetic Prose 903 Punctuation 924 Puns and Punning 928 Quodlibet 938 Quotation and Misquotation 944 Real People in Fiction 949 Reviews, Curiosities of 962 Rhymes, Eccentricities of 969 Self-Appreciation 992 Spelling, Eccentricities of 1024 Translation, Curiosities of 1057 Typographical Errors 1065 HANDY-BOOK OF LITERARY CURIOSITIES. A, the first letter of the alphabet in all languages which, like English, derive their alphabets directly or indirectly from the Phoenician. It corre- sponds to the aleph of the Phoenician and old Hebrew and the alpha of the Greek. Aleph means an ox, and the character is derived from the Egyp- tian hieratic symbol, in which the Phoenicians undoubtedly saw a rude re- semblance to the horned head of an ox. As a symbol A denotes the first of an actual or possible series : thus, in music it is the name of the first note of the relative minor scale, the la of Italian, French, and Spanish musicians ; and in the mnemonic words of logic it stands for the universal affirmative proposi- tion, e.g., all men are mortal ; while I stands for the particular affirmative (some men are mortal), E for the universal negative (no men are mortal), and O for the particular negative (some men are not mortal). It is some- times contended that these symbols were of Greek origin ; but the weight of authority makes them date from the thirteenth century, and it is not unlikely that they may have been taken from the Latin Afflrmo, I affirm, and nEgO, I deny. In the Greek form, a, alpha, this use of the letter as the first of a series is even more common. Thus, " I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord" (Rev. i. 8). " The o acid is converted by heat into the /? acid" (Watt's Fownes's Chemistry). The letter A standing by itself, es- pecially as a word, was formerly spelt in oral recitations A per se a, that is, A standing by itself makes the word a, and this oral phrase committed to writing was gradually corrupted to A per C, Apersey, Apersie, and frequently used as a synonyme for first, chief, most excellent, e.g., " The floure and A per se of Troie and Grece" (HENRYSON : Testament of Cresseide, 1475). Al, popular slang, meaning first-rate, excellent, is borrowed from the ratings used in Lloyd's Register of Shipping. The higher classes of vessels are styled A, and the figure I following the class letter shows that the equip- ment is complete and efficient. Hence " I am A i" means " I'm all right," and to say of another that "he or she is A i" is to pay one of the highest compli- ments in the slang repertoire. Thus, Shirley Brooks in "The Guardian Knot" makes one of his characters say, "She is A I ; in fact, the aye-wunnest girl I ever saw." Curiously enough, the French have a similar commendatory ex- pression, " He is marked with an A" (" C'est un homme marque a 1'A"), the money coined in Paris being formerly stamped with an A. 7 8 HANDY-BOOK OF A outrance (not a Voutrance), a French expression, meaning much the same as the English phrase " to the bitter end," originally applied to a contest between two antagonists who were each determined to conquer or to die, but now more often used in the sense of " to excess," " to the utmost extent," and applied to any custom, habit, or fashion which is carried to an extravagant excess. Ab ovo (literally, " from the egg," hence, from the beginning), an old Roman phrase, generally with allusion to the custom of beginning a meal with eggs, in this case forming the first part of the phrase ab wo usque ad mala, from the egg to the apples, i.e., from beginning to end ; but sometimes the allusion is to the poet mentioned by Horace (" Ars Poetica," 147) who began the history of the Trojan war with the story of the egg from which Helen was fabled to have been born. Horace contrasts him unfavorably with Homer, who plunged at once into the midst of things, or in medias res. Abacot, a spurious word which by a remarkable series of blunders has gained a foothold in the dictionaries. It is usually defined as "a cap of state, wrought up into the shape of two crowns, worn formerly by English kings." Neither word nor thing has any real existence. In Hall's " Chronicles" the word bicocket (Old Fr. bicoquet, a sort of peaked cap or head-dress) happened to be misprinted abococfet. Other writers copied the error. Then Holinshed improved the new word to abococke, and Abraham Fleming to abacot, and so it spun merrily along, a sort of rolling stone of philology, shaping itself by con- tinual attrition into something as different in sense as in sound from its first original, until Spelman landed the prize in his " Glossarium," giving it the definition quoted above. So through Bailey, Ash, and Todd it has been handed down to our time, a standing exemplar of the solidarity of dictionaries, and of the ponderous indolence with which philologers repeat without examining the errors of their predecessors. Nay, the error has been amusingly accent- uated by calling in the aid of a sister art that has provided a rough wood-cut of the mythical abacot, which in its turn has been servilely reproduced. Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit, a potent Latin phrase which loses all its virility in any possible English rendition (e.g., He has fled, retreated, es- caped, broken forth). It was used by Cicero at the beginning of his second oration against Catiline to express by the piling up of synonymous words the abrupt manner of the conspirator's escape from Rome. Abolitionist, in American politics, specifically a member of the anti- slavery party, which dates from 1829, when a handful of enthusiasts rallied around the stalwart figure of William Lloyd Garrison in a fierce crusade against slave-owners as criminals. In 1831, Garrison founded the first Abo- litionist paper, The Liberator. In 1832 the New England Anti-Slavery Society was formed in Boston, and in 1833 the growth of abolition sentiment led to the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia, with Beriah Green as its president and John G. Whittier as one of the secretaries. In 1840 the Abolitionists divided into two wings, one favoring abolition through constitutional amendment, the other, with Wendell Phillips as its chief spokes- man, denouncing the constitution as a bulwark of slavery. Anti-slavery senti- ment grew faster than the party which claimed to be its exponent. Before the war no large number of citizens, even in the North, were avowed Abolitionists, though after the war a majority of Northerners proudly insisted that they had always been Abolitionists. And in truth they could point back to the fact that Abolitionist was a term of contempt which the Democrats usually applied to all Republicans, and which the men of the South applied indiscriminately to all Northerners who were not Democrats. The word itself, even, in connection LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 9 with slave-emancipation, was not a new one. In England and all her colonies it had been familiarly applied to the anti-slavery agitators led by Wilberforce, and had been accepted by them. Thus, T. Clarkson says, " Many looked upon the Abolitionists as monsters" (" Slave Trade," ii. 212, 1790). In America also the term had been in use to denote the opponents of slavery who began an intermittent protest even before the Revolution ; but as a party name it belongs distinctively to the movement of which Garrison was the first apostle. Abracadabra, a cabalistic word used in incantations, and supposed to possess mystic powers of healing, especially when written in this triangular shape : ABRACADABRA ABRACADABR ABRACADAB ABRACADA A B R A C A D A B R A C A A B R A C A B R A A B R A B A The paper on which this was written was to be folded so as to conceal the writing, stitched with white thread, and worn around the neck. It was a sov- ereign remedy for fever and ague. Possibly the virtue lay in the syllables Abra, which are twice repeated, and which are composed of the first letters of the Hebrew words signifying Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Ab, Ben, Ranch Acadosh. The earliest known occurrence of the word is in a poem of the second century, " Praecepta de Medicina," by Q. Serenus Sammonicus. It is now often used in the general sense of a spell, or pretended conjuring, jargon, or gibberish. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. This line occurs in Thomas Haynes Bayly's song " Isle of Beauty." There is proverbial authority for this as well as for the contrary statement that absence kills love. But written literature is usually on Bayly's side. Charles Hopkins in his lines "To C. C." says, I find that absence still increases love. Howel in his " Familiar Letters" (i. I, No. 6) asserts, " Distance sometime.} endears friendship, and absence sweeteneth it." Frederick W. Thomas, in a short poem, " Absence Conquers Love," boldly traverses the titular statement : "Tis said that absence conquers love, But, oh, believe it not ! I've tried, alas ! its power to prove. But thou art not forgot. Desdemona, in Othello, i. 2, says, "I dote upon his very absence." Charles Lamb, in his " Dissertation on Roast Pig," punningly suggests a method by which the absent may keep their memory green : " Presents, I often say, endear absents." Bussy-Rabutin shows how both statements may be recon- ciled : L' absence est a 1'amour ce qu'est au feu le vent : 11 eteint le petit, il allume le grand. La Rochefoucauld says, " Friends agree best at a distance ;" but this was a popular proverb before his day, and a similar moral. is presented in the French adages, " To preserve friendship, a wall must be put between," and " A little io HANDY-BOOK OF absence does much good ;" the German, " Love your neighbor, but do not pull down the hedge ;" the Spanish, " Go to your brother's house, but not every day ;" and the Scotch, " They are aye gude that are far awa." But proverbs would not be proverbs if they did not contradict one another. The last quoted is directly traversed by the French, " The absent are always in the wrong," and "Absent, none without fault; present, none without excuse." And every language furnishes examples to support this : e.g., the Greek, " Friends living far away are no friends ;" the Latin, " He that is absent will not be the heir;" the Spanish, " Absence is Jove's foe : far from the eyes, far from the heart," and " The dead and the absent have no friends." Absolute Wisdom. A sobriquet given to Sir Matthew Wood, a stanch supporter of Queen Caroline in 1821, who, having been reproached for giving foolish advice to that unhappy queen, diffidently admitted that his conduct might not be "absolute wisdom," and was unmercifully chaffed in consequence by the wags of the period. He was made a baronet by Queen Victoria shortly after her accession, in acknowledgment, it was said, for pecuniary aid given to her father, the Duke of Kent, when greatly embarrassed. Accident of an accident, a phrase first used by Lord Thurlow. Dur- ing a debate on Lord Sandwich's administration of Greenwich Hospital, the Duke of Grafton taunted Thurlow, then Lord Chancellor, on his humble origin. Thurlow rose from the woolsack, and, advancing towards the duke, declared he was amazed at his grace's speech. "The noble duke,'' he cried, in a burst of oratorical scorn, " cannot look before him, behind him, and on either side of him without seeing some noble peer who owes his seat in this House to his successful exertions in the profession to which I belong. Does he not feel that it is as honorable to owe it to these as to being the accident of an accident ?' Across lots, in colloquial American, a short cut, as of one who leaves the public highway to find a nearer way across private property. The phrase has acquired especial prominence through Brigham Young's historic threat, " We'll send them [the Gentiles] to hell across lots." Acrostic (Gr. oKpocrixif ; aicpo, prefix, and orixof, row, order, line), a once favorite form of literary legerdemain. In its simplest and most usual form it consists of a copy of verses whose initial letters taken in order spell a word, a proper name, or a sentence. The following specimen is by Charles Lamb : Go, little poem, and present Respectful terms of compliment, A Gentle Lady bids thee speak ; Courteous is She, though l~hou be weak. Evoke from Heav'n, as thick as Manna, Joy after joy on GRACE JOANNA. On Fornham's glebe and pasture land A blessing pray. Long, long may stand, time, the grudging ch At Easter be the offerings due . , , Not touch' d by time, the Rectory blithe. No grudging churl dispute his tithe. With cheerful spirit paid. Each pew In decent order fill'd. No noise Loud intervene to drown the voice, Learning or wisdom, of the Teacher. Impressive be the Sacred Preacher, And strict his notes on Holy Page. May young and old from age to age Salute and still point out the " Good Man's Parsonage." Here the initial letters form the name Grace Joanna Williams. But many fantastic variations have been introduced. Sometimes the initials read LITERARY CURIOSITIES. II upward instead of downward ; sometimes the final instead of the first letters, and sometimes both the final and the first letters, form an acrostic. The latter is known as a double acrostic, or, more technically, a telestich. An ingenious improvement requires that the double acrostic shall be formed of two words of the same letters, yet of opposite meanings, e.g. : U-nite and untie are the same so say yo-U ; N-ot in wedlock, I ween, has the unity bee-N; I-n the drama of marriage, each wandering gou-T T-o a new face would fly all except you and I, E-ach seeking to alter the spell in their scen-E. Here is a bit of monastic verse of curious ingenuity. Not only do the first Lnd the final letters, but the middle initials also, form the word lesus. In technical words, the lines are at once acrostic, mesostic, and telestic. Nor is that all. The observant reader will discern that in the centre of the verse is a cross formed of the word Jesus, or lesus, read perpendicularly and hori- zontally : Inter cuncta micans I gniti sidera coell Expellit tenebras E toto Phoebus ut orb E Sic cxcas removet JESUS caliginis umbraS Vivificansque simul V ero praecordia motU Solem justitbe S ese probat esse beatiS Poe has devised a peculiarly complicated form in his VALENTINE. For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes, Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda, Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader. Search narrowly the lines ! they hold a treasure Divine a talisman an amulet That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure The words the syllables ! Do not forget The trivialest point, or you may lose your labor I And yet there is in this no Gordian knot Which one might not undo without a sabre, If one could merely comprehend the plot. Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering Eyes scintillating soul, there lie perdus Three eloquent words oft uttered in the hearing Of poets, by poets as the name is a poet's too. Its letters, although naturally lying Like the knight Pinto Mendez Ferdinando Still form a synonym for Truth. Cease trying ! You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you can do. To translate the address, read the first letter of the first line in connection with the second letter of the second line, the third letter of the third line, the fourth of the fourth, and so on to the last line. The name Frances Sargent Osgood will then be formed. Although acrostics are now relegated to the nursery, they were anciently looked upon with high reverence. A rude form of acrostic may even be found in the Scriptures, e.g., in twelve of the psalms, hence called the abece- darian psalms, the most notable being Psalm cxix. This is composed of twenty-two divisions or stanzas, corresponding to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Each stanza consists of eight couplets. The first line of each couplet in the first division begins with aleph, a, the first line of each couplet in the second division with beth, b, and so on to the end. This pecu- liarity is not retained in the translation, but is indicated by the initial letter prefixed to each division. The Greeks also cultivated the acrostic, as may be seen in the specimens that survive in the Greek Anthology, and so did their intellectual successors, the Latins. Cicero, in his " De Divinatione," tells us 12 HANDY-BOOK OF that " the verses of the Sibyls are distinguished by that arrangement which the Greeks call acrostic ; where from the first letters of each verse in order words are formed which express some particular meaning ; as is the case with some of Ennius's verses." In the year 326, Publius Porphyrius composed a poem, still extant, in praise of Constantine, the lines of which are acrostics. The early French poets, from the time of Francis I. to that of Louis XIV., were fond of this trifling. But it was carried to its most wasteful and ridicu- lous excess by the Elizabethan poets. Sir John Davies has a series of no less than twenty-six poems under the general heading of " Hymns to Astraea," every one of which is an acrostic on the words Elisabetha Regina. Here is a single specimen : Kar th now is green and heaven is blue ; Lively spring which makes all new, lolly spring doth enter. Sweet young sunbeams do subdue Angry aged winter. Blasts are mild and seas are calm, Every meadow flows with balm, The earth wears all her riches, Harmonious birds sing such a psalm As ear and heart bewitches. Reserve (sweet spring) this nymph of ours, Eternal garlands of thy flowers, Green garlands never wasting ; In her shall last our state's fair spring, Now and forever flourishing, As long as heaven is lasting. After the Elizabethan age, acrostics soon sank into disrepute. Dryden scornfully bids the hero of his " Macflecknoe" Leave writing plays, and choose for thy command Some peaceful province in acrostic land. And Addison gives the acrostic a high place among his examples of false wit. A fashion that is not quite extinct was introduced by the jewellers of the last century, who placed precious stones in such an order that the initials of their names formed the name of the recipient of the gift. Thus, the Princess of Wales, on her marriage, presented her groom with a ring set with the follow- ing gems : Beryl, Emerald, Ruby, Turquoise, Iris, Emerald. The initials, it will be seen, form the word Bertie, the name by which she prefers to call her spouse. Rachel, the French actress, when at the height of her popularity, received from her admirers a diadem with the following stones, whose name-initials not only spell her own name, but present the name-initials of her most famous characters : Ruby, Roxana. Amethyst, Amenaide. Carnelian, Camille. Hematite, Hermione. Emerald, Emilie. Lapis-Lazuli, Laodice. LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 13 One development of the acrostic that is specially vital and electric consists in reading the initial letters of the words of a sentence as a single word, or, conversely, in flashing in a single word the initials of a whole unuttered sen- tence. Thus, when the Italians outside of the Piedmontese states did not dare as yet openly to shout for Victor Emmanuel and Italian unity, they managed the thing neatly and thrillingly by the short cry of Viva Verdi! Why the popular composer had suddenly become so very popular that all Italy should in season and out of season be shouting his name did not at first appear, except to those who knew that Verdi, letter for letter, stood for Vittorio Emanuele Re d'ltalia. Now, this at least was an acrostic with a soul in it. Similarly the word Nihil was by the Anti-Bonapartists made to typify the Napoleon dynasty of kings in the following strangely prophetic acrostic : N-apoleon, the Emperor, J-oseph, King of Spain, H-ieronymus [Jerome], King of Westphalia, I-oachim, King of Naples, L-ouis, King of Holland. Another acrostic whose augury was justified by future events, in a pleasanter manner, however, than was anticipated, is mentioned by Bacon. " The trivial prophecy," he says, " which I heard when I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth in the flower of her years, was, When Hempe is spun, England's done ; whereby it was generally conceived that after the sovereigns had reigned, which had the letters of that word HEMPE (which were Henry, Edward, Mary, Philip, Elizabeth), England should come to utter confusion ; which, thanks be to God, is verified in the change of the name, for that the king's style is now no more of England, but of Britain." The most noteworthy of this species of acrostic, however, is the Greek word Ix0ty;,_fish, formed from the initials of the sentence, Ifiaovf Xptarbf Geov Yi'of 2cm?p, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour, which was used as a veiled symbol for Christ. The figure of a fish is frequently found carved on the monuments of the Roman catacombs to mark without revealing the burial-place of a Christian. Act of Parliament, an English slang term for small beer, now almost obsolete. The allusion is to the fact that publicans were by act of Parliament forced to supply billeted soldiers, gratis, with five pints of small beer daily. There is a story current among the Chelsea veterans that the Duke of Wellington saw a soldier warming his weak regulation beer. The duke said, " Damn the belly that won't warm Act of Parliament 1" The soldier replied, " Damn the Act of Parliament ! it won't warm the belly." BARR&RR AND LELAND : Dictionary of Slang. Action, action, action! In his " Lives of the Ten Orators," Plutarch tells how Demosthenes when asked what made the perfect orator responded, " Action !" And the second thing ? " Action !" And the third thing ? " Action !" The saying has often been imitated. The Marshal de Trivulce, to the query of Louis XI. as to what he needed to make war, promptly replied, "Three things : money, more money, always money" (" Trois choses : de 1'argent, encore de 1'argent, et toujours de 1'argent"). Fifty years later the Imperialist General von Schussendi said precisely the same thing : " Sind dreierlei Dinge notig : Geld, Geld, Geld." Danton rang another change upon the phrase in August, 1792, in a speech made before the National Assembly at the very moment when a discharge of cannon announced that the Reign of Terror had been inaugurated and the slaughter of royalist prisoners had begun. "Th cannon which you hear," he cried to his dismayed auditors, " is not the signal 14 HANDY-BOOK OF of alarm : it is the pas de charge upon our enemies. To conquer them, to crush them, what is necessary? Boldness, more boldness, and always bold- ness, and France is saved" ("De 1'audace, et encore de 1'audace, et toujours de 1'audace, et la France est sauvee"). Had Danton read Spenser as well as Plutarch? In the "Faerie Queene" (iii. II, 54) are the following lines : And as she lookt about she did behold How over that same dore was likewise writ Be bolde, be bolde, and everywhere Be bold. St.-Just, who succeeded Danton in the Reign of Terror, put a similar sen- timent in less epigrammatic form when he exclaimed in the Convention, " Dare ! that is the whole secret of revolutions." Gambetta, however, marked the difference between the present republic and its predecessor by the follow- ing paraphrase : " Work, more work, and always work !" (" Du travail, encore du travail, et toujours du travail !") Speech at banquet to General Hoche, June 24, 1872. See also AGITATE, AGITATE, AGITATE. Actions speak louder than words. An old saw, found in one form or another in all languages. Thus, the French say, " From saying to doing is a long stretch," and "Great boasters, small doers;" the Italians, "Deeds are male, words are female" (" Fatti maschi, parole femine") ; the Danes, " Big words seldom go with big deeds ;" the Spaniards, " Words will not do for my aunt, for she does not trust even deeds," and " A long tongue betokens a short hand ;" while our own proverb is varied by the alternatives, " Words show the wit of a man, but actions his meaning ;" " Saying and not doing is cheap ;" and the Scotch, " Saying gangs cheap." In another sense the saw may be taken as an answer to the question of the relative value to the world of the man of thought and the man of action ; a question which Walton states thus in his " Angler," Part I. ch. i. : " In ancient times a debate hath risen, . . . whether the happiness of man in this world doth consist more in contemplation or action." He instances on the one hand the opinion of "many cloisteral men of great learning and devotion," who prefer contemplation before action, because they hold that "God enjoys himself only by a contemplation of his own infiniteness, eternity, power, and goodness, and the like," and on the other, the opinions of men of equal "authority and credit" who say that "action is doctrinal, and teaches both art and virtue, and is a maintainer of human society ; and for these and other like reasons, to be preferred before contem- plation." But he decides that the question remains yet unresolved. In the present day the weight of authority is undoubtedly on the side of action, even the authority represented by the men of thought. Kingsley's fine line, Do noble things, not dream them all day long, findwan echo in Emerson, " An action is the perfection and publication of thought" (Nature) ; in Lowell, " Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action" (Rousseau and the Sentimentalists) ; in Beecher, " Action is the right outlet of emotion" (Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit) ; in Jules Simon, " In the eyes of God there is not a prayer which is worth a good action ;" and in numer- ous sayings of Goethe and Carlyle. The other side of the question may be summed up in Owen Meredith's phrase, " Thought alone is immortal" (Lucile), and is prettily and poetically presented in Kerner's stanzas, "Two Graves," the first grave being that of a warrior, who sleeps forgotten and unrecorded, the second that of a poet, whose songs stii! float in the breezes above him. And this in turn recalls the famous saying of Themistocles, who being asked whether the historian were not greater than the hero, because without the historian the hero would be forgotten, Yankee-like turned on his questioner LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 15 with another question : " Which would you rather be, one of the combatants in the public games, or the herald who announces them ?" Ad eundem (L., "to the same degree"), an English and American uni- versity phrase. A graduate of one university is permitted to enjoy the same degree at another, and is said to be admitted ad eundem (gradum understood) at the sister university. A coach that used to run between Oxford and Cam- bridge was facetiously known to the undergraduates at both universities as the ad eundem coach. Adam. There is an old English proverbial expression, When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman ? The couplet is memorable in English history. In Wat Tyler's insurrection during the reign of Richard II., John Ball addressed the mob on Blackheath from this text. Evidently it was a familiar proverb then. In English litera- ture its earliest recorded appearance is in a poem by Richard Rolle de Ham- pole (Early English Text Society Reprints, No. 26, p. 79) : When Adam dalfe and Eue spane, So spire if thou may spede, Whare was then the pride of man That now merres his meed ? The couplet is also known in Germany. Tradition asserts that it was writ- ten up in a conspicuous place in the city of Nuremberg both in Latin and in German : Quo nobilis turn quispiam loco fuit Cum federal Adam et Eva fila duceret ? Wo was da der Edelmann Da Adam hack t und Eva span ? SPENER : Operis Hera 'did, p. 150. (Frankfort, 1680.) Another tradition affirms that when Maximilian, presumably the first of the name, was prosecuting researches into his own pedigree, a wag posted up OK the doors of the palace this couplet, which is identical with the English : Da Adam hackt und Eva spann, Wer war damals der Edelmann ? Maximilian promptly retorted, Ich bin ein Mann wie ein ander Mann, Allein dass mir Gott der Ehren gan. " I am a man like any other man, Only that God hath given honor to me." Ray, in his collection of proverbs, adds a second couplet which contains an answer to the first, i.e. Upstart [upstarted] a churl and gathered good, And thence did spring our gentle blood This seems to be an after-thought of comparatively recent birth. Adam, the old. The unregenerate part of man's nature, in allusion tc the doctrine of original sin. This phrase is used in the English Book of Common Prayer, " Grant that the old Adam in these persons may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in them" (Baptism of those of Riper Years). Shakespeare says of Henry V., Consideration like an angel came And whipped the offending Adam out of him. King Henry V. t \.\. 1 6 HANDY-BOOK OF Adam's ale or wine, a humorous colloquialism for water, as being Adam's only beverage at the teetotal period when he flourished, occurs as far back as Prynne's " Sovereign Power of Parliament," ii. 32 : " They have been shut up in prisons and dungeons, allowed only a poore pittance of Adam's ale, and scarce a penny bread a day to support their lives." Adam's arms, a spade. "There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers : They hold up Adam's profession. He was the first that ever bore arms" (Hamlet, Act v., Sc. i). The term is recognized in heraldry and also in the popular vocabulary. The sign of a spade is much affected in England by market-gardeners. Adder, Deaf as an, a proverb common to most modern languages, and arising from the passage in Psalm Iviii. 4, where the wicked are compared to "the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear: which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely." This is an allusion to the supersti- tion, prevalent in the East from time immemorial, that some serpents defy all the powers of the charmer, pressing one ear into the dust, while they stop the other with the tail. Zoologically, this is an absurdity, as serpents have no external ears. Shakespeare refers to the superstition in Sonnet cxii. : In so profound abysm I throw all care Of others' voices, that my adder's sense To critic and to flatterer stopped are. Addition, Division, and Silence. In 1872, William H. Kemble, then State Treasurer of Pennsylvania, was alleged to have written a letter of in- struction for G. O. Evans to T. J. Coffey, of Washington, in which these words occur : "He understands addition, division, and silence." The New York Sun, which first made the allegation public (March 15, 1872), interpreted the words as meaning that Evans joined all the arts of the lobbyist to the kind of honor that is proverbially practised even by thieves. Kemble brought a libel suit against the Sun, and, though he asked only six cents damages, the jury failed to agree. Admiral of the Blue and Admiral of the Red are properly naval terms, the former being applied to an admiral of the third class, who holds the rear in an engagement, the latter to one of the second class, who holds the centre. In English slang an Admiral of the Blue is a public-house keeper, in allusion to the blue apron which is, or was, his usual insignia, while Admiral of the Red is a term applied to such of his customers as have developed a cheery, rubicund complexion, especially on the end of the nose. Admiral of the Red, White, and Blue is a term similarly applied to beadles, hall-porters, and other functionaries when sporting the gorgeous liveries of their office. Adullam, Cave of John Bright, in the course of a speech directed against Mr. Horsman and other Liberals who disapproved of the Reform Bill introduced by Earl Russell's administration in 1866, a bill that contem- plated a sweeping reduction of the elective franchise, said, " The right hon- orable gentleman is the first of the new party who has retired into what may be called his political cave of Adullam." The reference was to the discon- tented and distressed who gathered around David in the cave of Adullam (/. Samuel, xxii. i, 2). The retort was obvious, and was instantly made by Lord Elcho, who replied that the band in the cave was hourly increasing, and would succeed in delivering the House from the tyranny of Saul (Mr. Glad- stone) and his armor-bearer (Mr. Bright). Adullamite is now an accepted term for a member of any small clique which tries to obstruct the party with which they habitually associate, and has some affiliation with the American " mugwump." LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 1 7 Adversity. The poets and the philosophers are fond of cheerful moraliz- ings on the advantages of adversity. First and foremost, Shakespeare's lines spring to the mind : Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in its head. As You Like It, Act ii., Sc. i. Carlyle admits that " adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but," he adds, " for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity" {Heroes and Hero- Worship : 7'he Hero as Man of Letters). Hazlitt had already said the same thing in his " Sketches and Essays." "Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater" (On the Conversation of Lords). And the arch-plagiarist Disraeli, in " Endymion," ch. Ixi., gives us the aphorism, " There is no education like adversity." " Prosperity," says Bacon, " is the blessing of the Old Testament ; adversity is the blessing of the Newj" and he quotes approvingly from Seneca a high speech after the manner of the Stoics : " The good things that belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired" (Essays : Of Adversity). Aristotle found in education " an ornament in pros- perity and a refuge in adversity" (DIOGENES LAERTIUS : Lives of Famous Philosophers). Butler, in " Hudibras," finds a reason for contentment in adversity which is as wise as it is witty : I am not now in Fortune's power : He that is down can fall no lower. Part I., Canto 3. Longfellow finds a refuge in patience and hope : Let us be patient: these severe afflictions Not from the ground arise, But oftentimes celestial benedictions Assume this dark disguise. Resignation. And Beaumont and Fletcher bid us assume that sorrow is not and it will not be : Nothing is a misery, Unless our weakness apprehend it so : We cannot be more faithful to ourselves, In anything that's manly, than to make 111 fortune as contemptible to us As it makes us to others. Honest Man's Fortune, Act i., Sc. i. Advertising, Quaint and Curious. The origin of advertising dates back to the birth of the commercial spirit, when human beings began to feel the necessity for some means of communicating their wants and the business they had on hand. The ancient and mediaeval criers (called pracones in Rome) who, besides their public duties, announced the time, the place, and the conditions of sales, the hawkers who cried their own goods, the libelli of the Romans (announcing the sales of estates, and giving public notice of things lost or found, of absconding debtors, etc.), and the hand-bill or poster, which, after the invention of printing, gradually superseded the town or private crier, these are the various steps in the evolution of the modern advertisement. The first printed English newspaper, the Certain Newes of this Present Week, issued in London in 1642, contained nothing but news. Not until ten years later, in the Mercurius Politicus for January, 1652, do we meet with a well-authenticated advertisement. This relates to a panegyrical poem on Cromwell's return from Ireland, and runs as follows : " Irenodia Gratulatoria, an Heroick Poem ; being a congratulatory panegyrick for my Lord General's b 2 1 8 HANDY-BOOK OF late return, summing up his successes in an exquisite manner. To be sold by John Holden, in the New Exchange, London. Printed by Tho. Newcourt, 1652." But almost a century previous, on the continent of Europe, newspapers and newspaper advertisements had been foreshadowed in small news pam- phlets printed at irregular intervals in Vienna and other parts of Germany. The oldest newspaper paragraph approaching the modern advertisement that has yet been resuscitated was found in one of these early news-books, pre- served in the British Museum. The book is dated 1591, without any indica- tion as to the place of issue. The advertisement is half in prose and half in verse, and, like its English successor which we have just quoted, is the puff of a new publication. As newspapers grew apace, the art of advertising developed with them. In May, 1657, one Newcombe issued a weekly newspaper, The Public Adver- tiser, which consisted almost wholly of advertisements of a miscellaneous character. Simultaneously other papers increased the number and the variety of their advertisements. Announcements of books still held a prominent position ; quack doctors began to discover the value of puffery ; tradesmen praised their wares ; coffee-houses extolled the virtues of those strange new drinks, "cophee" itself, chocolate, and that "excellent and by all Physicians approved, China drink, called by the Chineans tcha, by other nations tay, alias tee." But the major part of the advertisements related to fairs and cock- fights, burglaries and highway robberies, the departure of coaches and stages, and to what would now be classed together under the heading of " Lost, Strayed, or Stolen." The number of runaway apprentices, servants, and negro boys is especially noticeable in the advertising literature of the seven- teenth century. And how shall we account for the extraordinary homeliness of the rogues and rascals of that period ? Hardly a criminal or a runaway but is described as " ugly as sin." They have ill-favored countenances, smutty complexions, black, rotten teeth, flat wry noses, a hang-dog expression ; they are purblind, or deaf, or given to slabber in their speech. Our modern tough must be a beauty in comparison with these earlier wrong-doers. By the eighteenth century, advertising had become recognized as a means of communication, not only for the conveniences of trade, but for political pur- poses, for love-making, 'for fortune-hunting, for swindling, and for all the other needs and desires of a large community. By the commencement of the present century matters were very nearly as we find them now. The Lon- don Times and the Morning Post, started modestly enough in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, were beginning to make themselves felt as powers in the land. As they grew and developed, they depended more and more upon the revenues from their advertising columns. Meanwhile, the benefits of advertising were becoming more and more appreciated by tradesmen and the general public. American newspapers profited by the example of their British predecessors. The first newspaper that succeeded in establishing itself in North America was the Boston News Letter. In its initial number, dated Monday, April 24, 1704, it issued a bid for advertising in this ungrammatical form : " All persons who have any houses, lands, tenements, farms, ships, vessels, goods, wares, or merchandise, etc., to be sold or let, or servants run away, or goods stole or lost, may have the same inserted at the reasonable rate of twelve pence to five shillings, and not to exceed." The first American daily journal, the Independent Gazette of New York, in its second year, 1788, contained as many as thirty-four advertisements in a single issue. From that time on the growth of advertising in America has been even more stupendous than in England. It is interesting to compare the advertising of the past with that of the LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 19 present. The mind that is accustomed to read between the lines can trace, in their various changes and developments, similar changes and developments in habits, customs, and methods of thinking ; can estimate the vast augmenta- tion in business and in industrial resources, and the mighty evolution of public and private enterprise. Let us go back through the columns of the news- paper press for the last two centuries or so, gleaning those curious and eccen- tric advertisements which illustrate in the most amusing fashion the temper of their respective periods and the mutations wrought by time. The class of advertisements now known as personals made an early appear- ance in newspaper literature. But there are a candor, a simplicity, and a ndivett in the earlier specimens which are less apparent in their successors of the present day. There is an opulence of phrase also which would indicate equal opulence of pocket, were personals charged for at the ruinous rates now current. Leaving out the question of expense, a jilted suitor of to-day would hardly be likely to vent his spleen in the fashion adopted by the Londoner who in- serted this notice in the General Advertiser : Whereas, on Sunday, April 12, 1750, there was seen in Cheapside, between the hours of four and five in the afternoon, a young gentleman, dressed in a light-colored coat, with a blue waistcoat, trimmed with silver lace, along with a young lady in mourning, going toward St. Martin's, near Aldersgate. This is, therefore, to acquaint the said gentleman (as a friend) to be as expeditious as possible in the affair, lest otherwise he should unhappily meet with the same disappointment, at last, by another stepping in in the mean time, as a young gentleman has been lately served by the aforesaid young lady, who, after a courtship of these four months past, and with her approbation, and in the most public manner possible, and with the utmost honor as could possibly become a gentleman. Take this, sir, only as a friendly hint. Nor would the modern head of a family deem that it comported with his dignity to express hilarity at the disappearance of his wife in the public fashion adopted by this advertiser in the Essex (Mass.) Gazette of September 17, 1771 : RAN AWAY from Josiah Woodbury, Cooper, his House Plague for 7 long years, Masury Old Moll, alias Trial of Vengeance. He that lost will never seek her ; he that shall keep her, I will give two Bushels of Beans. I forewarn all Persons in Town and Country from trusting said Trial of Vengeance. I have hove all the old Shoes I can find for Joy ; and all my neighbors rejoice with me. A good Riddance of bad Ware. Amen. JOSIAH WOODBURY. Miss Fisher inserts the following paragraph in the Public Advertiser of March 30, 1759: To err is a blemish entailed upon mortality ; indiscretions seldom or never escape from censure, the more heavy as the character is more remarkable ; and doubled, nay, trebled by the world if the progress of that character is marked by success ; then malice shoots against it all her stings, the snakes of envy are let loose ; to the humane and generous heart then must the injured appeal, and certain relief will be found in impartial honor. Miss Fisher is forced to sue to that jurisdiction to protect her from the baseness of little scribblers and scurvy malevo- lence ; she has been abused in public papers, exposed in print-shops, and to wind up the whole, some wretches, mean, wretched, and venal, would impose upon the public by daring to publish her Memoirs. She hopes to prevent the success of their endeavors by thus publicly declaring that nothing of that sort has the slightest foundation in truth. C. FISHER. The above might seem to the hasty thinker curiously characteristic of time and place. Yet history repeats itself, as it always must There is atavism even in advertisements. Characteristics that seem to belong to a past age will recur in the present. Surely the Miss Fisher of the last century finds her legitimate successor, her modern double, in the Ellen Rose of Stamford, Connecticut, who in 1890 inserted the following advertisement in all the newspapers of her native town : To MY SCANDALIZING FRIENDS. I hope you do not call yourselves Christians, for you are a disgrace to the Church. You know nothing about me. I don't care for your lying tongues ; I wonder that they don't fall out of your mouths. You act like fence cats and flying serpents. 20 HANDY-BOOK OF You have been very busy about me for the last nine years with your meddling ; please tell me what you have to do with me. You dare not come to my face with your lies ; you keep like a snake in the grass. See if you can keep it up for nine years longer. I know that I can stand it, but I should think that you would get tired of playing snake all the time. If you do not like my opinion of you, prove yourselves something different, you scandalizing imps ! Miss ELLEN ROSE. Matrimonial advertisements are now often roughly grouped under the head of " Personals" by newspaper managers who lack the nicer perceptive qualities. In truth, they form a department by themselves. They have a literature of their own. In recent years they have even developed journalistic organs of their own. An engaging feature of these would-be husbands and wives has ever been their freedom from bashfulness or mauvaise honte in the proclamation of their own charms. They are almost always handsome, or beautiful, or distinguished- looking, sweet-tempered and accomplished, well born, well mannered, and well educated. They are often wealthy, or, at least, in possession of a com- fortable income. One wonders how it is they have escaped Hymen so long, and still more why they are obliged to seek alien means of courting him. John Houghton, who in 1682 started a weekly entitled A Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, which proved one of the chief pro- moters of early advertising, was the father of matrimonial announcements. In his issue of July 19, 1695, he inserted two advertisements of wishful bride- grooms. But the public was suspicious of the innovation, and a few weeks later the editor found it necessary to explain that the " proposals for matches" were genuine, promising, moreover, to manage all necessary negotiations " with the utmost secrecie and prudence." After that he seems to have found custom. Imitators followed, and in 1775 a marriage bureau was even started in London, but it came to grief through an expose of its very questionable methods in the Town and Country Magazine of the next year. Nevertheless, matrimonial advertisements waxed apace. A very curious one appeared in Bell's Weekly Messenger of May 28, 1797 : Matthew Dawson, in Bothwell, Cumberland, intends to be married at Holm Church, on the Thursday before Whitsuntide next, whenever that may happen, and to return to Bothwell to dine. Mr. Reid gives a turkey to be roasted : Ed Clemenson gives a fat lamb to be roasted ; William Efliot gives a hen to be roasted ; Joseph Gibson gives a fat calf to be roasted. And in order that all this roast meat may be well basted, do you see, Mary Pearson, Betty Hodgson, Mary Bushley, Molly Fisher, Sarah Briscoe, and Betty Porthouse, give each of them a pound of butter. The advertiser will provide everything else for so festive an occa- sion. And he hereby gives notice to all young women desirous of changing their condition that he is at present disengaged ; and advises them to consider that although there be luck in leisure, yet in this case delays are dangerous ; for, with him, it is determined it shall be first come first served. So come along, lasses who wish to be married ; Max Dawson is vexed that so long he has tarried. In December, 1890, the New York Herald printed this last wild appeal of a seeker after the ideal : Humph, what mad folly ! I can't find her thus : expertus loquor. Yet with the dying year this final effort. Dear tribe of unorthographical writers on untidy paper, spare for once him, who, not being an elderly gentleman of means, neither could suit you if he would, nor would if he could. A tired Athenian seeking something new, Epicurean in the true, not base sense, far travelled, much but ill read, incorrigible truth-teller; Ithaca bores, the puffing sail delights me. Caprice ? Thou my complement, many-mooded as the sea or (..larimonde, dainty, high-bred, restful, joyous, delight to mind, pleasure to eye, child of earth, born of spirit, liberated from primeval curse, and in assurance of daily truffles without toil free to be thyself, where art thou ? Alas, in Spain only, I fear, ou sent mes chateaux. THEOPHILB, Herald Office. Far more sensible was the following advertiser in the London Times: A young gentleman on the point of being married, is desirous of meeting a man of expe- rience who will dissuade him from such a step. Address, etc. LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 21 Even the "Wants" column has its amusing features. Here is a very credit- able specimen from the London Times of the year 1850 : Do YOU WANT A SBRVANT? Necessity prompts the question. The advertiser OFFERS his SERVICES to any lady or gentleman, company, or others, in want of a truly faithful, con- fidential servant in any capacity, not menial, where a practical knowledge oi human nature in various parts of the world would be available. Could undertake any affair, of small or great importance, where talent, inviolable secrecy, or good address would be necessary. Has mored in the best and worst societies, without being contaminated by either ; has never been a servant; begs to recommend himself as one who" knows his place; is moral, temperate, middle-aged ; no objection to any part of the world. Could advise any capitalist wishing to increase his income and have the control of his own money. Could act as secretary or valet to any lady or gentleman. Can give advice, or hold his tongue, sing, dance, play, fence, box, preach a sermon, tell a story, be grave or gay, ridiculous or sublime, or do anything, from the curling of a peruke to the storming of a citadel but never to excel his master. Address, etc. Does the reader note the nice condescension of this paragon in engaging never to excel his master ? He will keep his multiform accomplishments in check, so as not to overshadow his employer. Here are a few more " Wants" from various portions of the globe that tell their own story and tell it joyously and well : From the Clevedon (Eng.) Mercury : Wanted A really plain but experienced and efficient governess for three girls, eldest 16. Music, French, and German required. Brilliancy of conversation, fascination of manner, and symmetry of form objected to, as the father is much at home and there are grown-up sons. Address Mater, Post-Office, Clevedon. From the Edinburgh Scotsman : Servant Wanted, by a family living in an Edinburgh flat, a general servant, who will kindly superintend her mistress in cooking and washing, nursing the baby, etc. She will have every Sunday and two nights out in each week, and the use of the drawing-room for the reception of her friends. Address A. F., Scotsman Office. From the Paris Figaro : Wanted A professor to come twice a week to the house of a noble family in order to reform the pronunciation of a parrot. The ingenuous reader may have imagined that prize-fighting and boxing were the especial privileges of the stronger half of humanity. A glance at the advertising columns of the eighteenth-century papers will convince him of his mistake. The following is by no means a solitary instance. It ap- peared in the Daily Post oi July 17, 1728, in the form of a challenge and answer : Whereas I, Ann Field, of Stoke-Newington, ass-driver, well known for my abilities in box- ing in my own defence wherever it happened in my way, having been affronted by Mrs. Stokes, styled the European Championess, do fairly invite her to a trial of the best skill in boxing, for ten pounds, fair rise and fall ; and question not but to give her such proofs of my judgment that shall oblige her to acknowledge me Championess of the Stage, to the entire satisfaction of all my friends. I, Elizabeth Stokes, of the city of London, have not fought in this way since I fought the famous boxing woman of Billingsgate twenty-nine minutes, and gained a complete victory (which is six years ago) ; but as the famous Stoke-Newington ass-woman dares me to fight her lor the ten pounds, I do assure her I will not fail meeting her for the said sum, and doubt not that the blows which I shall present her with will be more difficult for her to digest than she ever gave her asses. But it seems to have been discovered that even these degraded creatures had not lost all the characteristics of their sex. Some challenges provide that each woman shall hold half a crown in each hand, "the first woman that drops the money to lose the battle." Evidently the feminine temptation to use the nails instead of the fists had to be provided against. 22 HANDY-BOOK OF The Newcastle Courant of January 4, 1770, contained this notice, which could not have failed to excite curiosity : This is to acquaint the public, that on Monday the first instant, being the Lodge (or monthly meeting) Night of the Free and Accepted Masons of the 22d Regiment held at the Crmvn, near Newgate (Newcastle), Mrs. Bell, the landlady of the house, broke open a door (with a poker) that had not been open for some time past ; by which means she got into an adjacent room, made two holes through the wall, and, by that stratagem, discovered the secrets of Freemasonry ; and she, knowing herself to be the first woman in the world that ever ibund out the secret, is willing to make it known to all her sex. So any lady who is desirous of learning the secrets of Freemasonry, by Applying to that well-learned woman (Mrs. Bell, that lived fifteen years in and about Newgate) may be instructed in the secrets of Masonry. Our advertising ancestors frequently broke into verse. Here is a fair sam- ple from the Salem (Mass.) Register of September 6, 1801, in which poetry and prose, remonstrance and business, are quaintly intermixed : The following lines were written in the shop of the subscriber by a son of St. Crispin, viewing with contempt the tyrannical and oppressive disposition of a man who has threat- ened vengeance on his neighbor's business because the article he deals in is SHOES : Salem, 9th Mo. 6th, 1801. Oh Shame ! that Man a Dog should imitate, And only live, his fellow Man to hate. An envious Dog once in a manger lay, And starved himself to keep an Ox from hay. Althp' thereof he could not eat, Yet if the Ox was starved to him 'twas sweet His neighbor's comfort thus for to annoy, Altho* thereby he did his own desiroy. O Man, such actions from the page erase, And from thy breast malicious envy chase. Twenty per cent, was struck off at one clip, from those kind of shoes which are mostly worn. It is fifteen months since the Shoe War commenced. J. MANSFIELD, yd. But it is tradesmen, quacks, theatrical managers, etc., people, in short, who wish to attract the public attention to their own pecuniary profit, it is this portion of the race who have developed advertising, especially in the latter half of the present century, into an art that taxes all the creative facul- ties of the human mind. Their forerunners of past ages trusted merely to the resources of a gorgeous vocabulary. They used up all the laudatory adjectives in the language, and there was an end on 't. Their successors of to-day know better. They understand such appeals are made only to the eye and are immediately forgotten. It is necessary to arrest attention, to startle, to pique curiosity, to do something odd, bizarre, outre, extravagant, to be sensational above everything. Such methods set people to wondering, thinking, and talking. The earliest appeals of this sort were made in the comparatively conventional direction of literature and art. Wit, poetry, and wood-engraving were called into play. At first it was very poor wit, poor poetry, poor wood-engraving. When the novelty wore off it ceased to attract attention. Then advertisers began to turn themselves into Maecenases. They patronized the skilful pen and the cunning pencil. The world would be astonished if it knew how many men now famous have written puffs for tradesmen. And two men, one in England and another in America, have won fame for themselves in the exclusive service of the advertiser. The first was George Robins, the English auctioneer, whose advertisements of estates for sale were, half a century ago, conned and studied with as much gusto as the latest poem or romance. His description of that terrestrial paradise whose only drawback was " the litter of the rose-leaves and the noise of the night- ingales" has become a classic. The second is Mr. Powers, formerly of Wana- maker's Bazaar, in Philadelphia. He had a facility of phrase, a virile simplicity of style, a directness and an ingenuous candor, that indicated literary abilities LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 2$ of a high order. When he wrote them, Wanamaker's advertisements won a national reputation. Many people turned to them first when they took up the morning papers, sure of finding something fresh and interesting even if they had no desire to purchase. As to art, Cruikshank was the first well-known man to lend his pencil to the advertiser. His capital sketch, made for a blacking-establishment, of the cat seeing herself reflected and spitting at the boot, is still in use after half a century's service. A London soap-firm recently purchased the right of re- producing one of John Rogers's most famous little groups. And you have but to turn to the pages of any modern periodical to recognize what excellent work, mostly unsigned and unacknowledged, but betraying the well-known characteristics of eminent artists, is done for advertising purposes. Famous works of art, also, have been pressed into the same service in an indirect way. Hotels and bar-rooms attract custom by hanging on their walls the authentic works of great masters, old and new. Cigarette-dealers and others reproduce uncopyrighted masterpieces in miniature form, and give them away with their wares. But as the spirit of journalism has invaded literature and art, so it has invaded the advertising business. The sensational methods of editors and reporters have been aped by the advertisers in near-by columns. Who does not remember the thrilling " reading notices," once so popular, which, after holding you breathless with the account of an accident, a love-story, a tale of adventure, finally landed you into a box of pills or a bottle of castor oil ? Then there was the enigmatical notice, not yet extinct, which arrested atten- tion and kept you in wondering suspense, until such time as the advertiser deemed ripe to spring the explanation, the notice which cried, " In the name of the Prophet," and waited until you had pricked up your ears before it added, " Figs." An early example of this occurred in London some thirty years ago. One morning the good people woke up to find the interrogation ' Who's Blank ?" staring them everywhere in the face, in the newspapers, on the walls and hoardings of the town, even on the pavements. As day after day passed, the reiterated query set everybody to thinking. " Who indeed is Blank ?" So everybody asked, but nobody knew. Presently the words " Fire ! Fire ! Thieves ! Thieves !" following the query, deepened the mystery. At last the secret was out when the enterprising owner of a newly-patented safe added his name to the announcement. The mysterious statement, in large letters, " 724 MORE," which simulta- neously invaded the American press all over the country, carried wonder and even uneasiness to many an American household. One can imagine the whole family puzzling their brains over it for days. Finally, one morning, Young Hopeful bursts out breathlessly, " Pop ! I know what 724 More is !" " What is it ?" cries every one, expectantly. " Pancakes !" And then it comes out that 724 more pancakes can be made out of Puff's Baking Powder than out of any other. Tricks of the type are a lower form of art, and have now lost much of their efficacy. It is only the uninventive mind that seeks to attract attention by italics, capitals, exclamation marks, and the use of strange and uncouth letters. Even the familiar trick of setting up announcements in diagonal form, or of inverting the letters, palls upon a sated public. There is still great virtue, however, in large capitals and the force of iteration. If day in and day out the public have the name of any article pressed conspicuously upon their attention, that name is unconsciously fixed in the mind like a household word. And the effect is more certain if the name appears in some unlooked-for spot and in an unfamiliar environment. The knowledge of these facts has led advertisers to drop their lines in other places besides the daily papers. 4 HANDY-BOOK OF And so it came around that bill-posters stuck up flaring advertisements on walls, on fences, on bill-boards, that the interiors of cars and omnibuses were decorated with signs, that pavements were stencilled with trade notices, that peripatetic artists swarmed over the country painting the names of quack medicines on the palings of fences, the sides of houses and barns, on rocks, trees, and river-banks. Bill-posting was first used in connection with the drama. The very name indicates this. As far back as 1579, John Northbrooke, in his treatise against theatrical performances, says, " They use to set up their bills upon posts, some certain days before, to admonish people to make resort to their thea- tres." Later, notices of nouses to rent, of sales, auction, etc., were posted. Then followed all manner of advertisements. But not until twoscore years ago was bill-posting systematized into a business. Anciently the best bill- poster was the mighty man of brass and muscle, who, knowing nothing of law or license, tore down his rival's placard and set up his own in its stead. Some- times the rival would show fight. Sometimes the owner of the property would object to its desecration, and serve an injunction on the bill-poster. Un- daunted, however, the latter would lease out his contract to another man, who would stick up his bills before the court could issue a new injunction. At last the system of leasing space sprang up. The owner leased his space to the bill-sticker, who could enforce the right as against his rival. This system dates from 1876. It has led to the establishment of large firms, many of whom control space throughout the entire Union, and can, at a moment's bidding, proclaim the merits of a soap or a patent medicine throughout the land. Worst of all, the bill-poster has amalgamated with the peripatetic artist of the brush. When the latter first sprang into being, he was a distinct individuality and a most offensive one. Nothing in nature was too sacred for him, indeed, the more sacred, the greater the advertisement. The most magnificent scenery was profaned. The sign-painter often had to stand up to his neck in water, or climb apparently inaccessible peaks, to reach the most striking locality for his "ad." He was hooted by the newspapers, and shot at by enraged worshippers of the beautiful. But no danger, no difficulty, daunted him. The most remarkable of these early pioneers was the owner of a certain Plantation Bitters. He devised an enigmatic inscription, " S. T. 1860. X.," which shortly appeared in every newspaper and on every available fence, rock, tree, bill-board, or barn throughout the country, on wagons, railroad- cars, ships, and steamers. One day all the exposed rocks in the Niagara rapids bloomed out with the mystic sign. Forest-trees along the lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad were hewn down to afford the passengers a glimpse of the same announcement emblazoned in letters four hundred feet high on the mountain-side. Then the manufacturer's agents went abroad. Cheops' pyramid was not too sacred for him, nor the place on Mount Ararat where the Ark is said to have landed. He even announced that he would discover the North Pole for the express purpose of decorating it with the cabalistic words. And what did the words mean ? Many puzzled their heads over them in vain. Not until the proprietor had retired with a fortune did he reveal the secret. " S. T. 1860. X." meant, "Started trade in 1860 with $10." But we have not yet exhausted all the arts of the advertiser. Something should be said about the sad-eyed sandwich-man, braced between two bill- boards and set adrift in the crowded streets ; something also of the various perambulatory advertisements which have been gradually evolved from this simple germ ; of the negro gentleman exquisitely arrayed, save only for a huge standing collar, on which is printed the name of the firm that employs him ; of the army of tall men, all over six feet six inches in height, whom a LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 25 manufacturer of rubber goods clad in long rubber coats, bearing his name and trade-mark, and then cast out on the highways and by-ways of the metrop- olis ; of the countless numbers of men and boys bedecked in fantastic cos- tumes and placed in the streets to distribute circulars. A quarter of a century ago, a London manager invented a new advertising scheme which has been the fruitful parent of many similar devices. A drama 'called "The Dead Heart" was being played at his theatre. He ordered ten hundred thousand hearts to be printed in red, inscribed with the words Dead Heart, and had them posted everywhere, upon the pavements, upon the walls, upon the trees in the parks, upon the seats, and even upon the backs of revellers who were returning home in a convivial but oblivious mood. Twenty years later, one of his imitators devised a still more startling scheme. He was manager of the melodrama "The Mystery of a Hansom Cab." Hiring a number of hansoms, he placed in each the dummy figure of a man in a dress suit, with blood-bespattered shirt, and had them driven through the principal streets. He succeeded even better than he had expected. The ghastly spectacle became the talk of all London. The newspapers denounced it as an atrocity. It was said that nervous people had fainted, that children had screamed, and that ladies had gone off in hysterics. Finally, the authorities gave the lucky manager an additional "ad." by ordering the hansoms back to the stables under pain of arrest. Over in Vienna, a theatrical manager advertised for five thousand cats. The strange announcement attracted general attention. At the appointed day and hour the entrance to the theatre was blocked by a vast crowd of men, women, and children with bags, baskets, or coat-pockets stuffed with cats. The manager bought them all, fixed labels around their necks announcing the first performance of a grand pantomime in the following week, then turned them loose, and let them scamper off in all directions. Of course the manager did not depend merely on the labels. He knew that the novelty of the scheme would set press and public to talking, and he was right in his calculations. A story has recently gone the rounds of the press which is quite good enough to be true. A poor clergyman wishing to buy hymn-books for his congregation at the lowest possible price, a London firm offered to supply him gratuitously with a line of books containing certain advertisements. The minister complied, thinking to himself that, when the books arrived, the ad- vertisements could be removed, but, to his joy and surprise, he found no inter- leaved advertisements. On the first Sunday after the new books had been distributed, the congregation found themselves singing, Hark ! the herald angels sing, Beecham's Pills are just the thing; Peace on earth and mercy mild, Two for man and one for child." Advice. An axiom of proverbial as well as of written philosophy is summed up in this phrase of Hazlitt's : "Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us except the very thing we wish them to do. There is one thing in particular they are always disposed to give us, and which we are as unwilling to take, namely, advice." (Characteristics, No. 88.) Johnson offers an excellent reason both for the willingness on one side and the unwillingness on the other : " Advice, as it always gives a temporary appearance of superi- ority, can never be very grateful, even when it is most necessary or most judicious." (Rambler, No. 87.) If this be true, then it evidently follows, to quote his own words again from a letter to Mrs. Piozzi, "The advice that is wanted is generally unwelcome, and that which is not wanted is generally im- pertinent." Horace Smith, therefore, suggests quite the right attitude towards 26 HANDY-BOOK OF advice, and especially good advice : " Good advice is one of those injuries which a good man ought, if possible, to forgive, but at all events to forget at once." (The Tin Trumpet: Advice.) The ingenuous few that occasionally seem to seek advice really want something else : " We ask advice, but we mean approbation." (CoLTON : Lacon.) Yet Benjamin Franklin has so little worldly wisdom as to say in his " Poor Richard's Almanac," " They that will not be counselled will not be helped." To be sure, he adds almost in the same breath, " We may give advice, but we cannot give conduct," a thought, by the way, which he stole from La Rochefoucauld : " We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it." Saadi, in the " Gulistin," makes a sage remark when he says, " He who gives advice to a self-conceited man stands himself in need of counsel from another." (ch. viii., Rules for Conduct in Life.) But he fails to recognize that all men in this sense are self-conceited. Yet, on the other hand, if Bailey be right, self-conceit should incline them to hearken : " The worst men often give the best advice." (Festus. sc. A Village Feast.) In the face of all this human unwillingness, however, Alphonso the Wise of Castile was bold enough to say, " Had I been present at the Crea- tion, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe." A. E. L O. U. These five vowels were stamped by Frederick III. of Ger- many upon coins and medals, and inscribed upon public buildings. They had originally been used at the coronation of his predecessor, Albert II., then standing for Albertus Electus Imperator Optimus Vivat. At his own coro- nation at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1440, Frederick retained the initials, with this altered meaning, Archidux Electus Imperator Optime Vivat. It became a favorite pastime for learned and ingenious men to fit new readings to the motto. Frederick himself, in a manuscript referred to by the librarian of Leopold I., quoted a flattering German version, Aller Ehren 1st Oesterreich Voll, ("Austria is crowned with all honor,") but it is recorded that he had to remove an equally unflattering inscription in the Burg, Aller Erst 1st Oesterreich Verdorben. Rasch, organist of the Schottencloster, discovered no less than two hundred possible readings, which he gave to the world about 1580. Three of these are especially famous : Austria Erit In Orbe Ultima, "Austria will be the last in the world," and Austriae Est Imperare Orbi Universe, and Alles Erdreich 1st Oesterreich Unterthan, the last being a free translation into German of the Latin of the second. The initial ingenuity of both is retained in the English equivalent : Austria's Empire Is Over all Universal. Affinity. A term made famous by American Free-Lovers, meaning a per- son of the opposite sex who is in such perfect harmony, mentally, spiritually, and physically, with one's self, that a higher law a law above all mere human codes and conventions, and, therefore, above the seventh commandment, which was numbered among human ordinances urged these twain to become one flesh. A complete life or destiny could be fulfilled, not by a single individual, but by a couple. Each must have its affinity. The greater duty of life was to discover this alter ego. It will be seen that this necessitated numerous ex- periments on the way. The Free-Lovers were largely influenced by Goethe's "Elective Affinities," in which human beings are likened to chemical sub- stances that repel or attract one another by eternal laws. Only Goethe hesi- tates to say explicitly that this chemical force thrust upon man by the demoniac powers releases him from personal responsibility. The Free-Lovers not only explicitly stated this, not only asserted that man was excusable, but went fur- ther, and taught that it was his sacred duty to break through the traditional code and satisfy his higher self. The sect became prominent in 1850, and LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 27 established several communities, the most famous being at Oneida, New York. They were a constant target for the humorists. Artemus Ward has an excel- lent bit of fooling on the community at Berlin Heights, Ohio. He describes how he set up his great moral show in the neighborhood, and how the Free- Lovers came flocking round the doors, among them "a perfeckly orful-lookin' female," whose "gownd was skanderlusly short and her trowsis was shameful to behold." The exsentric female clutched me frantically by the arm and hollerd : " You air mine, O you air mine I" " Scarcely," I sed, endeverin to git loose from her. But she clung to me and sed : " You air my Affinerty 1" " What upon arth is that?" I shouted. " Dost thou not know?" " No. I dostent !" " Listen, man, & I'll tell ye !" sed the strange female : " for years I hav yearned for thee. I knowd thou wast in the world, sumwhares, tho I didn't know whare. My hart sed he would cum and I took courage. He has cum he's here you air him you air my Affinerty. O ' " yearn !" I bellered at the top of my voice, throwin' her away from me. Artemus Ward, His Book: Among the Free-Lovers. Agatliocles' Pot. Agathocles, the celebrated tyrant of Syracuse, was originally a potter : in his greatness he always affected extreme humility, having an earthen pot placed beside him at table to remind him of his origin. A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondency, ... a death's-head at your banquet, Agathocles' pot, a Mordecai in your gate, a Lazarus at your door, a lion in your path, . . . the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet. Lamb's Elia : Poor Relations, Agitate, agitate, agitate! This advice, which seems a reminiscence of Demosthenes's "Action, action, action !" (q. v.), was given to the Irish people by the Marquis of Anglesea when Lord Lieutenant of Ireland under the Duke of Wellington. O'Connell caught up the phrase and followed the advice it inculcated. Hence he was known as " the Irish Agitator." But Parnell deemed that a better watchword was "Organize, organize, organize !" Agnostic (Gr. a privative, and yvworof, knowing, known, knowable). One who believes that the finite mind can comprehend only the finite world, and that God and the infinite and the causes that underlie appearances are neces- sarily unknown and unknowable. According to a letter from R. H. Hutton, quoted in the New English Dictionary, sub voce, the word was "suggested by Prof. Huxley at a party held previous to the formation of the now defunct Metaphysical Society, at Mr. James Knowles's house on Clapham Common, one evening in 1869, in my hearing. He took it from St. Paul's mention of the altar to ' the Unknown God.' " Since this letter appeared in print, Prof. Huxley has himself given us the history of the word, in the Nineteenth Century for February, 1889. " When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist, a materialist or an idealist, a Christian or a free-thinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer, until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain 'gnosis,' had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence ; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. . . . This was my situation when I had the good fortune to find a 28 HANDY-BOOK OF place among the members of that remarkable confraternity of antagonists, long since deceased, but of green and pious memory, the Metaphysical Society. Every variety of philosophical and theological opinion was represented there, and expressed itself with entire openness ; most of my colleagues were ists of one sort or another ; and, however kind and friendly they might be, I, the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with, could not fail to have some of the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic.' It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the ' Gnostic' of Church history who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant, and I took the earliest oppor- tunity of parading it at our society, to show that I, too, had a tail like the other foxes. To my great satisfaction, the term took ; and when the Spectator had stood godfather to it, any suspicion in the minds of respectable people that a knowledge of its parentage might have awakened was, of course, com- pletely lulled." (Reprinted in Christianity and Agnosticism: a Controversy. New York, 1889.) Agony. To pile on the agony, originally an Americanism, is now a common locution on both sides of the Atlantic, meaning to use harrowing details for the purpose of intensifying a narrative or a statement. So far back as 1857, Charlotte Bronte writes in a letter, " What climax there is does not come on till near the conclusion ; and even then I doubt whether the regular novel-reader will consider the 'agony piled sufficiently high' (as the Ameri- cans say) or the colors dashed on to the canvas with the proper amount of daring." (GASKELL : Life of Charlotte Bronte, ch. xxv.) Agony Column. The name familiarly given to the second column of the first page of the London Times, containing advertisements similar to those which in American papers are grouped under the head of Personals. But they often exhibit a frantic exuberance of capitals, exclamation-marks, and interjections, and make lurid exhibitions of private and personal matters which are well-nigh unknown to the advertising columns of cis-Atlantic jour- nals. Sometimes they are written in cipher, or some mutually-agreed-on arrangement of words, and many a line that reads like the purest gibberish carries sorrow or gladness to the eye that reads the secret. Yet even ciphers have been found dangerous. There are everywhere certain ingenious busy- bodies (i.e., bodies who have nothing to busy themselves with) that make a study of this column, and, finding a key to the cipher in which a clandestine correspondence is carried on, insert a marplot advertisement, sometimes for the mere fun of the thing, sometimes to stop an intrigue that is nearly ripe for execution. The agony column itself is evidence of this. For you often find the real agents in a correspondence notifying each other that such and such an advertisement was not inserted by authority. (See CIPHER.) A large number of the advertisements relate to prodigal sons and truant husbands. Now, you and I have never run away and hid from our families ; probably no one in our set of acquaintances ever has. Yet the fact remains that there is a certain percentage of the human race to whom the temptation to run away is irresistible. By a more or less happy dispensation, they seem to be blessed with relatives of exceptional clemency, who, instead of leaving them alone like Bopeep's sheep, implore them through the Times and other papers to come home to a steaming banquet of veal. They frequently wind up by promising the fugitive that everything will be arranged to his satisfaction, which surely ought to prove a tempting bait, for to have everything arranged to one's satisfaction is a condition rarely realized. Of course the promise is LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 29 vague. It is therefore encouraging to run across an advertisement that deals with particulars and not with glittering generalities, e.g., as when on October s 2, 1851, a fugitive who is spoken of as "The Minstrel Boy" (probably in a fine vein of sarcasm, for among the items of personal description appears "no ear for music") is thus addressed: " Pray return to your disconsolate . friends. All will be forgiven, and Charlie will give up the front room." Another favorite way of luring the victim back is to threaten that all sorts of calamities will visit the family he has left behind. Thus, P. P. P. is im- plored for mercy's sake to write again : " If not, your wretched father will be a maniac, and your poor unhappy mother will die broken-hearted." Here is a still more pathetic appeal, ludicrous, however, in the very midst of its pathos : "To A .... If humanity has not entirely flown from your breast, return, oh, return, ere it is too late, to the heart-broken, distracted wife you have forsaken, ere the expression of those soft eyes that won you be lost in the bewildered stare of insanity, ere they may gaze even on you and know you not ; write, tell her, oh ! tell her where you are, that she may follow you her own, her all and die. See her once more." Here is an example that shifts with strange abruptness from entreaty to threats : " I entreat you to keep to your word, or it may be fatal. Laws were made to bind the villains of society." The neat laconicism of the following has even more merit : PHILIP. Would PHILIP like to hear of his MOTHER'S DEATH ? A sad little history is summed up in the following advertisements, the last two being, of course, an answer to the first : July 15, 18, 22, and 25, 1850. THE ONE- WINGED DOVE must die unless the CRANE returns to be a shield against her enemies. November 23, 1850. SOMERSET, S. B. THE MATE of the DOVE must take wing forever unless a material change takes place. J. B. November 26, 1850. THE MATE of the DOVE bids a final FAREWELL. ADIEU to the British Isles, although such a resolution cannot be accomplished without poignant grief. W. Undoubtedly there is a romance also behind these three advertisements, which followed one another at considerable intervals; but the reader will have to build one up to suit himself: March 24, 1849. No DOORMAT To-NiGHT. March 28, 1850. DOORMAT and BEANS To-NiGHT. May 28, 1851. DOORMAT To-NiGHT. Was this a love-message ? Was DOORMAT the agreed-upon symbol for a grim Paterfamilias, a jealous husband ? Did the mice, anxious for play, ac- quaint each other in this fashion that the cat was or was not away ? And what connection did DOORMAT have with BKANS ? Idle, idle questions ! As well ask " what songs the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women." A curious advertisement, that tells its own story, appears on May 21, 1838. The advertiser, who gives his real name and address, states that some years previous he had saved the life of an English nobleman by rescuing him from drowning, but that he withdrew himself, " not to receive the unbounded thanks and generous reward of an English gentleman." Now, however, he intimates that a correspondence with the family might be pleasing to them and a source 30 HANDY-BOOK OF of happiness to himself. Of course this ingenious gentleman wanted love and money, that is to say, he wanted money pressed on him with many expressions of gratitude. Very likely he deserved it. Certainly his way of asking for it was very pretty. What could be more happy than the hint about the generous reward ? But the most extraordinary series of advertisements that ever appeared in any paper, a series extending over a period of fifteen years and hinting at all sorts of mystery, romance, crime, and even madness, was contributed mainly by a gentleman whose real name, E. J. Wilson, is occasionally signed, while more frequently he masquerades under the initials E. W. or E. J. W., or under pseudonymes that would be baffling but for the unerring evidence of style. That he was a man who had suffered a good deal, and that his sorrows had unhinged his reason, is apparent enough, for the advertisements are couched in precisely the language which seems impressive to people of de- ranged minds. Moreover, he has an insane belief in his own virtues, impor- tance, and abilities. " I claim to rank with Cobden, Bright, and Rowland Hill," he says in one place, and elsewhere he asserts that he is the author of "the decimal system at Her Majesty's Customs which pours pure gold every day into the coffers of the nation." How far, therefore, his sorrows are the result of hallucination it is not possible to say. Nor is it possible to make a perfectly consistent and coherent whole out of the staccato story of his wrongs as revealed in these advertisements. But the main outlines seem to be that he was a man of fortune with an important position in the British Customs Office, that he married a Hebrew lady, that his family and friends quarrelled with him, apparently over some smuggling scheme of which he disapproved and in whose spoils he refused to participate, that his wife and his infant daughter were spirited away from him (he seems to hint that the wife eloped with a lover, but this she indignantly denies), and that he spent a large portion of his life, and lost fortune, place, and position, in the effort to regain the daughter. So much being premised, a few selections here and there from the voluminous communications of Mr. Wilson and the rare answers of his wife may be foundjnteresting, may pique curiosity, at least, if not satisfy it. Here is almost the first of the series : HONEST, HONEST ALEXIS ! What a strange coincidence ! Remove the last syllable, and there was once a great man, one of tfie self-constituted sacred race, known by that cognomen, whom I for which, of course, I shall never be forgiven transformed as I intend to serve many more into a city spectre. Honest, honest Alexis 1 May that never be your fate. Candour would then indeed be wronged. E. W. To this frantic expostulation Alexis (very naturally) answers, " What are you alluding to ? SEND YOUR ADDRESS. Do it immediately. I was much disappointed at not receiving it on Saturday, and have been in the greatest agony ever since. You are freely forgiven ; extend your mercy to Alexis." E. W. seems to have preferred continuing the correspondence through the columns of the Times. On March 19 he explains that he was alluding to " the customs," and adds, " You will only deceive the superficial fools of the nation." Alexis evidently gets very wroth, and four days later inserts the following : E. W., author of anonymous correspondence, look at home. Conscience does not accuse me of even attempting to deceive. You have, however, been playing the game of deception several years, until, judging from your exasperated feeling, you are at last tired that your bait has not taken. Have you a conscience? This is doubted by some, whilst others think you have, but that it dwells far beneath its usual seat. Alexis bids you farewell. Alexis is evidently the wife. Apparently she flees to Norway or Sweden, for a month or two later we find an impassioned appeal "to the pearl of the great eastern sea, the blue-eyed maid of Israel, who keeps watch near the LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 31 fmpassable gate of dreary Scandinavia : You cost one great man his place, and will also cost a great many more their place." Does Mr. Wilson refer to himself as the great man? Not unlikely. In January his wife, who now appears to be in Hammersmith, England, conjures him to call on her. "A wilful error," she says, "is maintained against justice and truth to oppose my right. Why not come immediately?" But, instead of going, E. J. W. simply inserts the word SILENCE! in the Agony column for January 15, which leads to the following interchange of mysteries : January 18, 1853. SILENCE, where ? January 19, 1853. WHERE? Has my vision been fulfilled, or does vice prevail? That is the question. E. J. W. Same date, lower down. SILENCE, WHERE? Why ! " Silence in the Metropolis !" Silence on the railway is good, but "Silence in the Metropolis" is excessively belter! Possibly there is a veiled allusion here to his address. For on the 2ist, E. J. W., apparently in answer to some communication by letter, inserts the word "INCORRUPTIBLE" with his initials. And on the 25th he celebrates his own incorruptibility in song : DIOGENES HIS LANTERN NEEDS NO MORE, An honest man is found, the search is o'er. Incorruptible E. J. W. More nonsense of a similar kind follows. Then, on February 8, the wife appears once more to be heard from : " G Arthur and E. J. W. are inex- cusable in absenting themselves from the two indescribables. Do not leave under a wilful delusion. . . . All communication is intercepted in England and abroad, and our reputations calumniated to render us homeless and friend- less. Deceit prevails." The plot has now thickened, and conjecture can make only the vaguest surmises. Nothing more appears until March 24, when E. J. W. says, " FLY BY NIGHT has got the ANCHOR. Corruption wins, and England's lost." On March 30 the tables appear to be turned : "ACHIL- LES has GOT the LEVER. Corruption sinks, and virtue swims. E. J. W." Again more nonsense follows, then an interval of silence. At last E. J. W. cries out, Je veux voir mafille: a little later (June 27, 1854), " I'll not touch the money. It's stolen property ;" and exactly a year later, " I tell you again I'll not touch the money. But where's my child ?" It would almost seem that he was finally persuaded to reconsider his determination, whatever it was, for on September 29, 1855, he writes, PITY yes. The future of a buried heart and conscience ! It is more than unfeeling to seize the unhappy hour of a weak and erring heart to influence it to violate its whole nature, abandon the tenderest ties, and make it forever bankrupt of every true and proper feeling. Remorse, and one day you will feel it. On November i, 1855, he breaks out, By that bitter cup you have given, and I drank to the dregs; . . . by promises made to those now no more, I will see you. Be true to yourself and to me. Oh, M'y, M'y ! I would save you the pangs of error, God forbid of crime, and though the passion, jealousy, hate, and madness you have excited be scorned and denied, when the serpent you foster is wearied, yea, even then, here is your haven, when all forsake. Once more she insists, You are deceived. Those now no more were deceived. I foster none, but am true to ties of happier days. Open to me a communication and a public investigation. Mary. There is now a silence of many months. Then in July, 1857, advertise- ments again break out, hinting at some mysterious money transactions under the headings, " NICHT EINE MILLION," "GENUG FUR ALLES," etc. They seem to have resulted in E. J. W. receiving back his daughter. But he retained 32 HANDY-BOOK OF her only a short time, though he had signed away his fortune for her. Here is the most lucid of many notices relating to this double loss : To B. C. Z. You don't know their antecedents (rouge et noir). I have never seen any of my money from the day I nobly signed it away ; and I did not see my child for five years, and yet I respected the laws of humanity ; and you see the return 1 have lust my daughter a second time. He never saw her again, apparently, though he managed to establish a cor- respondence with her in French through the Agony column. Then this breaks off and another silence ensues, which is sufficiently explained by this notice, dated October 12, 1865 : THE HEART OF STONE. Fifteen years of gloomiest depression, and long, sad hours of pain and sorrow, have made me what I am ; but the idol of our mutual affection having now passed into a better life, " He^rt of Stone" will relent if " Martyr," with meekness and sub- mission befitting her self-adopted title, consents to the condition stated in a former communi- cation to Mr. Pollaky, Private Inquiry Office, 13, Paddington Green ; until then no meeting can or shall take place. On October 18, "Martyr" signifies her acquiescence in the conditions, with certain reservations, apparently pecuniary. With all his old-time nobility of nature, Heart of Stone replies, After so many years of lacerating agony, what are riches to me? and now that our idol is no more, I do not press further your acceptance of clause 5. Let our meeting take place on the approaching anniversary of an event so indelibly impressed on the memory of us both ; and may the solemnity of our reconciliation at the hour of our reunion not be profaned by the faintest suspicion of parsimony. I will communicate to Mr. Pollaky the exact time and place of meeting. And so the curtain falls on the couple. Whether they made mutual and satisfactory explanations, whether they were happy ever after, we have no means of discovering. Agreeing to differ. This now familiar phrase dates back to Sidney's "Arcadia," Book I. : "Between these two persons [Dametas and Miso], who never agreed in any humor but in disagreeing, is issued forth Mistress Mopsa, a fit woman to partake of both their perfections." Southey, in his " Life of Wes- ley," has the ipsissima verba "agreed to differ." The more antithetic phrase "agreeing to disagree" is now more common. So I have talked with Betsey, and Betsey has talked with me, And we have agreed together that we can't never agree. WILL CARLETON : farm Ballads : Betsey and I are Out. Albe, a nickname which Shelley and his companions applied to Byron. It is a contraction of Albanese or Albaneser, and is an allusion to the noble lord's fondness for that people, which he carried to so great an extent as to become their blood-brother by adoption. This fact is made plain by the alter- native form Albaneser appearing in a letter from Shelley to his wife, written from Venice, August 23, 1818. Yet critics who are fond of mares' nests have spent a deal of ingenious conjecture on the term. Mr. Forman suggests that Albe was formed from the initials L. B. == Lord Byron. Another would make it an abbreviation of Albemarle Street, whence the poems of Byron were issued. And a third, with a subtlety of roundabout surmise that is worthy of all praise, finds an explanation in a romance by Mine. Cottin, entitled "Claire d'Albe," which Shelley admired so much that he encouraged his first wife to translate it into English. Now, if Byron's Claire was ever dubbed Claire d'Albe, Byron himself might become Albe ! Albion Perfide (F., "Perfidious Albion"). This phrase is generally at- tributed to Napoleon. But though he undoubtedly used it, the idea long ante- dated him. Thus, in Perlin's " Description des Royaulmes d'Angleterre et d'Ecosse" (1558) : " One may say of the English that in war they are not strong, LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 33 and in peace they are not faithful. As the Spaniard says, Angleterre bonne terre mala gente" (England, good country, bad people). On the other hand, Misson, in his "Travels" (1719), says, "I cannot imagine what could occasion the notion I have frequently observed in France that the English were treach- erous. It is certainly great injustice to reckon treachery among the vices familiar to the English." The following lines are said to have been composed by Philip of Valois on the occasion of Edward III.'s invasion of France : Angelas est Anglus cui nunquam fidere fas est : Dum ubi dicet ave, sicut ab hoste cave. Grozaetus ex Gaguino, in Hist. Franc. Aldine, a name given to the books that issued from the press o Aldus Manutius (Latinized form of Aldo Manuzio) and his family in Venice. These, from their historic interest in the annals of printing and their intrinsic ex- cellence, have always been held in high repute by book-lovers, especially the publications of Aldus himself. A generous love of classic literature was Aldus's main motive when, in 1490, he founded the great house which, after revolutionizing the art of printing and book-making, went out of existence in 1597. The Aldine publications consist of editiones principes of ancient classics and corrected texts of the more modern Italians, with grammars, philologies, and other works of erudition. They are even now reckoned with manuscripts among the critical apparatus of scholars. Aldus, or rather his engraver, Francesco of Bologna, invented what they called cursive types (i.e., italics), which were first used in the edition of Virgil published in 1501, a volume memorable, also, as the first octavo ever issued. Printing now became one of the fine arts. The success of the Aldine editions led to piratical counterfeits in Lyons and Florence, which even imitated the dolphin twined round an anchor, which was the Aldine trade-mark, and the alternative mottoes, " Fes- tina lente" or " Sudavit et alsit." Aldus himself complained bitterly of these pirates: "The paper of these books is second-rate, and even smells badly." They remain to this day a puzzle and a despair to amateur book-collectors, but an expert can tell the genuine not only by the superior quality of the paper used, but by the fact that the consonants are attached to the vowels as in writing, while in the counterfeits they stand apart. Alexanders at five sous a day. This is a phrase which Voltaire applied to soldiers. Is it the origin of the popular American locution for the shadow or imitator of a great original : A little Washington (or Blaine, or Cleveland, or what not) for a cent? Certainly in France it has given rise to a similar expression. For example, Emile Faguet (" Dix-huitieme Siecle," 1890, p. 193) says, "Voltaire n'a pas ete artiste pour un obole" ( <; Voltaire was not an artist for a cent"), or, in other words, was not at all an artist. Alexander the Corrector, a title assumed by Alexander Cruden (1701- 1770), the compiler of the famous Concordance of the Bible, who had been employed in various printing-offices as corrector of the press, but who used it in the higher sense of one divinely appointed to correct the morals of the nation, with especial regard to swearing and the neglect of Sabbatical obser- vances. He petitioned Parliament for a formal appointment as a corrector for the reformation of the people, and, being confined for a brief period in an insane asylum, published an account of his detention in "The Adventures of Alexander the Corrector." (See a review in Gentleman's Magazine, xxiv. 50.) Alexandra limp. One of the absurdest fads of toadying imitation. Princess Alexandra walks with a slight limp. Immediately after her mar- riage with the Prince of Wales (in 1860), an epidemic of lameness broke out among the petticoated hangers-on of royalty, which soon spread through all the female world of England, until it was happily laughed out of existence. 34 HANDY-BOOK OF Alive and kicking, a common saying, meaning very much alive. The allusion is to a child in the womb after quickening. All-fired, in English and American slang, inordinate, violent, immoderate. Not unlikely it is a euphemistic corruption of " hell-fired." " I know I be so all-fired jealous I can't bear to hear o" her talking, let alone writing, to you." T. HUGHES: Tom Brown at Oxford. All fours, To go or run on, a familiar expression, meaning to go on smoothly, successfully. Coke quotes it as an ancient saying : " But no simile holds on everything, according to the ancient saying, Nullum simile quatuor pedibu&currit." The saying is still a common form of comparison with law- yers to imply that two things exactly agree. Alliteration. The repetition of some letter or sound at the beginning of two or more words in close or immediate succession, as, Apt alliteration's artful aid, a line by Churchill, which illustrates while it characterizes. In the hands of a master, alliteration becomes a legitimate source of metric effect ; in those of a bungler, it is a vexation to the spirit. The mere literary trifler finds in it a medium for more or less astonishing yet entirely valueless tours de force. Alliteration is the parent of modern rhyme. In Icelandic and Gothic poetry it was reduced to a system which soon passed into our literature and became the metrical basis of early English poetry. Here is an example from Piers Plowman : By Saint Paul, quoth /"erkin, Ye ^rofer me fayre, That I shall jwynke and jwete And jowe for us bothe And other /abors do for thy /ove Al my /yfe tyme, In covenant that thou eep Holy Kyrke and myselfe Fro roasters and fro wycked men That this world destroyeth, etc. There is here an agreeable repetition of the same initial at the most em- phatic pauses of the verse. As a rule, three such letters were allowed in every couplet, two in the first member of the distich, the other in a prominent part of the second. Thus the attention was arrested and the structure of the verse indicated by a dominant letter which ruled like the key-note of a chant. With the modern as with the classical poets, alliteration is only brought in as an occasional ornament, not as a structural part of the verse. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Tennyson, are especially happy in their use of it. But these great artists are careful to place their alliterative words at some dis- tance, making them answer to one another at the beginning and end of a period, or so arranging them that they mark the metre and become the key-words of the line : thus, Heard ye the arrow hurtle in the air? is fine, but the music would be ruined by a very slight transposition : Heard ye the hurtling arrow in the air? In the former case the ear is satisfied by a repetition of the h sound which it had just begun to lose ; in the latter it is annoyed by the too quick suc- cession of another aspirant. Generally the repeated letter is found at the beginning of words, though it may occur in the second or final syllable, but in either case that syllable must be the accented part of the word, e.g. : That hushed in grim re/ose expects his evening /rey. Gray. LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 35 Here, culled almost at random from the masters of metre, are some speci- mens of successful alliteration : They cheerly chaunt, and rhymes at random flung. Spenser. The churlish chiding of the winter's wind. Shakespeare. In maiden meditation, fancy free. Shakespeare. God never made his work for man to mend. Dryden. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free. Coleridge. The rapture of repose. Byron. No gift beyond that bitter boon, our birth. Byron. The fervent underlip, and that above, Lifted with laughter or abashed with love, Thine amorous girdle, full of thee and fair, And leavings of the lilies in thine hair. Swinburne. Dip down upon the Northern shore, O sweet new year, delaying long, Thou dost expectant Nature wrong, Delaying long delay no more. Tennyson. In the example from Swinburne, the sounds of f, /, and ab, and in that from Tennyson, the sounds of d, n, and /, are interlinked with wondrous harmonic result. But harmony is not the only guerdon won by alliteration. The value of dissonance in heightening an effect, in giving force to a figure, in making the sound an echo of the sense, has often been proved. In Pope's famous line, Up the high hill he heaved the huge round stone, the continuous halts called for by the repetition of the aspirate produce a very effective idea of long-drawn effort. Almost as good is Young's But the black blast blows hard. The following, from Alfred Austin's " Season," is less known, but is well worth quoting : Be dumb, ye dawdlers, whilst his spells confound The gathered scattered symphonies of sound ; Cymbals barbaric clang, cowed flutes complain, As the sharp, cruel clarion cleaves the strain ; To drum, deaf-bowelled, drowning sob and wail, Seared viols shriek, that pity may prevail, Till with tumultuous purpose swift and strong Sweeps the harmonious hurricane of song. It is not only in serious writing, however, that alliteration has been found effective. In mock-heroic verse, in burlesque, and even in humorous prose, it frequently points a jest and sharpens an epigram. In Pope's line, Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux, at once the resemblance and the contrasts are accentuated by the recurrent p's and 's. Sydney Smith's humor was greatly assisted by his clever use of this artifice. He thus ridicules Perceval's scheme to prevent the introduction of medicines into France during a pestilence : " At what period was this great plan of conquest and constipation fully developed ? In whose mind was the idea of destroying the pride and the plasters of France first engendered ? Without castor oil they might for some months, to be sure, have carried on the war, but can they do without bark ? Depend upon it, the absence of the materia medica will soon bring them to their senses, and the cry of Bourbon and Bolus burst forth from the Baltic to the Mediterranean." And elsewhere he likens the poorer clergy to Lazarus, " doctored by dogs, and comforted with crumbs." Curran describes a politician as one who, " buoyant by putre- faction, rises as he rots." The antithesis and alliteration of the last four words 36 HANDY-BOOK OF have a tremendous effect. Voltaire's farewell to Holland is a classic : " Adieu, canaux, canards, canaille." Very good, too, is the following from Mortimer Collins, characterizing a bishop in "The Princess Clarice" as one "who had the respect of rectors, the veneration of vicars, the admiration of archdeacons, and the cringing courtesy of curates." Grattan, denouncing the British mon- archy, said, "Their only means of government are the guinea and the gallows." One of Lord Salisbury's happiest phrases was, "The dreary drip of dilatory declamation." Byron's lines also will recur to the memory : Beware, lest blundering Brougham destroy the sale, Turn beefs to bannocks, cauliflower to kail. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. The following epigram upon Bishop Pretyman (afterwards known as Bishop Tomline) has merit : Prim Preacher, Prince of Priests and Prince's Priest, Pembroke's pale pride in Pitt's praecordia placed, Thy merits shall all future ages scan, And Prince be lost in Parson Pretyman. That the ear finds a natural comfort in this species of assonance is evidenced by the fact that many of our compound words are formed on this principle. There is no other ground for saying milkmaid in lieu of milk-girl, or butcher- boy in liau of butcher-man. Fancy-free, hot-headed, browbeaten, heavy- handed, and the like, might also be instanced. Nay, the alliterative tendency is continued in our proverbs, which derive therefrom much of their pith and point : as, Where there is a will there is a way, Money makes the mare to go, Many a mickle makes a muckle, Love me little, love me long, etc. The same trick is observable in the proverbial literature of other countries. But alliteration becomes a defect when excessively and injudiciously em- ployed. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was allowed to run riot. Trapp's Commentary on the Bible offers the follovning gems : " As empty stomachs can hardly sleep, so neither can graceless persons, till gorged and glutted with sweetmeats of sin, with murdering morsels of mischief," and " Such a hoof is grown over some men's hearts as neither ministry, nor mir- acle, nor mercy can possibly mollify." About this time, too, books were sent out into the world burdened with such curious alliterative titles as " Seven Sobs of a Sorrowful Soul for Sins," and " A Sigh of Sorrow for the Sinners of Zion." But, indeed, even Dr. Johnson published a pamphlet under the title of "Taxation no Tyranny," "a jingling alliteration," says Macaulay, " which he ought to have despised." It is in ridicule of this alliterative affectation that Shakespeare in " Love's Labor's Lost" makes Holofernes say, I will something affect the letter, for it argues facility : The playful princess pierced and pricked a pretty, pleasing pricket. Of parody of this sort, however, the most astonishing example may be found in a certain poetical skit, anonymous and unacknowledged, yet none the less the undoubted handiwork of Swinburne, and therefore all the more notable, because the author parodied is Swinburne himself! NEPHELIDIA. From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine, Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float, Are the-looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic, miraculous moon- shine? These that we feel in the blood of our blushes that thicken and threaten with throbs through the throat ? Thicken and thrill as a theatre thronged at appeal of an actor's appalled agitation, Fainter with fear of the fires of the future than pale with the promise of pride in the past ; LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 37 Flushed with the furnishing fulness of fever that reddens with radiance of rathe recreation, Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of the gloaming when ghosts go aghast ? Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror, Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death ; Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic, emotional, exquisite error, Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath. Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh ; Only this oracle opens Olympian in mystical moods and triangular tenses, " Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day when we die." Mild is the mirk and monotonous music of memory, melodiously mute as it may be, While the hope in the heart of a hero is bruised by the breach of men's rapiers, resigned to the rod ; Made meek as a mother whose bosom-beats bound with the bliss-bringing bulk of a balm- breathing baby, As they grope through the graveyard of creeds under skies glowing green at a groan for the grimness of God. Blank is the book of his bounty beholden of old, and its binding is blacker than bluer : Out of blue into black is the scheme of the skies, and their dews are the wine of the blood- shed of things ; Till the darkling desire of delight shall be free as a fawn that is freed from the fangs that pursue her, Till the heart-beats of hell shall be hushed by a hymn from j the hunt that has harried the kennel of kings. And this brings us to all that class of triflers who have used alliteration, not as an ornament, but as an exercise of more or less misplaced" ingenuity. Latin literature probably affords the very earliest instance in this line of Ennius : O The, tute Tati tibi tanta tiranne tulisti. In more modern times we are told of a monk named Hugbald who wrote an " Ecloga de Calvis," every word beginning with e, and of a certain "Publium Porcium, poetam," who so signed a Latin poem of one hundred lines, to be found in the Nugae Venates, every word of which begins with a/. Here is a single couplet : Propterea properans Proconsul, poplite prono, Precipitem Plebem, pro patrum pace proposcit. We even hear of a more prodigious effort, extending to one thousand lines, each word beginning with c, the " Christus Crucifixus" of Christianus Pierius : Consilebratulae, cunctorum, carmine, certum, etc. The famous English couplet on Cardinal Wolsey has somewhat more than this mere verbal dexterity to recommend it : Begot by butchers, but by bishops bred, How high his honor holds his haughty head ! Here the very uncouthness in the persistent recurrence of similar sounds gives the effect of cumulative scorn and contempt. No such allowance, how- ever, can be made for the eccentric traveller Lithgow, who wrote a poem in which every word begins with &g. Here are the first two lines : Glance glorious Geneve, gospel-guiding gem, Great God govern good Geneve's ghostly game. A curious little volume called " Songs of Singularity, by the London Hermit," published quite recently, contains the following tour de force: ~ A SERENADE In M flat. Sung by Major Marmaduke Mutiinhead to Mademoiselle Madeline Mendosa Marriott. My Madeline ! my Madeline ! Mark my melodious midnight moans, Much may my melting music mean, My modulated monotones. 38 HANDY-BOOK OF My mandolin's mild minstrelsy, My mental music magazine, My mouth, my mind, my memory, Must mingling murmur " Madeline." Muster 'mid midnight masquerade, Mark Moorish maidens, matrons' mien, "Mongst Murcia's most majestic maids. Match me my matchless Madeline. Mankind's malevolence may make Much melancholy music mine ; Many my motives may mistake, My modest merits much malign. My Madeline's most mirthful mood Much mollifies my mind's machine; My mournfulness's magnitude Melts makes me merry, Madeline I Match-making ma's may machinate, Manoeuvring misses me misween ; Mere money may make many mate ; My magic motto's " Madeline." Melt, most mellifluous melody, 'Midst Murcia's misty mounts marine, Meet me by moonlight marry me, Madonna mia ! Madeline. A famous example of alliterative poetry is the following, in which the initial letters of the lines are those of the alphabet in proper sequence, forming a sort of acrostic. It is positively claimed for Alaric A. Watts by his son. There are other claimants, however : THE SIEGE OF BELGRADE. " Ardentem aspicio atque arrectis auribus asto." Virgil. An Austrian army, awfully arrayed, Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade ; Cossack commanders cannonading come, Dealing destruction's devastating doom ; Every endeavor engineers essay For fame, for fortune, forming furious fray ; Gaunt gunners grapple, giving gashes good ; Heaves high his head, heroic hardihood ; Ibraham, Islam, Ismail, imps in ill. Jostle John, Jarovlitz, Jem, Joe, Jack, Jill, Kick kindling Kutosoff, kings' kinsmen kill , Labor low levels loftiest, longest lines ; Men marched 'mid moles, 'mid mounds, 'mid murd'rous mines. Now nightfall's near, now needful nature nods, Opposed, opposing, overcoming odds. Poor peasants, partly purchased, partly pressed, Quite quaking, Quarter ! quarter ! quickly quest. Reason returns, recalls redundant rage, Saves sinking soldiers, softens seigniors sage. Truce, Turkey, truce ! truce, treach'rous Tartar train ! Unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine ! Vanish, vile vengeance ! vanish, victory vain ! Wisdom wails war wails warring words. What were Xerxes, Xantippe, Ximenes, Xavier? Yet Yassy's youth, ye yield your youthful yest, Zealously, Zarius, zealously zeal's zest. The above has been often imitated. Here, taken almost at random, are a few specimens that almost equal their great prototype : LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 39 BRISEIS. Achilles, angered, anxious, and aggrieved, Beheld Briseis, beauteous but bereaved, Conducted captive, cautiously conveyed, Dreading departure, desolate, dismayed, Escorting envoys earnestly entreat From frightened fair forbearance, free from fret ; Giving glad gratulations gayly given, How, heralding her happiness, high Heaven Immutably involves in its intent Joys jocund, juvenescent joys, Jove-sent, King's knabbing knights, kidnapping klepted kid. Love-lorn, lamenting, lady, lingering, lead, Meeting Mycenae's monarch mournfully Near nodding navies numerously nigh. " O opulent o'erruler, owned, obeyed, Propitious prove," Pelides' princess prayed. " Quench quarrellings, quit quaking quarry's quest, Receive rich ransom, ravishment resist." Supremely selfish, stubborn sovereign sought To tyrannize that timid trembler's thought, Until Ulysses, undismayed, uncowed, Vindictive vengeance vehemently vowed. Whereat worn warrior, wild with wonderment, 'Xhibiting 'xtremity's 'xtent, Yields yearningly ye yokemate youthful yet, Zeus-fearing, Zeus-obeying, Zeus-beset. Again Achilles, armed against attack, Beheld Briseis blushingly brought back. ADDRESS TO THE AURORA. An Alliterative Poem. (Lines written on shipboard in mid-ocean.) Awake, Aurora ! and across all airs By brilliant blazon banish boreal bears. Crossing cold Canooe's celestial crown, Deep darts descending dive delusive down. Entranced each eve Europa's every eye Firm fixed forever fastens faithfully, Greets golden guerdon gloriously grand ; How holy Heaven holds high his hollow hand ! Ignoble ignorance, inapt indeed, Jeers jestingly just Jupiter's jereed : Knavish Kamschatkans, knightly Kurdsmen know, Long Labrador's light lustre looming low ; Midst myriad multitudes majestic might, No nature nobler numbers Neptune's night, Opal of Oxus or old Ophir's ores. Pale pyrrhic pyres prismatic purple pours, Quiescent quivering, quickly, quaintly, queer, Rich, rosy, regal rays resplendent rear; Strange shooting streamers streaking starry skies Trail their triumphant tresses trembling ties. Unseen, unhonored Ursa, underneath, Veiled, vanquished vainly vying vanisheth : Wild Woden, warning, watchful whispers wan Xanthitic Xeres, Xerxes, Xenophon, Yet yielding yesternight yule's yell yawns Zenith's zebraic zigzag, Zodiac zones. BUNKER HILL MONUMENT CELEBRATION. Americans arrayed and armed attend ; Beside battalions bold, bright beauties blend Chiefs, clergy, citizens conglomerate, Detesting despots, daring deeds debate; Each eye emblazoned ensigns entertain, Flourishing from far, fan freedom's flame. Guards greeting guards grown gray, guest greeting guest. 40 HANDY-BOOK OF High-minded heroes hither homeward haste. Ingenuous juniors join in jubilee, Kith kenning kin, kind knowing kindred key. Lo, lengthened lines lend Liberty liege love, Mixed masses, marshalled, Monument-ward move. Note noble navies near, no novel notion, Oft our oppressors overawed old ocean; Presumptuous princes, pristine patriuts paled, Queens' quarrel questing quotas quondam quailed. Rebellion roused, revolting ramparts rose. Stout spirits, smiting servile soldiers, strove. These thrilling themes, to thousands truly told, Usurpers' unjust usages unfold. Victorious vassals, vauntings vainly veiled, Where, whilesince, Webster warlike Warren wailed. 'Xcuse 'xpletives 'xtra-queer 'xpressed, Yielding Yankee yeomen zest. Alma Mater (L., "fostering mother"), originally the title given by the Romans to Ceres, Cybele, and other goddesses, but in modern use applied by students to the college or seminary in which they have been educated. The student in his turn is frequently called an adopted son. There is something in the affection of our Alma Mater which changes the nature of her adopted sons ; and let them come from wherever they may, she soon alters them and makes it evident that they belong to the same brood. Harvard Register, p. 377. Almighty Dollar, an Americanism for mammon, the love of gold, seems to have been first used by so classic a writer as Washington Irving: "The Almighty Dollar, that great object of universal devotion throughout our land, seems to have no genuine devotee in these peculiar villages." ( Wolferfs Roost: A Creole Village.) Yet, after all, as Farmer points out, this is merely an old friend with a new face, for Ben Jonson used the term in its modern sense when speaking of money : Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold, And almost every vice, Almightie gold. Epistle to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland. Alone. Never less alone than when alone. Cicero originated this apt and striking paradox in his "De Officiis," lib. iii. ch. i. : "Nunquam se minus otiosum esse, quam quum otiosus, nee minus solum, quam quum solus esset." (" He is never less at leisure than when at leisure, nor less alone than when he is alone.") Gibbon in his "Memoirs," vol. i., page 117, has borrowed the expression : " I was never less alone than when by myself." And Rogers has versified it in " Human Life :" Then never less alone than when alone. Byron has slightly varied the phrase in " Childe Harold," stanza 90 : In solitude, when we are least alone. Epictetus ("Discourses," ch. xiv.) may have had Cicero's words in mind when he wrote, " When you have shut your doors, and darkened your room, remember never to say that you are alone ; but God is within, and your genius is within, and what need have they of light to see what you are doing?" Alphabetic Diversions. The twenty-six letters of the alphabet may be transposed 620,448,401,733,239,439,369,000 times. This should be good news to all that class of people known as authors, whose business and profit it is to transpose these letters with more or less brilliant and remunerative result. For all the inhabitants of the globe could not in a thousand million of years write out all the possible transpositions of the twenty-six letters, even sup- posing that each wrote forty pages daily, each page containing forty different transpositions of the letters. Of course the transpositions possible to author- LI7ERARY CURIOSITIES. 41 ship necessarily limited by the laws of grammar, rhetoric, and occasional common sense are not so inexhaustible. Nevertheless, it is quite safe to say that so long as language endures it will always be possible for the man of genius to say an original thing. Yet it is strange to note how long it took the human race to discover that a score or so of orthoepic symbols would suffice for all the needs of written speech. Nor was the discovery a sudden one, the independent inspiration of any race or period. It was the result of evolution taking place in accordance with fixed laws. All the known graphic systems originated in a picture-writing as rude as that of the American Indian or the African Bushman, and progressed by a slow and painful transition through the conventionalized hieroglyphs representing an idea or a word to the sylla- bary which denoted the phonetic value of syllables or portions of words, and thence to the final perfection of the alphabet, denoting the elementary sounds into which all words and syllables could in the last analysis be reduced. And from the clearest and simplest of these early alphabets, which minimized the necessary symbols to the smallest possible quota, all modern systems of writing, the Northern Runes, the Roman alphabet, which has now finally superseded its parent Greek, the square Hebrew of the Jews, the elaborate Sanscrit, the Neskhi alphabet, vehicle of the thoughts of Turk and Persian, as well as of all the vast Arabic-speaking world, all these have slowly diverged, in accordance with the necessities of various classes of languages. Utterly diverse as all these alphabets are in their latest form, scientific paleography has succeeded in bridging over the enormous intervals which separate them from one another, in explaining the transitions that time and space have effected, and in showing that they are all but the manifold develop- ments of a single germ. And what was that germ ? Greek myth credited the invention of the alphabet to Cadmus the Phoenician. The myth has a certain substratum of truth. Cadmus may never have lived. Certainly neither he nor any other Phoenician " invented" the alphabet. It is not, indeed, an invention which would occur spontaneously to the mind even of the most creative genius. And the Phoenicians, though clever intermediaries, were not creative geniuses. Nevertheless, they did give the alphabet to the world. Its very name may be cited in evidence, referring us, as it does, to alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, and these in turn to the Phoenician aleph znefk (still the names of the first two letters in Hebrew), which signify " ox" and " house." We may, therefore, assume that the Phoenicians saw some likeness between the letters so named by them and the pictures of an ox and a house, and thence we are easily led to the conclusion that they borrowed the symbols from some foreign system of writing which was still pictorial at the time of the borrowing, or else had once been so. Now, the most highly civilized nation with whom the Phoenicians came in contact was the Egyptian. It was by a system of selection, therefore, among Egyptian symbols that they developed the broad generalization of an alphabet. No doubt the elegant scholars of the Nile, cabined and confined within the traditions of ancient learning and the prejudices of early habit, looked down with scorn upon this species of short-hand, deeming it all well enough for ignorant merchants, but clearly unfit for educated people. Still, the Phoenicians calmly pursued their way, using the borrowed alphabet in all their mercantile transactions, and carrying it as an instrument of intercourse to all the nations among whom they dealt. In the end, the universities were swept away, the hieroglyphic scribes were out of employment, and mankind was taught to write its lan- guage in the A B C of the Phoenician trader, while the hieroglyphic and syl- labic writings sank into such black oblivion that it took the life-work of several generations of scholars to recover them. 4* 42 HANDY-BOOK OF It was a wise though a lazy cleric whom Luther mentions in his " Table- Talk," the monk who, instead of reciting his breviary, used to run over the alphabet and then say, " O my God, take this alphabet, and put it together how you will." For in the diverse combinations of which those twenty-four symbols are capable lies all that the human heart and intellect have ever conceived or ever can conceive of truth and beauty and reverence, all possible schemes of philosophy, all possible masterpieces of prose or poetry, all law and science and order and religion. In these, and these alone, lie all the records of the past and all the possibilities of the future. An alphabet, one would say, is too sacred a thing to be treated other than reverently. Yet there have always been triflers, even in this Holy of Holies. Some miscreants have taken the utmost imaginable pains to avoid a particular letter, and have com- posed poems, essays, and treatises without once raising the unmeaning taboo. Others have made inordinate use of some letter and insisted that it should form the initial of every word. The first called their Procrustean method lipogrammatizing ; the latter, alliteration. Each is treated under its proper caption. Others, again, have found still other methods of conjuring with the alphabet, a cunning sleight of hand played upon those magic symbols which may be made to work miracles at the beck of the true thaumaturgist Some ingenious trifler has discovered that there is one verse in the Bible which contains all the letters in the alphabet : " And I, even I, Artaxerxes the king, do make a decree to all the treasurers which are beyond the river, that whatsoever Ezra the priest, the scribe of the law of the God of heaven, shall require of you, it shall be clone speedily." (zra vii. 21.) Of course it will be seen that J is left out ; but then J and I were originally the same letter. It will further be seen that the letters are duplicated and reduplicated. Prof. De Morgan, who in his lucid moments was a great mathematician, used to find an insane pleasure in relieving his severer studies by composing inge- nious puzzles. He set himself to improve on Ezra. He would produce a sentence which would use all the twenty-six letters and use each only once. Here, however, his wits failed him. After many fruitless attempts, he decided on a compromise. He would not only admit the license of using i for/, but the further license of looking on u and v as the same letter. The result came out as follows : I quartz pyx who fling muck beds. The professor acknowledges that he did not at first grasp the full meaning and beauty of this sentence. He long thought that no human being could say it under any circumstances. " At last I happened to be reading a religious writer, as he thought himself, who threw aspersions on his opponents thick and threefold. Heyday ! came into my head, this fellow flings muck beds ; he must be a quartz pyx. And then I remembered that a pyx is a sacred vessel, and quartz is a hard stone, as hard as the heart of a religious foe-curser. So that the line is the motto of a ferocious sectarian who turns his religious ves- sels into mud-holders, for the benefit of those who will not see what he sees." Thus heartened, he published his sentence in Notes and Queries, and boldly threw down the gauntlet to all and sundry to do better if they could. The gauntlet was taken up by a number of correspondents. These were the best of the results arrived at : Quiz my whigs export fund. Dumpy quiz, whirl back fogs next. Get nymph ; quiz sad brows ; fix luck. The professor magnanimously awards the palm to the last one. "It is good advice," he explains, " to a young man, very well expressed under the circumstances. In more sober English, it would be, ' Marry ; be cheerful ; LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 43 watch your business.' " It is doubtful, however, whether the young man would understand it without the accompanying gloss. Since that time many other people have tried their hands at the same kind of trifling. But the combined intellect of the world has produced nothing better than this : Quiz, Jack ; thy frowns vex. G. D. PLUMB. Now, at all events, this makes sense. But the arbitrary lugging in of a proper name made up for the occasion spoils its symmetry, and the reduplication of the letter u throws it entirely out of court. Here is an effort still more in- telligible in itself: John T. Brady gave me a black walnut box of quite small size. Here the name is a very common one, and consequently less offensive to the finer instincts. But the continuous reduplication of letters relegates it to the class of which the Biblical specimen already quoted remains the best because unconscious exponent. Another scholar has discovered that there are only two words in the English language which contain all the vowels in their order. They are " abstemious" and " facetious." The following words each have them in irregular order : authoritative, disadvantageous, encouraging, efficacious, instantaneous, im- portunate, mendacious, nefarious, objectionable, precarious, pertinacious, sacri- legious, simultaneous, tenacious, unintentional, unequivocal, undiscoverable, vexatious. We all know that " A was an Archer who shot at a frog," and have had our early thirst for knowledge stimulated by the descriptive verses of which this is the first line, and the accompanying pictures that showed an archer in the earlier stages of intoxication transfixing a cheerful nay, an hilarious frog, followed by Butchers and Cows of so alarming an aspect that we have never been able to look at the letters B and C without conjuring up the horrors that disturbed our adolescent imaginations. These juvenile alphabets have lent themselves to numerous parodies. In that ponderous bit of semi-facetiousness, "The Doctor," a book that always reminds one of a light-hearted megathe- rium, Southey essays his hand at what may possibly be the earliest example. Speaking of periodical literature, he declares that the Golden Age of Maga- zines has passed away : " In those days A was an Antiquary, and wrote articles upon Altars and Abbeys and Architecture. B made a blunder, which C corrected. D demon- strated that E was in error, and that F was wrong in philology, and neither Philosopher nor Physician, though he affected to be both. G was a Genealo- gist : H was an Herald who helped him. I was an inquisitive Inquirer, who found reason for suspecting J to be a Jesuit. M was a Mathematician. N noted the weather. O observed the stars. P was a Poet who piddled in pastorals, and prayed Mr. Urban to print them. Q came in the corner of the page with his query. R arrogated to himself the right of reprehending every one who differed from him. S sighed and sued in song. T told an old tale, and when he was wrong U used to set him right. V was a Virtuoso. W warred against Warburton. X excelled in algebra. Y yearned for im- mortality in rhyme ; and Z in his zeal was always in a puzzle." Probably the best, most consistent, and most coherent of these alphabets is by that true genius, C. S. Calverley : A is an Angel of blushing eighteen ; B is the Ball where the Angel was seen ; C is her Chaperon, who cheated at cards ; D is the Deuxtemps with Frank of the Guards ; E is her Eye, killing slowly but surely ; F is the Fan whence it peeped so demurely ; 44 HANDY BOOK OF G is the Glove of superlative kid; H is the Hand which it spitefully hid; I is the Ice which the fair one demanded ; J is the Juvenile that dainty who handed ; K is the Kerchief, a rare work of art; L is the Lace which composed the chief part; M is the old Maid who watched the chits dance ; N is the Nose she turned up at each glance ; is the Olga (just then in its prime) ; P is the Partner who wouldn't keep time; Q is a Quadrille put instead of the Lancers ; R the Remonstrances made by the dancers ; S is the Supper where all went in pairs ; T is the Twaddle they talked on the stairs ; U is the Uncle who " thought we'd be goin' ;" V is the Voice which his niece replied " No" in ; W is the Waiter, who sat up till eight ; X is his exit, not rigidly straight ; Yis the Yawning fit caused by the Ball; Z stands for Zero, or nothing at all. In one of the early numbers of Notes and Queries, a contributor signing him- self "Eighty-One" published a single-rhymed alphabet, and threw out a chal- lenge to the English-speaking world to produce another equally good. Here is " Eighty-One's" effort : A was an Army to settle disputes ; B was a Bull, not the mildest of brutes ; C was a Cheque, duly drawn upon Coutts, D was King David, with harps and with lutes; E was an Emperor, hailed with salutes; F was a Funeral, followed by mutes ; G was a Gallant in Wellington boots ; H was a Hermit, and lived upon roots; 1 was Justinian his Institutes ; K was a Keeper, who commonly shoots ; L was a Lemon, the sourest of fruits ; M was a Ministry say Lord Bute's; N was Nicholson, famous on flutes ; was an Owl, that hisses and hoots ; P was a Pond, full of leeches and newts; Q was a Quaker in whity-brown suits ; R was a Reason, which Paley refutes ; S was a Sergeant with twenty recruits ; T was Ten Tories of doubtful reputes ; U was Uncommonly bad cheroots ; V Vicious motives, which malice imputes ; X an Ex-king driven out by emeutes ; Visa Yawn ; then, the last rhyme that suits, Z is the Zuyder Zee, dwelt in by coots. The challenge was taken up by a number of readers, insomuch that the office was flooded (evidently the paper circulates among people of unbounded leis- ure), and only a small proportion of the answers could be published. As good as any was the following by Mortimer Collins : A is my Amy, so slender of waist ; B 's little Bet, who my button replaced ; C is good Charlotte, good maker of paste : D is Diana, the forest who traced ; E is plump Ellen, by Edward embraced ; F is poor Fanny, by freckles defaced; G is Griselda, unfairly disgraced ; H is the Helen who Ilion effaced ; 1 is fair Ida, that princess strait-laced; T is the Judy Punch finds to his taste ; K, Katy darling, by fond lovers chased; L is Laurette, in coquetry encased ; M is pale Margaret, saintly and chaste ; LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 45 N is gay Norah, o'er hills who has raced ; O is sweet Olive, a girl olive-faced : P 's pretty Patty, so daintily paced ; Q some lair Querist, in blue stockings placed; R is frail Rose, from her true stem displaced; S is brisk Sal, who a chicken can baste; T is Theresa, at love who grimaced; U is pure Una, that maid undebased ; V is Victoria, an empire who graced ; W is Winifred, time who will waste ; X is Xantippe, for scolding well braced ; Y 's Mrs. Yelverton : ending in haste, Z is Zcnobia, in panoply cased. Alps. Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise. The concluding line of a famous simile in Pope's " Essay on Criticism," II., 1. 32, which aims to illustrate the growing labors of science and learning. Dr. Johnson has praised this simile as the most apt, the most proper, the most sublime of any in the English language. "The comparison," he says, " of a student's progress in the sciences with the journey of a traveller in the Alps is perhaps the best that English poetry can show. It has no useless parts, yet affords a striking picture by itself; it makes the foregoing position better understood, and enables it to take faster hold on the attention ; it assists the apprehension and elevates the fancy." But Warton points out that the simile and consequently the panegyric belong to Drummond : All as a pilgrim who the Alps doth pass, ***** When he some heaps of hills hath overwent, Begins to think on rest, his journey spent, Till, mounting some tall mountain, he doth find More heights before him than he left behind. Whether Pope's or Drummond's, the " Essay" was hardly published before we find the Spectator making use of it : " We are complaining of the short- ness of life, and are yet perpetually hurrying over the parts of it, to arrive at certain imaginary points of rest. Our case is like that of a traveller upon the Alps, who should fancy that the top of the next hill must end his journey, because it terminates his prospect ; but he no sooner arrives at it than he sees new ground and other hills beyond it, and continues to travel on as before." No doubt the simile had passed through many more hands before it finally reached Rousseau, who, in the fourth book of "fimile," likens successful con- querors to " those inexperienced travellers who, finding themselves for the first time in the Alps, imagine that they can clear them with every mountain, and, when they have reached the summit, are discouraged to see higher moun- tains in front of them." Few could hope to vie with Jean Jacques in turning an affiliated idea to honor and advantage. Among these few Sir Walter Scott cannot be numbered. In his " Life of Napoleon" he compares the great Emperor to "the adventurous climber on the Alps, to whom the surmounting the most dangerous precipices and ascending to the most towering peaks only shows yet dizzier heights and higher points of elevation." What with indif- ferent English, and the notion misapplied, really the poet of the Pelicans is not materially worse : Ocean breaking from his black supineness Drowned in his own stupendous uproar all The voices of the storm beside : meanwhile, A war of mountains raged upon his surface ; Mountains each other swallowing, and again New Alps and Andes, from unfathomed valleys Upstarting, joined the battle. Quite in another spirit is the use made by Sir John Herschel of the same comparison : 46 HANDY-BOOK OF No man can rise from ignorance to anything deserving to be called a complete grasp of any considerable branch of science, without receiving and discarding in succession many crude and incomplete notions, which, so far from injuring the truth in its ultimate reception, act as positive aids to its attainment by acquainting him with the symptoms of an insecure footing in his progress. To reach from the plain the loftiest summits of an Alpine country, many inferior eminences have to be scaled and relinquished ; but the labor is not lost. The region is unfolded in its closer recesses, and the grand panorama, which opens from aloft, is all the better understood and the more enjoyed for the very misconception in detail which it rectifies and explains. Altruism, from the Latin alter, " another," formed on the same basis as ego- tism from ego, to indicate unselfishness, benevolence, in short, the very oppo- site of egotism. The altruist rejoices in his neighbor's welfare, and finds his highest joy in advancing it ; the egotist strives only for himself. The word was first employed by Comte, and has been welcomed by modern agnostics as offering the basis for a new code of morality, a new impetus to right action. Mr. Frederic Harrison, the leader of the English Positivists, even looks upon it as an admirable substitute for the Christian hope of personal immortality. Man will be immortal not in himself but in his actions, and the consciousness of this posthumous activity, this living incorporation with the glorious future of his race, "can give a patience and happiness equal to that of any martyr of theology." Once make this idea the basis of philosophy, the standard of right and wrong, and the centre of religion, and the conversion of the masses " will prove, perhaps, an easier task than that of teaching Greeks and Romans, Syrians and Moors, to look forward to a life of careless psalmody in an immaterial heaven." George Eliot's finest poem indeed, her only bit of verse that is truly poetry, and not merely fine thought thrown into metrical form, her lines beginning, " Oh, may I join the choir invisible" gives magnifi- cent voice to this feeling. Here are the concluding lines : May I reach That purest heaven, be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty, Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense. So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world. Of course the idea readily lends itself to satire and caricature. In a review of this very poem (Atlantic, xxxiv. 102), Mr. Howells neatly enough characterizes it as " the idea that we are to realize our inborn longing for immortality in the blessed perpetuity of man on earth ; the supreme effort of that craze which, having abolished God, asks a man to console himself when he shall be extinct with the reflection that somebody else is living on towards the annihilation which he has reached." The whole of W. H. Mallock's " New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island," is an admirable bit of fooling, with this doctrine of altruism as one of its chief targets. Here is an illustrative example, where the castaways Virginia, the curate, and the agnostic pro- fessor are sitting at lunch on the island : . " Yes, my dear curate," said the professor, " what I am enjoying is the champagne that you drink, and what you are enjoying is the champagne that I drink. This is altruism ; this is benevolence ; this is the sublime outcome of enlightened modern thought. The pleasures of the table in themselves are low and beastly ones ; but if we each of us are only glad be- cause the others are enjoying them, they become holy and glorious beyond description." " They do," cried the curate, rapturously, " indeed they do. I will drink another bottle for your sake. It is sublime !" he said, as he tossed off three glasses. " It is significant !" he said, as he finished three more. "Tell me, my dear, do I look significant?" he added, as he turned to Virginia, and suddenly tried to crown the general bliss by kissing her. A familiar jest unconsciously embodies the same element of parody, " So LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 47 glad," "So glad you're glad," "So glad you're glad I'm glad," and so on ad infinitum. But, indeed, no verbal burlesque can exceed the burlesque in action which is afforded by the sad fate of the Altruist Society of St. Louis, thus recorded by the New York Nation, April 10, 1890: Those to whom experiments for a remodelling of society appeal must be saddened by the Vast phase in the history of the Altruist Community of St. Louis. " We find it necessary," says Mr. Alcander Longley, its late president, in the columns of its organ, the Altruist, " to announce to our readers that the Altruist Community is dissolved by mutual consent of all the members. The reasons for the dissolution are some of them as follows. Since Mr. Smith withdrew, late last fall, there have been but two male members of the community, George E. Ward and myself, and our natures and our methods of doing things are so different that there has been more or less discord at different times since, and not at any time real harmony." One of the causes of disagreement was Mr. Ward's ambition to be " appointed or elected as one of the editors and managers of the Altruist" which Mr. Longley had decided views about controlling himself, " saying that he would not own and manage a paper with Mr. Ward or any one else." This led to the calling of a special meeting to elect a president in Mr. Longley's place, and the success of Mr. George E. Ward and two Mrs. Wards, who formed a majority of the community. Meanwhile, Mr. Longley admits, " I have, during our dissensions, said some very uncomplimentary and disrespectful things to Mr. Ward, for which I have told him I am sorry. Among them was, I charged him with being an anarchist and with bullying his wife to get her to vote as he desired in the community, and with having acted fraudulently in keeping the record of the community as secretary, and in the election of himself as president, all of which I hereby retract and apologize for." Mr. Longley and the remaining members of the pentagonal community, except Miss Travis, withdrew when Mr. Ward's journalistic aspirations were about to be gratified. Ambiguities. Words are slippery things. They frequently refuse to do their master's bidding, to express the meaning that was in his mind. Oceans of blood have been spilled over the interpretation of disputed passages in the Bible. Oceans of ink have been spilled over similar attempts to get at the inner truth of some of Shakespeare's mystic phrases. There is no more piquant subject of conjecture than to think what would happen if Shakespeare were recalled from his grave and set to reading that excellent Variorum Edition of his works which contains all the glosses of all the com- mentators. Perhaps he would forget his own meaning. That has often hap- pened to authors. We all remember the story of how certain reverent pupils came to Jacob Boehme on his death-bed, begging that before he died he would explain to them a certain difficult passage in his work. "My dear children," said the mystic, after puzzling his head to no purpose, " when I wrote this I understood its meaning, and no doubt the omniscient God did. He may still remember it, but I have forgotten." And he died with the secret unre- vealed. Klopstock's student admirers were more worldly wise, yet they too were equally doomed to disappointment. They appealed to him, not on his death-bed, but in his hale and vigorous maturity. At Gottingen they had found one of his stanzas unintelligible, and they begged for more light. Klop- stock read the stanza, then slowly reread it, while all stared agape. Finally the oracle spoke : " I cannot recollect what I meant when I wrote it, but I do remember it was one of the finest things I ever wrote, and you cannot do better than to devote your lives to the discovery of its meaning." Cardinal Newman, in his old age, frankly acknowledged that he could no* remember what he meant when he penned those famous lines in his hymn " Lead, Kindly Light," And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since and lost awhile. At a large reception in London a Mrs. Malaprop in pantaloons edged his way up to Robert Browning and incontinently asked him to explain then and there a difficult passage in one of his poems. " Upon my word, I don't know what it means," said the poet, laughing, as he closed the volume thrust into his hands. " I advise you to ask the Browning Society : they'll tell you all about it." 48 HANDY-BOOK OF Hawthorne wrote to Fields on April 13, 1854, apropos of a new edition of his " Mosses from an Old Manse," " When I wrote those dreamy sketches, I little thought that I should preface an edition for the press amidst the bus- tling life of a Liverpool consulate. Upon my honor, I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning in some of these blasted allegories; but I remember that I always had a meaning, or at least thought I had." When Chamier asked Goldsmith if he meant tardiness of locomotion by the word "slow" in the first line of the "Traveller," Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow, Goldsmith inconsiderately replied, " Yes." Johnson immediately cried out, " No, sir. you do not mean tardiness of locomotion : you mean that sluggish- ness of mind which comes upon a man in solitude." If such be the experience of the great masters of language and literature, why should we wonder that the smaller men, who have command of a smaller vocabulary, and only an imperfect appreciation of the laws of rhetoric or even of grammar, should often find difficulty in rendering themselves intelligi- ble ? That blunder known as neglect of the antecedent may lead to the ab- surdest misapprehension. Here is a choice example, selected from the pro- ceedings of the New York Common Council, May 12, 1869: "Resolved, That the Comptroller be and is hereby directed to draw a warrant in favor of David Sherrad for the sum of $350, to be in full compensation for loss sustained by rea- son of his horse stepping into a hole in the pavement in South Street, at the foot of Pine Street, on the I7th of February, 1869, from the effects of which he died." Here are many astonishing statements. That David should have died from the effects of his horse stepping into a hole is a notable fact in itself. That he could be compensated for his own death by the paltry sum of three hundred and fifty dollars passes belief. Indeed, the very absurdity of the passage is its own safeguard. We know what the writer meant, because what he said is so evidently nonsense. Advertisers are frequent sinners in this respect. Here is a sample which appeared in the London Times in February, 1862 : " Piano- forte, Cottage, 7 Octaves the property of a Lady leaving England in remark- ably elegant walnut case on carved supports. The tone is superb and eminently adapted for anyone requiring a first-class instrument." The Saturday Review pounced upon this gem of English and commented upon it as follows : " We have heard of Arion riding on a dolphin, and of the Wise Men of Gotham who went to sea in a bowl ; we have heard of Helle on her ram, and of Europa on her bull ; but we never before heard of a lady designing to cross the English Channel in a remarkably elegant walnut case with carved supports. Indeed, we might go so far as to ask whether the carved supports are those of the walnut case or of the lady herself. In either case, they would seem equally ill adapted to struggle with the winds and the billows." This excellent lady finds a fit parallel in the advertiser who wanted " a young man to look after a horse of the Methodist persuasion," the Texan who applied for "a boss hand over 5000 sheep that can speak Spanish fluently," the boarding-house-keeper who announced that she had "a cottage contain- ing eight rooms and an acre of land," the maiden or widow lady, matrimoni- ally inclined, who advertised for a husband " with a Roman nose having strong religious tendencies" (did she wish those tendencies to be Roman also ?), or the horse-owner who signified his willingness to sell cheap " a splen- did gray horse, calculated for a charger or would carry a lady with a switch tail." A lady so favored by nature should certainly make the acquaintance of the owner of a certain mail phaeton announced for sale as " the property of a gentleman with a movable head as good as new." The latter may have been some relation to the boy who produced a fiddle of which his proud LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 49 father asserted that " he had made it out of his own head and had wood enough left for another," or of the London match-peddler who used to cry, " Buy a penny-worth of matches from a poor old man made of foreign wood." There was something gruesome in the furrier's announcement that he was prepared to "make up capes, circulars, etc., for ladies out of their own skins." But he was more than equalled by the proprietor of a bone-mill who assured the public that " parties sending their own bones to be ground will be attended to with fidelity and despatch." And what shall we say to the druggist's printed request that " the gentleman who left his stomach for analysis will please call and get it together with the result" ? A horrid suspicion of cannibalism hangs about the advertisement of a St. Louis man : " Wanted a good girl to cook, one who will make a good roast or broil and will stew well." Almost as barbarous is a farmer near Fulton, New York, who posted this notice in his field : " If any man's or woman's cows or oxen gits in these oats, his or her head will be cut off, as the case may be." We are moved to gentle and kindly mirth when under the head of Wanted we read that " a respectable young woman wants washing." But we have grown quite used to such journalistic English as " octagonal men's cassimere pantaloons," or "woollen children's mitts," or " terra-cotta ladies' gloves," so much so that we scarcely pause to smile at the odd images they ought to raise in the mind that is grammatically constituted. So also with advertisements for such articles as "a keyless ladies' watch," "a green lady's parasol," or " a brown silk gentleman's umbrella." And in hastily running your eye over the papers you rarely pause to give its due meed of surprise to the appetite of a lady who wants "to take a gentleman for breakfast and dinner," the benevo- lence of a boarding-house-keeper who advertises that " single gentlemen are furnished with pleasant rooms, also one or two gentlemen with wives," or the audacity of a merchant who, in a free country, openly gives notice, " Wanted, a woman to sell on commission." But, indeed, anything is possible in an age where the sign " Families supplied by the quart or gallon" meets you at every turn. A quaint story is told of a member of the Savage Club in London. Stand- ing on the steps of the club-house, he was accosted by a stranger: "Does a gentleman belong to your club with one eye named Walker?" "I don't know," was the reply. " What is the name of the other eye ?" The St. yames Gazette chronicles the fact that a blind man who perambulates the streets of Windsor playing sacred music on an accordion bears upon his breast a placard reading, " Blind from inflammation. Assisted by Her Majesty the Queen." He had once attracted the compassionate attention of the queen, who had given him a small donation. It is said that the public baths in Paris originally bore the sign, " Bains a fond de bois pour dames a quatre sous." This was objected to because, strictly construed, it would mean "wooden-bot- tomed baths for foufpenny ladies." So the sign was changed to " Bains a quatre sous pour dames a fond de bois." But the hypercritics hilariously con- tended that this was even worse. And this reminds us of the advertisement of a school, which appeared in the London Times in March, 1838, and which promised that boys would, for twenty-five guineas, receive various benefits, and be " fundamentally instructed." This was in the days of Dotheboys Hall. There was an ominous sound about the adverb, and it is not to be wondered at that about this time several advertisements appeared in the Agony column for "youths" and "young gentlemen" who had run away from home. A shoemaker hung out a sign, and then wondered why people found it so amusing. This is how it read : " Don't go elsewhere to be cheated. Walk in c d S 56 HANDY-BOOK OF here." He was equalled by the London firm which warned everybody against unscrupulous persons " who infringe our title to deceive the public," and by the Chatham Street establishment which requested the public " not to confound this shop with that of another swindler who has established himself on the other side of the way." The Irish advertiser was more alarmingly frank when he inserted a " want" for " a gentleman to undertake the sale of a Patent Medi- cine. The advertiser guarantees it will be profitable to the undertaker." A curious instance of the difficulty of making a few words convey an explicit and definite meaning is furnished by the repeated failures of postal authorities who wished to inform the public that they might write anything they chose on one side of a postal card, but on the other side must confine themselves to the mere address of the person. Uncle Sam tried six times, in as many different issues, before he was satisfied with the result : Nothing but the address can be placed on this side. Nothing but the address to be on this side. Write only the address on this side. Write the address only on this side, the message on the other. Write the address on this side, the message on the other. This side for address only. The first two were evidently rejected for their clumsiness. The third, fourth, and fifth seem to limit the public to writing, and indirectly forbid printing or lithographing. The fourth, moreover, is hopelessly ambiguous. Accurately construed, it means that the address may be written on one side only. Any- thing else may be written on that side. But the address must not be repeated on the other. Canada says : The address to be written on this side. Great Britain : The address only to be written on this side. Here the same difficulty appears in regard to printing or lithographing the address. They manage these things better in France : Ce cote est exclusivement reserve a 1'adresse. Yet Belgium is not satisfied. Apparently it thinks there is tautology in " exclusively reserved," and drops the adverb : Ce cote est reserve a 1'adresse. Zijde voo het adres voorbehouden. Luxemburg, in a still more critical mood, holds that the French ought to write more correct French than they do, and places " exclusivement" after the verb: Ce cote est reserve exclusivement a 1'adresse. Diese Seite ist nur fur die Adresse bestimmt. Russia is of the same mind : Cote reserve exclusivement a 1'adresse. Italy uses no ambiguous word : Su questo lato non deve scriversi che il solo indirizzo. Chili's wish is stated with equal clearness : En este lado debe escriverse unicamente la direccion. Amende Honorable. In modern usage, especially newspaper usage, this phrase signifies a manly apology and acknowledgment of a fault, accom- panied by such reparation as may be needed. But historically the amende honorable was a very different affair. It was in fact in ancient French law a disgraceful punishment, inflicted for the most part on offenders against public decency. The offender was stripped to his shirt, when the hangman put a LITER AR Y CURIOSITIES. 5 1 rope about his neck and a taper in his hand, and then led him to the court, where the culprit asked pardon of God, of the king, and of the court. It was abolished in 1791, reintroduced in cases of sacrilege in 1826, and finally abrogated in 1830. American. Who reads an American book? This famous query was originally propounded by Sydney Smith in a notice of Adam Seybert's "Statistical Annals of the United States" (Edinburgh Review, January, 1820), included in Sydney Smith's collected Essays. The query created a storm of sufficiently humorous indignation on this side of the Atlantic, and was quoted and requoted only to be furiously combated in every Yankee-doodle article that attempted to blazon forth the literary glories of the New World. Of recent years, since our literary men have really begun to be a glory to the land of their birth, since the "American Wordsworth" and the "American Milton" and the " American Goldsmith" have been succeeded by American writers sufficiently native and original to stand on their feet, and to be them- selves, and not the fancied shadows of foreigners, since that time the query has been suffered to go the same road as Father Bouhours's equally memorable question, " Can a German have wit \esprit\ ?" Here is the full context of the question, which occurs at the conclusion of the article. It will be seen that not only the literature but also the arts and sciences of our forefathers are attacked. But it was chiefly the literary men who raised their voices in indig- nant protest : 'Such is'the land of Jonathan, and thus has it been governed. In his honest endeavors to better his situation, and in his manly purpose of resisting injury and insult, we most cordially sympathize. We hope he will always continue to watch and suspect his government as he now does, remembering that it is the constant tendency of those intrusted with power to con- ceive that they enjoy it by their own merits and for their own use, and not by delegation and for the benefit of others. Thus far we are the friends and admirers of Jonathan. But he must not grow vain and ambitious, or allow himself to be dazzled by that galaxy of epithets by which his orators and newspaper scribblers endeavor to persuade their supporters that they are the greatest, the most refined, the most enlightened, and the most moral people upon earth. The effect of this is unspeakably ludicrous on this side of the Atlantic, and even on the other, we should imagine, must be rather humiliating to the reasonable part of the population. The Americans are a brave, industrious, and acute people ; but they have hitherto given no indica- tions of genius, and made no approaches to the heroic, either in their morality or character. They are but a recent offset indeed from England, and should make it their chief boast, for many generations to come, that they are sprung from the same race with Bacon and Shake- speare and Newton. Considering their numbers, indeed, and the favorable circumstances in which they have been placed, they have yet done marvellously little to assert the honor of such a descent, or to show that their English blood has been exalted or refined by their republican training and institutions. Their Franklins, and Washingtons, and all the other sages and heroes of their Revolution, were born and bred subjects of the King of England, and not among the freest or most valued of his subjects. And, since the period of their separation, a far greater proportion of their statesmen and artists and political writers have been foreigners than ever occurred before in the history of any civilized and educated people. During the thirty or forty years of their independence, they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for literature, or even for the statesman-like studies of politics or political economy. Confining ourselves to our own country, and to the period that has elapsed since they had an inde- pendent existence, we would ask, Where are their Foxes, their Burkes, their Sheridans, their Windhams, their Homers, their Wilberforces ? where their Arkwrights, their Watts, their Davys? their Robertsons, Blairs, Smiths, Stewarts, Paleys, and Malthuses? their Persons, Parrs, Burneys, or Blomfields? their Scotts, Campbells, Byrons, Moores. or Crabbes? their Siddonses, Kembles, Keans, or O'Neils? their Wilkies, Laurences, Chantrys ? or their parallels to the hundred other names that have spread themselves over the world from our little island in the course of the last thirty years, and blest or delighted mankind by their works, inventions, or examples ? In so far as we know, there is no such parallel to be produced from the whole annals of this self-adulating race. In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book ? or goes to an American play ? or looks at an American picture or statue ? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons ? What new substances have their chemists discovered ? or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans ? What have they done in mathematics ? Who drinks out of American glasses ? or eats from American plates ? or wears American coats 52 HANDY-BOOK OF or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical gov- ernments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy, and sell, and torture? Amicus Plato, sed magis arnica veritas (L., " Plato is dear to me, but truth is still dearer"). This phrase is a gradual evolution from a passage in the "Phaedo" of Plato (ch. 91), where Socrates is reported as saying to his disciples, "I would ask you to be thinking of the truth, and not of Socrates ; agree with me if I seem to you to be speaking the truth ; or, if not, withstand me might and main, that I may not deceive you as well as myself in my en- thusiasm." Paraphrasing this sentiment, Aristotle was wont to say, " Socrates is dear to me, but the truth is still dearer," this on the authority of his biographer Ammonius, who wrote in Latin, and whose Latinized version became proverbial. But in course of time " Plato" was substituted for " Socrates," and so the phrase comes down to us. Cicero does not seem to have accepted the lesson of the maxim, for he expressly says, " Errare malo cum Platone quam cum istis vera sentire" (" I would rather err with Plato than think rightly with these"), i.e., the Pythagoreans. And in this very saying, curi- ously enough, he endorsed a Pythagorean rather than a Platonic method. For while Plato evidently approved of Socrates's preference of the truth over the individual, the disciples of Pythagoras adopted as their motto, " The master has said it." Cicero's sentiment was echoed in the modern line, Better to err with Pope than shine with Pye. Ampersand (also ampusand, amperzand, etc.), an old name for &, for- merly , the contracted sign of et = and. The name is a corruption of " and per se and," i.e., "& by itself = and," the old way of spelling and naming the character. Similarly, A, I, O, when representing words and not merely letters, were read in spelling-lessons, "A per se A," etc. These were similarly corrupted into apersey, etc. The amateur etymologist has done some ex- cellent guessing at the derivation of the word. Here is an example : " The sign & is said to be properly called Emperor's hand, from having been first invented by some imperial personage, but by whom deponent saith not." The Monthly Packet, vol. xxx. p. 448. Anagram (Gr. uvdypanfia ; uvd, up, or back, and ypdfi/M, a letter). A re- arrangement of the letters of a name, a word, or a sentence. In order to be perfect, the result should be a word or words reacting upon the original as a comment, a sarcasm, a definition, or a revelation. Thus, the pessimist re- joices to find that if the component letters of LIVE be committed to the smelting-pot of the anagram, they may reissue either as evil or vile ; the non- argumentative mind smiles calmly when LOGICA (logic) yields caligo (dark- ness); and the conservative is delighted to find the sinister epithets love to ruin wrapped up in REVOLUTION and rare mad frolic in RADICAL REFORM. Those who atta'ch themselves scrupulously to the rules of the anagram permit no change, omission, or addition of letters therein. Others, less timid, take an almost poetical license, and, besides occasionally omitting or adding a letter, think themselves justified in writing, when they find such a change desirable and that the resulting sense falls aptly, e for ce, v for w, s for z, c for k, and vice versa. Nevertheless, the orthodox anagrammatist frowns upon this heretical license and characterizes its results as impure. Although the anagram has fallen upon evil days, and is now relegated to the children's column, along with the riddle, the enigma, and the rebus, it once boasted a high estate and taxed the reverence of the wise, the learned, and the devout. The Hebrews held that there was something divine in this species of word-torture. Nay, some Rabbins assert that the esoteric law given to Moses, to be handed down in the posterity of certain seventy men, and LITERARY CURIOSITIES. S3 therefore called Cabbala, or traditional, was largely a volume of alpha- betary revolution or anagrammatism. The Greeks, and especially the scho- liasts of the Middle Ages, echoed the opinions of the Hebrews, believing that there was a mystic correspondence between things and their names, and that by the study of names, by the intense consideration and the turning inside-out of the m's and 's of which they are composed, these correspondences might be evolved and nature made to flash out her secrets. Men sought in one another's names, and in the names of things of high public import, those pro- phetic indications of character, of duty, or of destiny which might possibly lurk in them. Lycophron, the father of the anagram in Greece, and one of the " Pleiads" of the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus, is said to have earned high favor with his prince by finding the words and ^e/Urof (out of honey) in the name n.Tofa/j.alo(;, and the words lov "Hpaf (violet of Juno) in 'Apcivori, the name of Ptolemy's queen. Both these anagrams are exact or pure, and, as such, are the earliest examples that have survived to our day. Another famous historical anagram refers to the siege of Troy by Alexander. That monarch was about to aban- don the enterprise in despair, when he had a dream of a Satyr leaping before him, whom eventually, after many elusions, he caught. This dream his sages converted into a prophetic anagram : " 2uTvpof" (Satyr), said they, " why, certainly, aa Tvpof" (Tyre is thine). This put heart in the king, and Tyre was taken. But, though good in its way, this is one of the illegitimate forms of anagram, arising not from the rearrangement or transposition of letters, but only from their redivision or resyllabification. Another instance is that of Constantine III., son of the Emperor Heraclius, who on the eve of battle dreamed that he took the way through Thessalonica into Macedonia. Relating the dream to one of his courtiers, the latter divided Thessalonica into syllables, finding in it, " Leave the victory to another :" Qeaca^,omKr]v : 0ef fMu VIKIJV. The emperor took no notice of the warning, and was badly beaten by the enemy. But this might rather be called a species of paronomasia or pun. Patriot resolved into Pat-riot is an even poorer instance. The Romans seem to have despised this sort of literary trifling. Latin anagrams are generally of modern origin. Yet among these are some of the best anagrams ever made, notably that admirable one which discovers in Pilate's question, QUID EST VERITAS ? (What is truth ?) its own answer, Est vir qui adest (It is the man before you). A famous cento of Latin anagrams was made in honor of young Stanislaus Leczinski, afterwards King of Poland. On his return from his travels, all the family of Leczinski assembled at Lissa, to celebrate his arrival with appropriate festivities. The most ingenious compli- ment of all was paid by the College of Lissa. A heroic dance was presented by thirteen young warriors, each holding a shield on which was engraved one of the thirteen letters in the name Domus Lescinia. The evolutions were so arranged that at each turn the row of bucklers formed different anagrams in the following order : First. Domus Lescinia. Second. Ades incolumis. Third. Omnis es lucida. Fourth. Omne sis lucida. Fifth. Mane sidus loci. Sixth. Sis columna dei. Seventh. I, scande solium. The poet Jean Dorat, sometimes known as the French Lycophron, found two notable anagrams in the Latinized form of his own name, JOANNES AURATUS : 54 HANDY-BOOK OF Ars vivetannosa (My art will live long), and Ars en nova vatis (Behold the new art of the bard). The Latin language, indeed, lends itself readily to the ana- gram, being free from the ugly assortment of j's, w's, and jy's that disfigure most modern tongues and prove so great a stumbling-block in the way of the word-poser. No means so ready for writing up a friend or writing down an enemy as that of turning Smith into Smithius and proving that Smithius is the verbal equivalent either for spirit of health or goblin damned. Thus, Calvin, wroth at the hearty licentiousness of Rabelais, anagrammatized the Latin form RABEL^SIUS into Rabie Lasus (Bitten-mad). This was rash in Calvin, for, of all things on earth, to think of fighting Rabelais with his own weapons, or, for that matter, with any weapons, must needs be the most hope- less. And so it proved. All Europe lay still and breathless waiting the sure response. 'Twas the calm before the thunderstorm. It came at last. " So / am Rabie Lcesus, Master John ? And pray what are you ? Let me see : CAL- VIN : Jan Cul ; yes, that's about it !" And over Europe rushed the jest, as it had been a scavenger in the sky ; and Calvin, we fancy, did not come out for a week. Perhaps, even in the time of the Reformation, when the anagram was largely laid under contribution for purposes of billingsgate and satire, no finer controversial use was ever found for it than in that example which sought to turn the very title of the Pope into a denial of his claims, as thus : SUPRE- MUS PONTIFEX ROMANUS : O non super Petram fixus (O ! not founded upon Peter). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, anagrams were quite in fashion as pen-names. Thus, CALVINUS (Calvin) became Alcuinus, FRANCOIS RABE- LAIS, Alcofribas Nasier, and AGOSTINO COLTELINI, Ostilio Contalegni. More modern examples are HORACE WALPOLE, Onuphris Muralto, the very imperfect anagram under which he published his " Castle of Otranto," and the equally imperfect BRYAN WALLER PROCTER, Barry Cornwall, Poet. But the most famous case, and one in which the anagram has entirely overshadowed the original name, is furnished by Voltaire. This was not the family cognomen of the great Frenchman, but simply an anagram of his right name, AROUET, with the two letters L. J. (le jeune, or " the younger") superadded, an anagram concocted by himself in a freak or deliberately, and so familiarized by his use of it that he was known thereafter universally as Voltaire, and will be so for- ever. One of the most amusing applications of the anagram is that on Lady Eleanor Davies, wife of Sir John Davies, Attorney-General in Ireland to King James I. This lady, a fanatic who fancied herself possessed by the pro- phetic spirit of Daniel, grounded her belief on an anagram which she made on her name, viz., ELEANOR DAVIES Reveal, O Daniel I And though the anagram had too much by an / and too little by an s, yet she found Daniel and Reveal in it, and that served her turn. Whereupon she pestered the world with her prophecies, gaining great repute among the unlearned by a lucky guess here and there, until a prediction of the approaching death of Archbishop Laud caused her arrest. When brought before the Court of High Commission, all appeals to reason and to Scripture proved futile. At last one of the deans seized a pen and hit upon this excellent anagram : DAME ELEANOR DAVIES, Never so mad a ladie. The unhappy woman, finding her own argument turned against her, renounced all claims to supernatural powers. This story is related with much gusto by Heylin in his "Cyprianus Angli- canus" (1719). Doubtless it is true in all essential features, but, as the device on which the lady founded her pretensions had been known for years, it seems more than likely that the acute lawyer invented the shell which blew up her LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 55 ladyship in the quiet of his own chamber, and chose the most dramatic moment for exploding it. Though the art of the anagrammatist may be despised as puerile, none can deny its difficulty. Where the letters are few the field is indeed circumscribed within comparatively easy limits of transposition ; but the possible changes on a large series of letters exceed all but a mathematician's belief. A bare dozen of letters, for example, will admit of more than 729,00x3,000 transpositions. Literally, it is mind on the one hand against chaotic infinity on the other. The patience of Penelope herself would be exhausted in such assiduous doing and undoing as the process seems to require. The vexation of oft-repeated effort and proximate success resulting in fruitless labor is racily expressed by Camden : " Some have been seen to bite their pens, scratch their heads, bend their brows, bite their lips, beat their board, tear their paper, when they were fair for somewhat and caught nothing herein." Ad- dison, who numbers anagrams among his examples of false wit, tells with unnecessary jubilance the story of a lover who, having retired from the world to wrestle anagrammatically with his mistress's name, emerged after several months pale and worn, but triumphant. His chagrin, however, at finding that his lady's name was not what it appeared to be on the surface, not Chum- ley, in short, but Cholmondeley, was so great that he went mad on the spot, and finished in Bedlam what he had commenced in Boaotia. From all which it may readily be understood why it is that after centuries of endeavor so few really good anagrams have been rolled down to us. One may assert that all the really superb anagrams now extant might be contained in a pill-box. Such a pill-box we shall aim to present to our readers. And first we offer an alphabetical group of the aptest anagrams on places, things, and persons in general : ASTRONOMERS : Moon-Starers. CATALOGUES : Got as a due. CHRISTIANITY : / cry that I sin. CONGREGATIONALIST : Got scant religion. CRINOLINE : Inner coil. DEMOCRATICAL: Comical trade. DETERMINATION : / mean to rend it. ELEGANT : Neat leg. FRENCH REVOLUTION : Violence run forth. FUNERAL: Real fun. GALLANTRIES : All great sins. IMPATIENT : Tim in a pet. Is PITY LOVE ? : Positively. LA SAINTE ALLIANCE : La Sainte Canaille. LAWYERS : Sly -ware. MATRIMONY : Into my arm. MELODRAMA : Made moral. MIDSHIPMAN : Mind his map. MISANTHROPE : Spare him not. OLD ENGLAND : Go'den Land. PARADISE LOST : Reap sad toils. PARISHIONERS : / hire parsons. 56 HANDY-BOOK OF PENITENTIARY : Nay, I repent it. POOR HOUSE : O sour hope ! POTENTATES : Ten Teapots ! PRESBYTERIAN : Best in prayer. PUNISHMENT : Nine thumps. SOLDIERS : Lo ! I dress. SPANISH MARRIAGES : Rash games in Paris. SURGEON : Go, Nurse I SWEETHEART : There we sat. TELEGRAPHS: Great helps. UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE: Guess a fearful ruin. A well-sustained effort in this word-conjuring is the following specimen : " How much there is in a word ! Monastery, says I : what, that makes nasty Rome ; and when I looked at it again it was evidently mart nasty, a very vile place or mean sty. Ay, monster, says I, you are found out. What monster? said the Pope. What monster? says I. Why, yourown image there, stone Mary. That, he replied, is my one star, my Stella Maris, my treasure, my guide ! No, said I, you should rather say my treason. Yet no arms, said he. No, quoth I, quiet may suit best, as long as you have no mastery, I mean money aris. No, said he again, those are Tory means ; and Dan, my senator, will baffle them. I don't know that, said I, but I think one might make no mean story out of this one word monastery." And here, still in alphabetical order, are some of the best and most famous anagrams that have been made upon the names of celebrated individuals. JOHN ABERNETHY : Johnny the Bear. A peculiarly appropriate epithet for this terror of hypochondriacal patients, this physician of curt speech, crusty presence, and bluff address. " Has any one," asks Southey, " who knows Johnny the bear, heard his name thus anagrammatized without a smile ? We may be sure he smiled and growled at the same time when he heard it himself." Sm FRANCIS BACON, LORD KEEPER : Is born and elect for a rich Speaker. So it is usually given, as an anagram by one Tash, a contemporary of the great man, but, on testing it, we can make out only, is born and elec for a ric spek, the original being four letters short. This shows the necessity for verifying reputed anagrams. It is a sad thought that many may be passing unchallenged which are but impostures. In this case, however, deep and sus- tained investigation has enabled us to mend the anagram. It must have been given forth thus : SIR FRANCIS BACON, THE LORD KEEPER : Is born and elect for rich Speaker. JOHN BUNYAN : Nu hony in a B. Execrable ! one would naturally exclaim, but, as it is John's own work, we must be reverently dumb. GENERAL BUTLER : Gen/, real brute. THOMAS CARLYLE : Cry shame to all ; or, Mercy, lash a lot ; or, A lot cry, "Lash me!" Just after the death of the sage and prior to the publication of his Reminiscences, the anagram a calm, holy rest was hailed as admirably significant. An enemy hath found in the same letters, clearly to sham. CAROLUS REX: Cras era lux (To-morrow I shall be light). An anagram which Charles II. is said to have left written on one of the windows of King's Newton Hall, in Derbyshire. PRINCESS CHARLOTTE AUGUSTA OF WALES: P. C. Her august race is lost, O fatal news! An anagram in which British regret over the decease of the Princess Charlotte enshrined itself. LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 57 JAQUES CLEMENT, the assassin of Henry III. of France, Qui est ce mal ne? (Who is this ill-born person?). Very good from the point of view of the believer in the divine right of kings, but thrown utterly in the shade by the superiority of its corollary: FREKE JACQUES CLEMENT: Cest Fenfer qui m'a cree, (It was hell that created me), which may be taken as an answer to the first. RICHARD COBDEN : Rich corn, bedad ! CHARLES DICKENS : Cheer sick lands. DISRAELI : / lead, sir. A Tory anagram, of course. The Whigs resolve the name into idle airs. But the latter found their best opportunity in the full title, DISRAELI, EARL OF BEACONSFIELD : Self-fooled, can he bear it? JOHN DRYDEN : Rhino deny\i, which was Glorious John's life-long com- plaint, in his own spelling, too. PHINEAS FLETCHER: Hath Spencer life? A very good anagram, for in the age after Spenser's death, Phineas Fletcher had more of his manner and spirit than almost any other poet. GLADSTONE : G leads not. So cried the exultant Tory in apt opposition to the anagram he had coined out of the name of his great rival : DISRAELI : / lead, sir. The Whig rather weakly remonstrated that GLADSTONE doesn't lag. But though the Whig achieved small success with the family cognomen, he reaped vast and varied results with the full name, WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE: A man to wield great wills ; or, Go, administrate law well; or, I'll waste no glad war-time ; or, G., a weird man we all list to ; or, finally, the dubious and perplexing statement, Allowing me T. glad Erin waits. SIR EDMUNDBURY GODFREY : I fynd murdered by rogues, and By Rome's rtide finger die. These anagrams, uncouth and^imperfect as they are, were cir- culated shortly after the death of Godfrey, the magistrate who, it will be remembered, had taken Titus Oates's deposition in regard to the pretended Popish plot, and on October 17, 1678, had been found murdered on the south side of Primrose Hill. HENRY HALLAM : Real manly H. H. RANDLE HOLMES: Lo! men's herald. This very apt anagram was prefixed to Holmes's well-known heraldic work, "The Academy of the Armory," 1688. SELINA, COUNTESS OF HUNTINGDON : See! sound faith clings to no nun. DOUGLAS JERROLD : Sure, a droll dog! HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW: Won half the New World's glory. MARTIN LUTHER : Lehrt in armuth (He teaches in poverty). The Latinized form of the name yields even more remarkable results. For example, MAR- TINUS LUTHERUS, Vir multa struens (The man who builds up much), and Ter matris vulnus (Three wounds to the mother, church is of course understood). D. MARTINUS LUTHERUS : Ut turris das lumen (Like a tower you give light). But most apt of all is the form DOCTOR MARTINUS LUTHERUS : ORom, Luther ist der Schwan (O Rome, Luther is the Swan), an allusion to John Huss's prophecy that a swan should arise from the blood of the goose (Huss). THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY : O ! a big mouth, a manly Cantab 's. MARIE ANTOINETTE: Tear it, men, I atone. THOMAS MOORE : Homo amor est (Man is love). NAPOLEON. The anagrams made on or about the great Corsican are num- berless. Thus, when he came into power, the words LA REVOLUTION FRAN- C.AISE were twisted into Veto! un Corse la finira. But in 1815 party spirit 58 HANDY-BOOK OF discovered in the same words, At! La France veult son Roi! The best ana- gram on NAPOLEON BONAPARTE is the Latin one, Bona rapta leno pone! (You rascal, return your stolen goods !). Written in Greek letters, the same name affords the very best example of what is known as the reductive or sub- tractive anagram, thus : NaTro/lewv .... Napoleon CTro/leaw .... Apollyon, TToAetw .... of cities ofauv .... the destroyer, fauv .... a lion, einv .... goes uv . . . . about Every syllable tells a tale of rapine. HORATIO NELSON: Honor est a Nilo (Honor is from the Nile). This cele- brated anagram, put in circulation when the news of the victory of the Nile arrived in England, was the work of a clergyman, the Rev. William Holden, rector of Charteris. Very inferior is the English O a nation's Hero. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE : Flit on, cheering angel. NOTES AND QUERIES: Enquiries on dates ; or, A question- sender ; or, still better, O, send in a request. WILLIAM NOY: / moyl in law. This anagram on the laborious Attorney- General of Charles I. made a great sensation at the time. Howell, in his Letters, says, " With infinite pains and indefatigable study he came to his knowledge of the law ; but I never heard a more pertinent anagram than was made of his name." LORD PALMERSTON : So droll, pert man. SIR ROBERT PEEL : Terrible prose. EDGAR ALLAN POE: A long peal, read. PILATRE DU ROSIER : Tu es proie de Fair ( You are the prey of the air), pecu- liarly appropriate to the unfortunate aeronaut who fell from his balloon, June 15, 1785, but an omitted r and a redundant e rob the anagram of the higher meed of praise. The suggested amendment, Tu es P. R. t Roi de Fair (You are P. R., King of the Air), is puerile. JOHN RUSKIN : No ink-rush I! WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : I ask me, has Will a peer? Though Shakespeare provided against the shaking up of his bones, he uttered no curse upon those who should disturb the letters of his name. At the hands of the ruthless anagrammatists they have been made to yield strange and varied results. As good as any is the above, though there is some virtue in I swear he is like a lamp. The alternative spelling WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE produces We praise him, ask all, which is somewhat forced and stilted. ROBERT SOUTHEY: Robust hero yet. This is from the pen of an admirer. An enemy is responsible for the following : Be thou Sour Tory. MARIA STEUARTA : Veritas armata (armed truth), evidently by an admirer of the unfortunate Queen of Scots. A more remarkable anagrammatic feat is MARIA STEUARDA, SCOTORUM REGINA : Trusa vi regnis, morte amara cado (Thrust by force from my kingdoms, I fall by a bitter death). CHARLES JAMES STUART : He asserts a just claim. This anagram on the Pretender was highly popular with the Jacobites, who also found in the same name, claims Arthur's seat ; and in CHARLES, PRINCE OF WALES, A I France cries, O help us! Taylor, the Water Poet, had already found in CHARLES LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 59 STUART (i.e., Charles I.) cals true harts, which illustrates the necessity of being acquainted with the orthographic licenses of the period to which an anagram belongs. But Taylor was a clumsy anagrammatist at best. JAMES STUART : A just master ; a famous anagram by the poet Sylvester in dedicating to James I. his translation of Uu Bartas. SWEDISH NIGHTINGALE: Sing high, sweet Linda! a rather successful com- pliment to Jenny Lind, under her sobriquet. ALFRED TENNYSON : Ferny land 'notes ; or, Fans one tenderly. Slightly better is this : ALFRED TENNYSON, POET LAUREATE : Neat sonnet or deep tearful lay. GEORGE THOMPSON: O go, the negro's M. P. This excellent anagram on the name of the noted advocate of negro emancipation derives additional interest from the fact that it was made by a friend at a time when Thompson was hesitating whether to accept a seat in the House of Commons, and is said to have decided him to do so. TOUCHET, MARIE (mistress of Charles IX.) : Je charme tout (I charm all). UNITED STATES: In te Deus stat (God stands in thee), and, as a sort of corollary to this statement, Inde tute stas (hence thou standest safely). Other Latin anagrams, less excellent because their application is less immediately apparent, are the following : Dentatus est (he has teeth, he evidently meaning Uncle Sam). Desiste, nutat (hands off! it shakes), apt enough in 1861, when it was made, but not at present. Siste, nudat te (stop ! he strips thee). Et ista desunt (those things are also wanting), and A te desistunt (they keep off from thee). VICTORIA, ENGLAND'S QUEEN : Governs a nice quiet land. Her majesty herself should be startled out of her habitual composure at the enigmatic result obtained from HER MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTY ALEXANDRINA VIC- TORIA : Ah, my extravagant, joco-serious radical minister ! WATT, JAMES : Wait, steam, or A steam wit. ARTHUR WELLESLEY : Truly he'll see war ; or, Rules the war yell ; or, Rule earthly swell (the latter expressing the opinion of those detractors who, while the duke was alive, accused him of being hard and worldly). But best is the following : ARTHUR WELLESLEY, DUKE OF WELLINGTON : Let well-foird Gaul secure thy renown. A number -of very clever burlesque anagrams were contributed to Mac- milliin's Magazine in 1862 by an anonymous hand. Some of these are worth quoting, as, for example : JEREMY BENTHAM : The body of Jeremy Bentham never was buried. By his own directions it was kept above ground, a wax fac-simile of his face and head being fitted on to his skeleton, and his own silver hair, and the hat and clothes he usually wore, being placed on the figure, so as to make an exact representation of him sitting in his chair as when alive. Perhaps his notion was that his school would last, and that he should be wheeled in to preside at their annual meetings in that ghastly form. At all events, the figure was long kept by the late Dr. Southwood Smith, and is now in one of the London museums. No one can look at it without disgust at such an exhibition, the too literal fulfilment of the senile whim of an old man. His very name con- tains the punishment of the whim : yeer my bent ham. OLIVER CROMWELL: More clover, Will, an anagram beautifully repre- senting Oliver's life when he was a quiet farmer and had a servant lad named William ; or, We/comer r / viol, which expresses the opinion of Oliver's ad- herents that he was a better first fiddle than the martyr-monarch. Observe 60 HANDY-BOOK OF how significant is the blank in the word royal. Oliver was not nominally king, though really such. SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON : The anagram of the name of this great meta- physician takes the form of a bit of dramatic dialogue : L. L. L. : " I am I, am I not ?" H.: " W (double you), Sir!" So profound an anagram as this may require a little explanation. L. L. L. is the Learned Logic Lecturer, Sir William himself. He is interrogating H., one of his hearers, and, to try his powers of thinking, asks him in a personal form a question of great metaphysical moment. The Hearer is evidently puzzled, and cannot grasp the notion of Sir William, I and then I again, or two Sir Williams at once. JAMES MACPHERSON : Me cramp Ossian! he! expressing how James laughed to scorn the charge brought against him ; or M. P., reach me Ossian, which was a standing joke against Macpherson in the library of the House of Commons when he became a member. JOHN STUART MILL : Just mart on hill, i.e., not only fair exchange, but with all, circumstances of publicity ; or, O thrill, just man. or, O man just thrill, expressing two opinions of the character of Mr. Mill's philosophy. ADAM SMITH : Admit hams, i.e., apply the principle of free trade first to one particular article, and mark the results. THE TIMES : Its theme ! i.e., the whole planet and all that takes place upon it; Meet this, a reference chiefly to the advertisements in the second column ; and, finally, E. E. T. Smith. This last anagram we could not interpret for some time ; but we think we have it now. It seems to mean that the Times represents Smith, or general English opinion, and yet not Smith absolutely and altogether, but rather Smith when he is well backed by capital. Ancestor, I am my own. When Andoche Junot, who had risen from the ranks, became Due" d'Abrantes and an important figure at Napoleon's newly-formed court, a nobleman of the old regime asked him what was his ancestry. " Ah, ma foi !" replied the sturdy soldier, " je n'en sais rien ; moi je suis mon ancetre" (" Ah, sir, I know nothing about it ; I am my own ances- tor"). Probably he had never heard of the similar remark made by Tiberius of Curtius Rufus : " He seems to me to be descended from himself." (Taci- tus, xi. 21, 16.) Napoleon's reply to the Emperor of Austria was in a kindred vein. The Austrian, when Napoleon became his prospective son-in- law, would fain have traced the Bonaparte lineage to some petty prince of Treviso. " I am my own Rudolph of Hapsburg," said Napoleon. Under similar circumstances he silenced a genealogist : " Friend, my patent of no- bility dates from Montenotte," his first great victory. When Iphicrates, the Athenian general, had it cast up in his face by a descendant of Harmo- dius that he was a shoemaker's son, he calmly replied, " The nobility of my family begins with me, yours ends with you." (PLUTARCH : Life of Iphicrates.) Almost the same words were used by Alexander Dumas when asked if he were not descended from an ape (a covert sneer at his negro grandmother) : " Very likely : my ancestry began where yours ends." General Skobeleff, in answer to a query as to his pedigree, said, " I make little account of genea- logical trees. Mere family never made a man great. Thought and deed, not pedigree, are the passports to enduring fame." Fortnightly Review, October, 1882. The thought is, of course, a commonplace in literature. Here are a fcw representative instances : LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 6 1 They that on glorious ancestors enlarge, Produce their debt instead of their discharge. YOUNG : Love of Fame, i. 1. 147. Le premier qui fut roi fut un soldat heureux : Qui sert bien son pays n'a pas besoin d'ai'eux. VOLTAIRE : Merope, i. 3. (" The first to become king was a successful soldier. He who serves well his country has no need of ancestors .") Whoe'er amidst the sons Of reason, valor, liberty, and virtue Displays distinguished merit, is a noble Of Nature's own creating. JAMES THOMSON : Coriolanus, iii. 3. r What can they see in the longest kingly line in Europe, save that it runs back to a suc- cessful soldier? The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors is like a potato, the only good belonging to him is under ground. SIR THOMAS OVERBURY : Characters. Anchor as the Symbol of Hope. Among the ancients the anchor, as the hope and resource of the sailor, came to be called "the sacred anchor," and was made the emblem of hope. The early Christians adopted the anchor as an emblem of hope, and it is found engraved on rings and depicted on monuments and on the walls of cemeteries in the Catacombs. The anchor was associated with the fish, the symbol cf the Saviour. The fact that the transverse bar of an anchor below the ting forms a cross probably helped towards the choice of the anchor as a Christian symbol. Andrew's, St., Cross. The Cross of St. Andrew is always represented in the shape of the letter X ; but that this is an error, ecclesiastical historians prove by appealing to the cross itself on which he suffered, which St. Stephen of Burgundy gave to the convent of St. Victor, near Marseilles, and which, like the common cross, is rectangular. The cause of the error is thus ex- plained : when the apostle suffered, the cross, instead of being fixed upright, rested on its foot and arm, and in this posture he was fastened to it, his hands to one arm and the head, his feet to the other arm and the foot, and his head in the air. Angel, To write like an, originally characterized, not literary style, but penmanship. So Disraeli tells us in his "Curiosities of Literature." Angelo Vergecio, a learned Greek, emigrated first to Italy, and afterwards, during the reign of Francis I., to France. His beautiful penmanship attracted universal admiration. Francis I. had a Greek font of type cast, modelled from his handwriting. Angelo's name became synonymous with exquisite calligraphy, and gave birth to the familiar phrase "to write like an angel," which, by a natural extension of meaning, was applied to authors as well as mere pen- men : Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll, Who wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll. Gar rick. Angels altogether, a West Indian slang term applied to habitual drunk- ards. The sobriquet is said to have taken its rise in the following manner. A negro employed on a sugar-plantation on the East Coast, Demerara, applied for a Saturday holiday. His manager, knowing Quashie's reputation as a hard drinker, chaffed him as follows: "John, you were drunk on Sunday?" " Yes, massa." " Monday, too ?" " Yes, massa." And so on up to Friday, eliciting the same response. " But, John," remonstrated the manager quietly, "you know you can't be an angel altogether." The story got abroad and passed into a proverbial phrase. 6 62 HANDY-BOOK OF Angels, On the side of the. In 1864, when Darwinism was an aston- ishing novelty, Disraeli neatly expressed the indignant misapprehension of the multitude in a speech before the Oxford Diocesan Society : " What is the question which is now placed before society, with the glib assurance which to me is most astounding ? That question is this : Is man an ape or an angel ? I am on the side of the angels. I repudiate, with indignation and abhorrence, those new-fangled theories." Carlyle was equally emphatic. " I have no patience whatever," he cried, "with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Disraeli lived to modify his views, Carlyle detested Darwinism first and last. The optimistic Emerson saw only hope in the new doctrine. " I would rather believe," he said, " that we shall rise to the state of the angels than that we have fallen from it." Angels' Visits. One of the most hackneyed quotations in English litera- ture occurs in Thomas Campbell's " Pleasures of Hope," Part II., 1. 375 : What though my winged hours of bliss have been Like angels' visits, few and far between ? This simile was highly praised for its " originality." Hazlitt, in his " Lectures on the English Poets," was the first to point out a similar expression in Blair's "Grave:" Its visits, Like those of angels, short and far between. " Mr. Campbell," adds Hazlitt, " in altering the expression has spoilt it. ' Few' and ' far between' are the same thing." Elsewhere he notes that Camp- bell never forgave him this bit of detective work. But Blair himself was not original. He borrowed from John Norris of Bemerton (1656-1711), who has the following lines in his poem " The Parting :" How fading are the joys we dote upon ! Like apparitions seen and gone ; But those which soonest take their flight ^ Are the most exquisite and strong : Like angels' visits, short and bright, Mortality's too weak to bear them long. Norris again returned to the image in a poem to the memory of his niece : Angels, as 'tis but seldom they appear, So neither do they make long stay ; They do but visit and away. Angelus (so 'named from the opening words of the prayer: "Angelas Domini nuntiavit Marise," "The Angel of the Lord announced unto Mary"), in the Roman Catholic Church, is a devotion in memory of the Annunciation. It consists of three of the scriptural texts relating to the mystery, recited alternately with the angelic salutation, " Ave Maria," etc., and followed by a versicle with prayer. The devotion was of gradual growth. So early as 1347 we find the Council of Sens taking up an ordinance already passed by Pope John XII. (1316-1334), which recommended the faithful to say the Ave Maria three times at the hour of curfew (ignitegii). The ordinance was approved, and its observance was made obligatory. Church-bells should be rung at the hour of curfew, and all hearers should go down on their knees and recite the angel's salutation to the glorious Virgin, thus gaining ten days' indul- gence. In 1369 it was further ordained that at dawn there should be three bell-strokes, and whoever at that signal said three aves and as many pater- nosters should obtain an indulgence for twenty days. The Angelus, as we know it, developed out of this beginning, and was substantially the present devotion, when, in 1416, a repetition of the Angelus three times a day was recommended at Breslau, the example being followed by Mainz and Cologne LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 63 in 1423. In 1472, Louis XL obtained a papal decree sanctioning the triple Angel us in France, and promising three hundred additional days of indul- gence to the suppliant. Angry boys, a term applied in the seventeenth century to the unruly " bloods" of the day whose mad frolics nightly made the streets a terror to sedate and peaceable citizens. Get thee another nose that will be pulled Off by the angry boys for thy conversion. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER : The Scornful Lady. Annus Mirabilis (L., " Wonderful year"). A term that may be applied to any year memorable in public or private history. Thus, one of Coleridge's critics called 1797 his annus mirabilis, as during that year the poet composed most of his finest works. And, again, 1871 has been called the annus mira- bilis of the Papacy, as the year in which Pius IX., first among all the succes- sors of St. Peter, attained and passed the twenty-five years of rule which are credited to Peter. But, specifically, the term is applied in English history to the year 1666, which was crowded thick with events, the great fire of Lon- don, the defeat of the Dutch fleet, etc. This specific use of the word has been fixed and perpetuated by Dryden's poem " Annus Mirabilis," which cel- ebrates these events, j Antiquitas seeculi juventus mundi (L., " The antiquity of ages is the youth of the world"). This phrase occurs as a quotation in Bacon's " Ad- vancement of Learning," book i. (1605). Bacon explains it thus: "These times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient ordine retrograde, by computation backward from our- selves." Whewell has pointed out that the same thought occurs in Giordano Bruno's "Cena di Cenere," published in 1584. Pascal, in the preface to his " Treatise on Vacuum," says, " For as old age is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it ?" For a humorous, yet most effective, statement of the same axiom by Sydney Smith, see WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS. Gladstone has taken the words Juventus Mundi as a title for his book on the Homeric period. Anxious Bench, or Anxious Seat, a familiar Americanism, originally derived from the terminology of Methodist camp-meetings and other religious revivals. The anxious benches are seats set aside for anxious mourners, i.e., for sinners who are conscious of their sin and desirous of conversion. After the ordinary services, an Anxious Meeting is held, where the mourners are exhorted, and, after they have brought forth fruit meet for repentance, they are received into church membership. By extension, the phrase On the Anxious Bench means to be in a state of great difficulty, doubt, or despondency. Any other man, a bit of American slang which had a great run in 1860. When a man became prolix or used alternatives, such as Brown or Jones or Robinson, he was promptly called to order by the cry, " or any other man." The first use of the phrase in print was by Charles G. Leland, in a comic sketch in the New York Vanity Fair. A sort of forerunner has been discov- ered in " Waverley :" " Gif any man or any other man." Apartments to let, a colloquial expression, indicating that the person referred to as having such apartments is a fool, an idiot, i.e., that his skull has no tenant in the shape of brains. The phrase may have originated with the famous mot of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, when his son Thomas jest- ingly declared that he had no decided political principles, but would serve 64 HANDY-BOOK OF whatever party paid him best, and that he had a mind to put a placard on his forehead, "To let." "All right, Tom," was the answer, "but don't forget to add 'unfurnished.'" Apes. Leading apes in hell. This proverbial expression is supposed to describe the fate of women who die old maids, or who have otherwise avoided the responsibility of bearing children. In this sense it occurs fre- quently in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Thus, in the "Taming of the Shrew," Act iii. Sc. I : She is your treasure, she must have a husband ; I must dance barefoot on her wedding-day, And, for your love to her, lead apes in hell. Dodsley, in his "Collection of Poems," vol. vi. p. 216, has this stanza: Poor Gratia in her twentieth year, Foreseeing future woe, Chose to attend a monkey here Before an ape below. A more recent example is in Dibdin's song " Tack and Tack : " At length cried she, " I'll marry ; what should I tarry for ? I .may lead apes in hell forever." But it would seem that the expression had some other meaning before the seventeenth century, which it has now lost. Stanihurst, in the dedication to his "Description of Ireland," in Holinshed's "Chronicles," vol. ii. (1586-87), says, " Mersites . . . seemed to stand in no better stead than to lead apes in hell." Here there is an allusion quite unconnected with maidenhood or childlessness. Apostle Gems. According to Bristow's Glossary, the apostle gems are as follows : jasper, the symbol of St. Peter ; sapphire, St. Andrew ; chal- cedony, St. James ; emerald, St. John ; sardonyx, St. Philip ; carnelian, St. Bartholomew ; chrysolite, St. Matthew ; beryl, St. Thomas ; chrysoprase, St. Thaddeus ; topaz, St. James the Less; hyacinth, St. Simeon; amethyst, St. Matthias. A white chalcedony with red spots is called " St. Stephen's stone." Apostle Spoons. Old-fashioned silver or silver-gilt spoons, whose handle terminated in the figure of one of the apostles. The souvenir spoons of to-day are their legitimate descendants. Apostle spoons were the usual presents of sponsors at christenings. The rich gave a set of a dozen, those less wealthy four, while the poor gave one. In "Henry VIII.," Act v. Sc. 2, the king wishes Cranmer to stand godfather to the Princess Elizabeth, and when the prelate excuses himself, saying, How may I deserve it, That am a poor humble subject to you? the king jestingly responds, Come, come, my lord, you'd spare your spoons. Apostles, or The Twelve Apostles, in Cambridge University slang, "the clodhoppers of literature who have at last scrambled through the Senate House without being plucked, and have obtained the title of B.A. by a miracle. The last twelve names on the list of Bachelor of Arts those a degree lower than the ol Ko'Xh.oi are thus designated" (Gradus ad Cantabri- giam). The very last on the list was known as St. Paul, punningly corrupted into St. Poll, an allusion to i Cor. xv. 9 : " For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle." In a fine burst of etymological inspiration, Hotten suggests that apostles is derived horn post alias, i.e,, "after LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 65 the others." But the reference to the Twelve Apostles is clear enough in itself. In Columbian College, Washington, D.C., the twelve last members of the B.A. list_receive each the name of one of the apostles. Appetite. In Rabelais's "Gargantua," ch. v., occurs the famous phrase "L'appetit vient en mangeant" ("Appetite comes in eating"). The context is worth quoting : "The stone called asbestos is not more inextinguishable than is the thirst of which I am the parent. Appetite comes with eating, said Angeston ; but thirst goes away by drinking. Remedy for thirst ? It is the opposite of that for the bite of a dog ; always run after a dog, and he will never bite you ; always drink before thirst, and it will never come to you." The Angeston referred to is supposed to be Jerome de Hangest, a famous doctor of the Sorbonne, who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth cen- tury. But where or under what circumstances he used the phrase is unknown. Montaigne echoes Rabelais in his essay on " Vanity :" " My appetite comes to me while eating." But this is a mere autobiographical detail. The true original is probably in Ovid, who, speaking of Erysichthon, condemned by Ceres to an inextinguishable hunger, says, " All food stimulates his desire for other food." (Metamorphoses, lib. viii.) The phrase is often used now in a meta- phorical sense, as, for example, in Shakespeare's paraphrase : Why, she would hang on him, As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on. Hamlet, Act i. Sc. 2. But even in this sense a classical prototype may be found in Quintus Curtius, who makes his Scythians say to Alexander, " You are the first in whom satiety has engendered hunger." Apple Jack, in America, a familiar name for whiskey distilled from apples, known also as Jersey lightning, from the fact that it is mainly a New Jersey product. It may be interesting to recall John Philips's lines in " The Splendid Shilling :" Thus do I live, from pleasure quite debarred, Nor taste the fruits that the sun's genial rays Mature, John Apple, nor the downy peach. But this is only a curious coincidence. The John Apple, or Apple John (so called because it is ripe about St. John's day), is a kind of apple said to keep for years, and to be in perfection when shrivelled and withered. Hence Washington Irving's " Poor Jemmy, he is but a withered little apple-John," quoted in C. D. Warner's Life, p. 77. Apple of Discord. Something which causes strife, an allusion to the classical fable of Eris, the goddess of hate, who threw a golden apple among her fellow-goddesses, with this inscription, "To the most beautiful." Here, Pallas, and Aphrodite (Juno, Minerva, and Venus) all three claimed the prize, and referred their dispute to Paris, who decided in favor of the latter, a decision that led to the Trojan war. "Angry, indeed !" says Juno, gathering up her purple robes and royal raiment. " Sorry, indeed !" cries Minerva, lacing on her corselet again, and scowling under her helmet. (I imagine the well-known Apple case has just been argued and decided.) " Hurt, forsooth ! Do you suppose we care for the opinion of that hobnailed lout of a Paris? Do you suppose that I, the Goddess of Wisdom, can't make allowances for mortal ignorance, and am so base as to bear malice against a poor creature who knows no better? You little know the goddess nature when you dare to insinuate that our divine minds are actuated by motives so base. A love of justice influences us. We are above mean revenge. We are too magnanimous to be angry at the award of such a judge in favor of such a creature." And, rustling out their skirts, the ladies walk away together. This is all very well. You are bound to believe them. They are actuated by no hostility ; not they. They bear no malice of course not. But when the Trojan war occurs presently, which side will they take ? Many brave souls will be sent to e 6* 66 HANDY-BOOK OF Hades, Hector will perish, poor old Priam's bald numskull will be cracked, and Troy town will burn, because Paris prefers golden-haired Venus to ox-eyed Juno and gray-eyed Minerva. THACKKKAY : Roundabout Papers. Apple-pie order, complete, thorough order. Plausibly conjectured to be a corruption of cap-a-pie order (Fr. de pied en cap), with reference to the com- plete equipment of a soldier fully caparisoned from head to foot. The only objection to this theory is that no instance of the latter phrase appears. Per- haps the derivation suggested in Barrere and Leland's " Slang Dictionary" is the true one : "Order is an old word for a row, and a properly-made apple-pie had, of old, always an order or row of regularly-cut turrets, or an exactly divided border." Pies are rarely now made in this fashion in England, but quite frequently in America. An apple-pie bed, familiaV to school-boys, is a bed in which some practical joker has folded the sheets so that a person cannot get his legs down. The children's garden is in apple-pie order. SCOTT, in Lockharfs Life, vol. iv. p. 131, ed. 1839. Apples. How we apples swim ! A common English phrase, applied to the self-gratulation of a pompous and inflated person. The reference is to the fable of the horse-dung floating down the river with a lot of apples. And even this, little as it is, gives him so much importance in his own eyes that he assumes a consequential air, sets his arms akimbo, and, stmtting among the historical artists, cries, " How we apples swim !" HOGARTH : Works (ed 1873), vol. iii. p. 29. Apprentices and Salmon. A curious popular tradition, still current in the valley of the Severn, asserts that in ancient indentures masters bound themselves not to feed their apprentices on salmon more than thrice a week. A lively controversy on this subject in Notes and Queries led to an offer by the editor of that periodical of five pounds for the discovery of an indenture having this clause. The reward, however, was never claimed. Apron-strings, To be tied to a woman's. To be under petticoat gov- ernment. To be ruled by a woman. There is an old legal term, Apron-string hold, = a tenure of property through one's wife, or during her lifetime alone. The fair sex are so conscious to themselves that they have nothing in them which can deserve entirely to engross the whole man, that they heartily despise one who, to use their own ex- pression, is always hanging at their apron-strings. ADDISON : Spectator, No. 506 (1712). Apropos de bottes (" apropos of boots"), a French expression which has been adopted into English, and means apropos of nothing. The saying is thus accounted for. A certain seigneur, having lost an important cause, told the king, Fran9ois I., that the court had unbooted him (favait debotte). What he meant to say was that the court had decided against him (il avait ete deboute) cf. med. Lat. debotare). The king laughed, but reformed the practice of pleading in Latin. The gentlemen of the bar, feeling displeased at the change, said that it had been made a propos de bottes. Hence the application of the phrase to anything that is done without motive. (Notes and. Queries, second series, 5x. 14.) The explanation is plausible, and, as there is no direct historical evidence to confute it, may be accepted without mental stultification. But it fails to support the burden of proof that legitimately rests on its shoulders. Arcadia, in ancient geography, a pastoral district of the Peloponnesus in Greece, is used as a synonyme for any Utopia of poetical simplicity and innocence. " Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren" (" I too was born in Arcadia"), sings Schiller in his poem "Resignation." Goethe adopts this famous phrase as the motto of his Italian journeys. In the Latin form " Et ego in Arcadia" it appears in one of Poussin's landscapes in the Louvre, LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 67 inscribed on a tomb whereon a group of shepherds gaze with mingled curi- osity and affright. Architect of his own fortune. The familiar proverb, Every man is the architect of his own fortune, is found in most modern languages. Accord- ing to Sallust, in his first oration (" De Republ. Ordinand.," i. i), the phrase originated with Appius Claudius Cascus, who held the office of Censor in B.C. 312: " Sed res docent id verum esse, quod in carminibus Appius ait: Fabrum esse sua quemqtie fortunce" (" But the thing teaches us that that is true which Caius says in his poems, that every one is the architect of his own fortune"). A century later we find Plautus asserting that the wise man is the maker of his own fortune, and, unless he is a bungling workman, little can befall him which he would wish to change : Nam sapiens quidem pol ipse fingit fortunam sibi Eo ne multa quse nevolt eveniunt, nisi fictor malus siet. Trinummus, ii. 284. Publius Syrus has, " His own character is the arbiter of every one's fortune." (Maxim 283.) Bacon quotes Appius's saying approvingly, putting it in the indicative instead of in the infinitive mood, and possibly restoring it thereby to its origi- nal form : " It cannot be denied, but outward accidents conduce much to fortune ; favor, opportunity, death of others, occasion-fitting virtue. But chiefly the mould of a man's fortune is in his own hands : Faber est quisque fortuntz suecame the property of Lord Spencer for .918, a price less than one-half of what his formerly successful rival had paid. And in 1890 another copy of the same edition found its way to Eng- land, and was knocked down for ^230. To be sure, this copy had some slight imperfections. It is all very well to say that it is the rarity of a particular volume which makes it valuable. In a rough and ready way, that is true, of course. But rare books, possibly unique copies, may every clay be seen in old-book stores, tied up with a dozen other books and labelled " This lot for ten cents." It is all very well, again, to say that the book should be valuable as well as rare. Many valueless books are highly prized by bibliomaniacs. A limited .supply must be conjoined to an active demand, there must be the pleasure and ex- citement of the chase, the subsequent calm satisfaction of possessing an envied rarity, or the book would be mere lumber. And the difficult problem to de- termine is why, at certain periods, all the hounds are out and all the horsemen off for one particular fox. It is certainly not because that fox is better than any other fox. It is certainly not because that fox is considered a nobler animal than otherym? natures which would yield equal pleasure in the chase. Of course there are many rare books which are intrinsically interesting, and are rendered valuable by the fact that many people, able to pay big prices for them, would rejoice to have them. There is the famous letter of Christopher Columbus announcing the discovery of the New World. A copy of the origi- nal edition in Spanish is in the possession of Mr. E. F. Buonaventure in Paris, and is priced in his catalogue at 65,000 francs, or $13.000. Yet it is a mere pamphlet of four quarto pages, thirty-four lines to the page. This may be a mere "bluff" on the part of that excellent bibliophile, meant to keep the letter at a prohibitive price, so as to obtain the full value of the centennial boom given by the Chicago Fair to the memory of the great discoverer. Cer- tain it is that another copy of the same edition, or what purported to be such, E g 9 98 HANDY-BOOK OF was disposed of at the Brayton Ives sale in New York (1891) for $4300. A year previous, at the equally memorable Barlow sale, a copy of the Latin edition, published in 1493, had been purchased by the Boston Public Library for $2900. At this same Brayton Ives sale, the sum of $14,800 was paid by Mr. W. E. Ellsworth, of Chicago, for a Gutenberg Bible, the first book ever printed from movable types. Here is an account of the purchase as it appeared in the New York Sun of March 6, 1891 : When the Gutenberg Bible was reached there was a clapping of hands and a genuine stir of excitement. No favorite horse, no peach-blow vase, no French pictures, can win from the heart of a genuine book-lover his affection for this typographical monument. The circum stances under which this copy was purchased, its acknowledged rarity, the various surmises concerning its value, and the report that it was to return to England, gave special importance to the sale. Although it has sixteen leaves in fac-simile, its condition, height, purity of vellum, its illuminated letters, have given it a world-wide reputation. The story of it is brief. Mr. Brinley bought it in Europe. At his sale in 1884 the late Mr. Hamilton Cole purchased it for $8000, Mr. Ives at that time being the next bidder. When the Syston Park copy, badly " cropped," was purchased by Mr. Quaritch for .3500, and offered to Mr. Ives at a small advance, he immediately decided to purchase Mr. Cole's copy. It is well known that this is the first book printed with type, and is from the press of John Gutenberg about 1450. The first bid was $3000 a volume ; this was quickly followed by bids of about $500 each until Mr. W. E. Ellsworth became the purchaser for $14,800. Is this $14,800 the highest price ever paid for a book ? The French Bulletin de rimprimerie says not. Indeed, it " sees" that sum and goes it better by nearly $35,000. And it also claims that a still higher sum was once offered for another book, and refused : What was the highest price ever given for any book ? We may venture to say that we know of one for which a sum of 250,000 francs (,10,000) was paid by its present owner, the German government. That book is a missal, formerly given by Pope Leo X. to King Henry VIII. of England, along with a parchment conferring on that sovereign the right of assuming the title of " Defender of the Faith," borne ever since by English kings. Charles II. made a present of the missal to the ancestor of the famous Duke of Hamilton, whose extensive and valuable library was sold some years ago by Messrs. Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, of Lon- don. The book which secured the highest offer was a Hebrew Bible, in the possession of the Vatican. In 1512 the Jews of Venice proposed to Pope Julius II. to buy the Bible, and to pay for it its weight in gold. It was so heavy that it required two men to carry it. Indeed, it weighed three hundred and twenty-five pounds, thus representing the value of half a million of francs (.20,000). Though being much pressed for money, in order to keep up the " Holy League" against King Louis XII of France, Julius II. declined to part with the volume. Bigot. The amateur etymologist has always had lots of fun with this word. First comes old Camden, who relates that when Rollo, Duke of Nor- mandy, received Gisla, the daughter of Charles the Foolish, in marriage, he would not submit to kiss Charles's foot; and when his friends urged him by all means to comply with that ceremony, he made answer in the English tongue NE SE BY GOD, i.e., Not so by God. Upon which the king and his courtiers, deriding him, and corruptly repeating his answer, called him bigrt, which was the origin of the term. Cotgrave's Dictionary (1611) calls it "an old Norman word, signifying as much as de par Dieu, or our ' for God's sake !' made good French, and signifying an hypocrite, or one that seemeth much more holy than he is, also a scrupulous and superstitious person." As we come down to the present, guesses come fast and furious. As good as any is Archbishop Trench's, who derives the word from the Spanish "bigote," a mustachio. " Hombre de bigote" is indifferently a man with a moustache or a man of resolution, " tener bigotes" is to stand firm, " and we all know that Spain is still the land proverbial for mustachios and bigotry" (S.'ua'y of Words). Dr. Murray gives up the problem, and the Century Dictionary si^s, " Under this form two or more independent words appear to have been confused, involving the etymology in a mass of fable and conjecture." Billingsgate. One of the ancient gates of London and the adjacent fish- LITERARY CURIOSITIES, 99 market were known as Billing's gate (presumably from a personal name), which, in the modern form, as above, the market still retains. It has been celebrated in literature for the extreme foulness of the language used by its denizens, especially the female ones. Hence to this day foul language is known as Billingsgate.- Johnson once made a bet with Boswell that he could go into the fish-market and put a Billings- gate woman in a passion without saying a word that she could understand. The doctor com- menced by silently indicating with his nose that her fish had passed the stage in which a man's olfactories could endure their flavor. The Billingsgate lady made a verbal attack, common enough in vulgar parlance, which impugned the classification in natural history of the doctor's mother. The doctor answered, " You're an article, ma'am." " No more an article than yourself, you b y misbegotten villain." " You are a noun, woman." " You you " stam- mered the woman, choking with rage at a list of titles she could not understand. " You are a pronoun." The beldam shook her fist in speechless rage. " You are a verb an adverb an adjective a conjunction a preposition an interjection !" suddenly continued the doctor, applying the harmless epithets at proper intervals. The nine parts of speech completely con- quered the old woman, and she dumped herself down in the mud, crying with rage at being thus " blackguarded" in a set of unknown terms which, not understanding, she could not answer. ARVINE : Encycloptedia of Anecdotes. Bills. This would seem an unpromising subject. Yet a few specimens are worth filing among the bric-a-brac of literature. The trade-bills of Roger Payne, the great English bookbinder, are highly valued by curiosity-hunters for the eccentric remarks with which he adorned them. For example, on one for binding a copy of Barry's " Wines of the Ancients" he wrote, Homer, the bard who sung in highest strains, Had, festive gift, a goblet for his pains ; Falernian gave Horace, Virgil fire, And barley-wine my British muse inspire. Barley-wine first from Egypt's learned shore, Be this the gift to me from Calvert's store. An Irish election-bill has decided merits. During a contested election in Meath, early in this century, Sir Mark Somerville sent orders to the pro- prietor of the hotel in Trim to board and lodge all persons who should vote for him. In due course he received the following bill, which he had framed and preserved in Somerville House, County Meath. A copy of it was found in the month of April, 1826, among the papers of the deceased Very Rev. Archdeacon O'Connell, Vicar-General of the Diocese of Meath. It ran thus : MY BILL YOUR HONOUR. To eating 16 freeholders above stairs for Sir Marks at 33. 6d. a head is to me . . . . 2 ia o For eating 16 more below stairs and two Priests after supper is to me ...... 2 15 9 To six beds in one room and four in another at two guineas every bed and not more than four in any bed at a time, cheap enough God knows, is to me 22 15 o To 18 horses and 5 mules about my yard all night at 133. every one of them, and for a man which was lost on head of watching them all night, is to me 55 For breakfast on tay in the morning, for every one of them and as many more as they brought, as near as I can guess is to me 4 12 o To raw whiskey and punch without talking of pipes and tobacco as well as for porter, and as well as for breakfasting a lot above stairs and for glasses and delf for the first day and night I am not sure, but, for three days and a half of the election as little as I can call it and not to be very exact it is in all or thereabouts and not to be too particular it is to me at least 79 15 9 For shaving and cropping of the heads of the 49 freeholders for Sir Marks at I3d. for every head of them by my brother who has a vote, is to me 2 13 i For medicine and nurse for poor Tom Kernan in the middle of the night when he was not expected, is to me ten hogs, I don't talk of the Piper or for keeping him sober, as long as he was sober, is to me 40 10 o The total is 100 IDS. 7d., you may say 111 ', so your honor Sir Mark send me this Eleven hundred by Bryan himself, who and I prays for your success always in Trim and no more at present. Signed in place of Jemmy Can s wife. BRYAN X GARRATY mark. 100 HANDY-BOOK OF The following is given as a true bill, made by an artist, for repairs and retouchings to a gallery of paintings of an English lord in the year 1865 To filling up the chink in the Red Sea and repairing the damages of Pharaoh's host. To cleaning six of the Apostles and adding an entirely new Judas Iscariot. To a pair of new hands for Daniel in the lions' den and a set of teeth for the lioness. To an alteration in the Belief, mending the Commandments, and making a new Lord's Prayer. To new varnishing Moses's rod. To repairing Nebuchadnezzar's beard. To mending the pitcher of Rebecca. To a pair of ears for Balaam and a new tongue for the ass. To renewing the picture of Samson in the character of a fox-hunter and substituting a whip for the firebrand. To a new broom and bonnet for the Witch of Endor. To a sheet-anchor, a jury-mast, and a boat for Noah's ark. To painting twenty-one new steps to Jacob's ladder. To mending the pillow stone. To adding some Scotch cattle to Pharaoh's lean kine. To making a new head for Holofernes. To cleansing Judith's hands. To giving a blush to the cheeks of Eve on presenting the apple to Adam. To painting Jezebel in the character of a huntsman taking a flying leap from the walls of Jericho. To planting a new city in the land of Nod. To painting a shoulder of mutton and a shin of beef in the mouths of two of the ravens feeding Elijah. To repairing Solomon's nose and making a new nail to his middle finger. To an exact representation of Noah in the character of a general reviewing his troops preparatory to their march, with the dove dressed as an aide-de-camp. To painting Noah dressed in an admiral's uniform. To painting Samson making a present of his jaw-bone to the proprietors of the British Museum. Binding. A famous tract entitled " De Bibliothecis Antediluvianis" pro- fessed to give information about the libraries of Seth and Enoch. Setting aside this information as not up to the requirements of modern historical criticism, it is fairly safe to assume that the earliest germ of bookbinding was to be found among the Assyrians, who wrote their books on terra-cotta tablets, and en- closed these tablets in clay receptacles which had to be broken before the contents could be reached. Tamil manuscripts of extreme antiquity are also extant, to which a rounded form has been given by the simple expedient of using larger leaves at the centre and adding others gradually shortened at each side. The circle is surrounded by a metal band, tightly fastened by a hook. How far the Greeks improved upon these primitive methods it is difficult to say, as their literature furnishes no details on the subject, but there is a tradition that the Athenians raised a statue to Phillatius, who invented a glue for fastening together leaves of parchment or papyrus. Nay, Suidas, who lived in the tenth century, contends that the Golden Fleece was only a book bound in sheepskin which taught the art of making gold. Did the Romans, profiting by the invention of Phillatius, glue their papyrus leaves into books? A pretty controversy might be raised over a passage in one of Cicero's letters to Atticus. He asks for a couple of librarians to glue (glutinare) his books. Dibdin translates the word " conglutinate." That first syllable is the bone of contention. Did Cicero mean to have his manuscripts made up in books, or did he only require the sheets to be fastened into rolls, in the usual Roman manner ? Dibdin believes the former. But it is an article of faith with the modern bibliophile that Dibdin made a mistake wherever possible, and that mistakes were possible to him where they would have been impossible to any one else. Nevertheless, the papyrus rolls were in their way handsome speci- mens of the art of bookbinding, with their leather covers, gold bosses, gold cylinder, and perfumed illuminated leaves. Mediaeval bindings were gener- LITERARY CURIOSITIES. lot ally of carved ivory, metal, or wood, covered with stamped leather, and frequently adorned with bosses of gold, gems, and precious stones. Of course they could not be kept on shelves, like modern volumes : they would have scratched one another. Each had its embroidered silken case, or chemise, and, when especially valuable, its casket of gold. Books in libraries, churches, and other public places were protected from theft by being chained to shelves and reading-desks. When, as often happened, the volume was too heavy to be lifted, the desk upon which it was chained was made to revolve. A print in La Croix's " Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance," representing the library in the University of Leyden, shows that this custom continued down to the seven- teenth century. Books so chained were called Catenati. With the invention of printing, regular bookbinding, in the modern sense of the word, began. Wooden covers and stamped pig-skin gradually gave way before the lighter styles introduced by the Italians and perfected by the French. Early in the sixteenth century morocco was introduced, the arts of the printer and the binder were differentiated, and new decorations testified to the conservation of energy thus attained and its direction into the right channel. The bindings affected by the great people of the court of France had a distinct individuality. Henri II. and Diane de Poictieis displayed the crescent, the bow, and the quiver of Diana, and the blended initials H. and D. Francis I. had his sala- manders, Marguerite the flower from which she derived her name. The pious Henri III. rejoiced in figures of the Crucifixion, in counterfeit tears with long curly tails, and in various emblems of mortality. In the reign of Louis XIV. it became fashionable to emboss the owner's arms upon his books. Madame de Maintenon had her famous copy of the " De Imitatione Christ!" so decorated, the copy which contained the engraving of the lady saying her prayers at St.-Cyr, when the roof of the chapel opens and a divine voice says, " This is she in whose beauty the king is well pleased." But the engraving was thought indiscreet and suppressed. These blazons needed no special skill, and they do not improve the beauty of a volume, but they are now valued at exorbitant prices if they evidence that the book belonged to some famous library or some exalted personage. In the eighteenth century, ornamental figures of birds and flowers became common, together with mosaics of various- colored leather. The Revolution brought temporary ruin upon the art of bookbinding. Morocco was culpable luxury, and coats of arms were an insult to the Republic. There is an oft-quoted story of the French literary man of 1794, a great reader, who always stripped off the covers of his books and threw them out of his window. What had a citizen to do with morocco bind- ings, with the gildings of Le Gascon or Derome, the trappings of an effete aristocracy ? Perhaps he was right. A working-man of letters, like a work- ing-man of any other guild, cannot use a gorgeously-bound book as one of the implements of his trade. He puts an inky pen into the leaves of one volume, he lays another on its face, he uses the leg of a chair to keep a folio open and to mark the pregnant passage. But there is a class of drones, of literary voluptuaries and sybarites, who love to see their libraries well clothed. Perhaps the most unique binding in the world is in the Albert Memorial Exhibition in Exeter, England. It is a Tegg's edition of Milton (1852), and, according to an affidavit pasted on the fly-leaf, the binding is part of the skin of one George Cudmore, who was executed at Devon March 25, 1830. The skin is dressed white, and looks something like pig-skin in grain and texture. Bird. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Will Somers, the celebrated jester to Henry VIII., happened to call on Lord Surrey, whom he had often, by a well-timed jest, saved from the king's displeasure, and who, consequently, was always glad to see him. He was on this occasion ushered into the aviary, where he found my lord amusing himself with his 9* 102 HANDY-BOOK OF birds. Somers happened to admire the plumage of a kingfisher. "By my Lady, my prince of wits, I will give it to you." Will skipped about with de- light, and swore by the great Harry he was a most noble gentleman. Away went Will with his kingfisher, telling all his acquaintances whom he met that his friend Surrey had just presented him with it. Now, it so happened that Lord Northampton, who had seen this bird the day previous, arrived at Lord Surrey's just as Will Somers had left, with the intention of asking the bird of Surrey for a present to a lady friend. Great was his chagrin on finding the bird gone. Surrey, however, consoled him with saying that he knew Somers would restore it if he (Surrey) promised him two some other day. Away went a messenger to the prince of wits, whom he found in raptures with his bird, and to whom he delivered his lord's message. Great was Will's sur- prise, but he was not to be bamboozled by even the monarch himself. "Sirrah," said Will, " tell your master that I am much obliged for his liberal offer of two for one, but that I prefer one bird in hand to two in the bush." This is the good old story told about the phrase, but, if true, Somers was quoting rather than originating, as the proverb antedates him. The analogous French saying is " Un tiens vaut deux tu 1'auras." Bird. A little bird told me. An almost universal adage, based on the popular idea that this apparently ubiquitous wanderer, from the vantage-point of the upper air, spied out all strange and secret things, and revealed them to such as could understand. Thus, in Eccles. x. 20 : " Curse not the king, no, not in thy thought ; and curse not the rich in thy bed-chamber : for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter." The Greek and Roman soothsayers not only drew auguries from the flight of birds, but some pretended to a knowledge of their language which made them privy to the secrets they had to reveal. And how was this knowledge attained ? There were various recipes. Pliny recommends a mixture of snake's and bird's blood. Melampus is more exacting. He says you must have your ears licked by a dragon ; but then few of us have any social acquaintance with dragons. Nevertheless, the art was acquired by many. Solomon, according to the Koran, was first informed by a lapwing of all the doings of the Queen of Sheba. Mahomet himself was instructed by a pigeon, which whispered in his ear in presence of the multitude. In the Mahabharata, King Nsinara is taught by a dove, which is the spirit of God. In the old wood-cuts of the " Golden Legends" the Popes are distinguished by a dove whispering in their ear. In the Saga of Siegfried the hero understands bird- language, and receives advice from his feathered friends. And talking birds, as well as other animals, appear in the folk-lore of every country. Proverbial and popular literature also abound with allusions to the spying habits of birds, from the old Greek saw, " None sees me but the bird that flieth by," to the passage in the Nibelungen Lied, one of many, " No one hears us but God and the forest bird." An eavesdropper is ever a gossip, so it is an easy tran- sition from listening to repeating what is heard. The very last lines of Shakespeare's " Henry IV., Part II." refer to our subject * We bear our civil swords and native fire As far as France : I heard a bird so sing, Whose music to my thinking pleased the king. Bis dat qui cito dat (L., " He gives twice who gives quickly"), a proverb shortened from the 245th sentence of Publius Syrus, " Inopi beneficium bis dat qui dat celeriter" (" He gives a double benefit to the needy who gives quickly"). Even a prompt refusal, according to the same authority, should be prompt : " Pars est beneficii quod petitur si cito neges" ("A prompt refusal has in part the grace of a favor granted"). And Shakespeare's lines are used to urge expedition in all things, good or evil : LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 103 If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly. Macbeth, Act i., Sc. 7. Queen Elizabeth was dilatory enough in suits, of her own nature ; and the Lord Treasurer Burleigh, to feed her humor, would say to her, " Madam, you do well to let suitors stay, for I shall tell you, bis dat qui c ito dat ; if you grant them speedily, they will come again the sooner." BACON : Apothegms, No. 71. Bishop (Gr. kmano-Kog, " overlooker," " overseer"). A curious example of word-change, as effected by the genius of different tongues, is furnished by the English bishop and the French eveque. Both are from the same root, furnishing, perhaps, the only example of two words from a common stem so modifying themselves in historical times as not to have a letter in common. (Of course many words from a far-off Aryan stem are in the same condition.) The English strikes off the initial and terminal syllables, leaving only piscop, which the Saxon preference for the softer labial and hissing sounds modified into bishop, fiveque (formerly evesque) merely softens the p into v and drops the last syllable. Biter Bit. A proverbial phrase meaning that one is caught in one's own trap, that the tables have been turned. Biter is an old word for sharper, and may be found with that meaning at least as far back as 1680. But early in the eighteenth century the humorous diversion known as a bite was introduced into exalted circles. Swift, in a letter to Rev. Dr. Tisdall, December 16, 1703, describes it thus : " I'll teach you a way to outwit Mrs. Johnson ; it is a new- fashioned way of being witty, and they call it a bite. You must ask a banter- ing question, or tell some damned lie in a serious manner, and then she will answer or speak as if you were in earnest, and then cry you, ' Madam, there's a bite !' I would not have you undervalue this, for it is the constant amuse- ment in court, and everywhere else among the great people ; and I let you know it, in order to have it obtain among you, and teach you a new refine- ment." Now, when the gudgeon refused to rise to the bait, one can well understand that the biter might be said to be bit. Another very plausible derivation of the phrase, which, even if not its actual origin, undoubtedly helped to establish it in popular favor, is thus suggested by a correspondent in Notes and Queries (sixth series, iv. 544) : "A case came within my own knowledge not long ago, where the severe remedy was tried of biting a child who had contracted the habit of biting others. I have no doubt that it will be found to be a recognized part of old-fashioned nursery discipline, which gave rise to the common expression, the biter bit." Bitter end, originally a nautical expression applied to the end of a ship's cable. Admiral Smyth's "Sailor's Word-Book" explains it as "that part of the cable which is abaft the bitts" two main pieces of timber to which a cable is fastened when a ship rides at anchor. When a chain or rope is paid out to the bitter end, no more remains to be let go. It seems, therefore, that the phrase " to the bitter end" was originally used as equivalent to the ex- treme end, but the non-nautical mind (misinterpreting the word bitter] gradu- ally made it synonymous with to the bitter dregs, to the death, in a severe or pitiless manner, from a fancied analogy to such expressions as a " bitter foe," " the bitter east wind," etc. Bitter Sweet In " As you Like It," Shakespeare makes his Jaques speak of " chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancies" (Act iv., Sc. 3). Some edi- tions would have us read food instead of cud, but the proverbial use of the phrase discards all conjectural amendment, the more so that in this case it is a distinct defilement of sense and sound. The close approximation of pleas- 104 HANDY-BOOK OF ure and pain has been noted by many authors, both before and since Martial wrote his famous epigram, Difficilis, facilis, jucundus, acerbus es idem ; Nee tecum possum vivere, nee sine te. Quarles comes very close to the Shakespearian phrase in the line, I languish with these bitter sweet extremes. Spenser says, So every sweet with sour is tempered still. And here are a few more examples : Still where rosy pleasure leads See a kindred grief pursue ; Behind the steps that misery treads Approaching comfort view. The hues of bliss more brightly glow Chastised by sabler tints of woe, And, blended, form with artful strife The strength and harmony of life. GRAY. Under pain pleasure, Under pleasure pain lies. EMERSON : The Sphinx. A man of pleasure is a man of pains. YOUNG: Night Thoughts. Sweet is pleasure after pain. DRYDEN : Alexander's Feast. Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure. CONGREVE : The Old Bachelor, Act v., Sc. i. And sometimes tell what sweetness is in gall. WYAT. Good-night, good-night ! Parting is such sweet sorrow That I shall say good-night till it be morrow. SHAKESPEARE : Romeo and Juliet, Act ii., Sc. 2. Black and White, i.e., black ink and white paper. To put a thing down in black and white is to preserve it in print or in writing. The phrase is at least as old as Ben Jonson's time : I have it here in black and white (fulls out the warrant). Every Man in his Humour, Act iv., Sc. 2. There is a current phrase for a paradoxical or illogical reasoner, " He would try to prove that black is white." Curiously enough, in the etymological sense black is white. The word black (Anglo-Saxon blac, blaec) is fundamentally the same as the old German black, now only to be found in two or three com- pounds, e.g., Blachfeld, a level field. It meant originally level, bare, and was used to denote black, bare of color. But the nasalized form of black is blank, which also meant originally bare, and was used in the sense of white, because white is (apparently) bare of color. Black Box. When Charles II. was king and the Duke of York heir presumptive, a large party of the common people wished to have the Duke of Monmouth, Charles's putative son, recognized as heir to the crown, and a legend was started that there existed somewhere a black box containing a written marriage contract between the king and Monmouth's mother, the "bold, brown, and beautiful" Lucy Walters. In " Lorna Doone," John Ridd says of his mother, " She often declared that it would be as famous in history as the Rye House, or the meal-tub, or the great black box, in which she was a firm believer." LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 105 Black Monday. The name given to a memorable Easter Monday in the year 1351, which was very dark and misty. A great deal of hail fell, and the cold is said to have been so intense that hundreds died from its effects. The name afterwards came to be applied to the Monday after Easter of each year. It is also a school-boy term for the Monday on which school reopens after vacation. Black Watch. The name by which the Forty-Second Highlanders are familiarly known in the British army. Among the many deeds of daring per- formed by them in recent wars three stand out pre-eminent. They were one of the three Highland regiments with which Sir Colin Campbell (afterwards Lord Clyde) broke the Russian centre at the Alma, on the aoth of Septem- ber, 1854. They formed part of the immortal "thin red line tipped with steel" against which an overwhelming Russian force shattered itself in the memorable attack upon Balaklava five weeks later. In the advance upon Coomassie during General Wolseley's Ashantee campaign, in January, 1874, the "Black Watch" bore the brunt of the great fight at Amoaful, suffering severe loss in carrying at the point of the bayonet a thick wood held by na- tive sharp-shooters. Indeed, they have fully obeyed the injunction with which their chief led them up the Alma hill-side : "Now, my men, make me proud of the Highland Brigade." Blarney literally means a little field (Irish blarna, diminutive of blar, a "field"). Its popular signification of flattery, palavering rhodomontade, or wheedling eloquence may have originated in Lord Clancarty's frequent promises, when the prisoner of Sir George Carew, to surrender his strong castle of Blarney to the soldiers of the queen, and as often inventing some smooth and plausi- ble excuse for exonerating himself from his promise. Blarney Castle, now a very imposing ruin, situated in the village of Blarney, some four miles from Cork, was built in the early part of the fifteenth century by Cormac McCarthy, Ihe Prince of Desmond. No one appears to know the exact origin of the famous Blarney Stone, or whence it derived its miraculous power of endowing those who kiss it with the gift of " blarney." In some way it found itself one day upon the very pinnacle of the castle tower with the date 1703 carved upon it. It is now preserved and held in place by two iron girders between huge merlons of the northern projecting parapet, nearly a hundred feet above the ground. To kiss it has been the ambition of many generations, who labori- ously climb up to its dangerous eminence. Sir Walter Scott himself did not feel degraded by following the general example. Like the famous toe of St. Peter's statue in Rome, the lip-service of tourists is gradually wearing it away. The date has already been obliterated, and the shape and size have altered so much that people who visit it at long intervals find it difficult to believe it is the same stone. Blazes, in English and American slang, a euphemism for the infernal regions, from the flames which theologians are wont to describe. This is evidently the meaning in expressions like " Go to blazes !'' But in what looks at first sight like an identical expression, " Drunk as blazes," another ety- mology has been suggested, making it a corruption of Blaisers or Blaizers, i.e., the mummers who took part in the processions in honor of the good bishop and martyr St. Blaise, patron saint of English wool-combers. The uniform conviviality on these occasions made the simile an appropriate one. Blessing Curse. Walter Scott makes one of his characters describe Rob Roy as " o'er bad for blessing, and o'er good for banning." This same antithesis had already been put into proverbial verse form : Io6 HANDY-BOOK OF Too bad for a blessing, too good for a curse, I wish in my soul you were better or worse. In the same way Corneille said of Richelieu, after his death, II a fait trop de bien pour en dire du mal, II a fait trop de mal pour en dire du bien. Blindman's Holiday, a humorous locution, formerly used more widely than at present, to designate the time just before the candles or lamps are lighted, when it is too dark to work and one is obliged to rest, or "take a holiday." With the superior readiness of gas and electricity, the holiday now need be of infinitesimal duration. The phrase is found as far back as 1599, in Naslvs " Lenten Stuffe" (Harl. Misc.,v\. 167) : " What will not blind Cupid do in the night, which is his blindman's holiday ?" Swift's " Polite Conversa- tion," a mine of contemporary slang, does not overlook this phrase : " Indeed, madam, it is blindman's holiday ; we shall soon be all of a color." Blocks of Five, a phrase that became famous in American politics during the Harrison-Cleveland Presidential campaign (1888). The Democratic man- agers made wide circulation of a letter alleged to have been written by Colonel W. W. Dudley, Treasurer of the Republican National Committee. Its most salient feature was a recommendation to secure "floaters in blocks of five." This was construed to mean the purchase of voters at wholesale rates. Colonel Dudley denied the letter, and instituted suits for libel, which were abandoned after the election. I had attributed at least originality to the promoter of " floaters in blocks of five," but it appears that, after all, we have here only a modification of an old scheme. Says Suidas under the word Sexd^faOai, " This phrase originated from the practice of bribing men by tens. Candidates for office, or persons with a job to carry through, used to deal out their bribes to blocks of ten." Anytus, the accuser of Socrates, usually has the discredit of introducing this system into the courts, and, as a recent commentator remarks, " doubtless a juryman would feel greater confidence if he knew he had nine others sitting by him who had been bribed." Scholars have always been in the dark about the details of this scheme, and a monograph on the subject, dashed off by Colonel Dudley in his leisure hours before the next election, would be very gratefully received. M. H. MORGAN, in a letter to N. Y. Nation of November 21, 1889. Blood is thicker than water, i.e., a relation is dearer than a stranger. This phrase is sometimes ascribed to Commodore Tatnall, of the United States Navy, who assisted the English in Chinese waters, and, in his despatch to his government, justified his interference in these words. Sometimes it is ascribed to Scott, who puts it in the mouth of Bailie Nicol Jarvie in " Guy Mannering," ch. xxvii. But Tatnall and Scott were merely quoting an old saw duly recorded in " Ray's Proverbs" (1672), which was probably in common use long before. Blood stands for traceable, admitted consanguinity; water, for the chill and colorless fluid that flows through the veins of the rest of mankind, homines homini lupi, who take but cold interest in the happiness of a stranger. Water, too, in our early writers, was symbolic of looseness, inattachment, falsity. " Unstable as water" is the scriptural phrase. Thicker signifies greater consistency and substance, hence closeness of attachment, adhesiveness. " As thick as thieves," = as close as bad men when banding for evil enterprise. Blood is always thought binding. Conspirators have signed their bonds with their own blood, as martyrs have their attestation of the truth. " He cemented the union of the two families by marriage," is a stock Ehrase with historians. Quitting metaphor for physical fact, we find that the lood as well as the hair of oxen has been used to bind mortar together and give greater consistency than mere water, as is reported of the White Tower of London. The proverb may also allude to the spiritual relationship which, according to the Roman Catholic Church, is created between the sponsor and the child LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 107 whom he brings to the waters of baptism. The relationship by blood would probably be more thought of than one originating in water. Bloody, a vulgar intensive used in a variety of ways, especially by London roughs. Dr. Murray rejects all derivations which would imply any profane origin, such as 'sblood or the very absurd By'r Lady suggested by Max O'Rell. He holds that there is good reason to think it was at first a reference to the habits of the "bloods" or aristocratic rowdies of the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Bloody drunk must originally have meant as drunk as a blood ; thence the adjective was extended to kindred ex- pressions, its popularity being greatly enhanced by its sanguinary sound and its affiliation with the adjective in bloody murder, bloody butcher, etc. Bloody chasm, To shake hands across the. An American phrase which sprang up immediately after the civil war, among those peace-loving orators, writers, and speakers who were anxious to obliterate all memories of the fratricidal struggle. People of an opposite temper were said to " wave the bloody shirt." Bloody shirt. In American political slang, " to wave the bloody shirt," sometimes euphemized into " the ensanguined garment," means to keep up the sectional issues of the civil war by appeals to prejudice and passion. A probable origin of the phrase may be found in a Corsican custom nearly, if not quite, obsolete. In the days of the fierce vendette the feuds which divided Corsican family from family bloodshed was a common occurrence. Before the burial of a murdered man the gridata was celebrated. This word, which literally means a crying aloud, may be translated a " wake." The body of the victim was laid upon a plank ; his useless fire-arms were placed near his hand, and his blood-stained shirt was hung above his head. Around the rude bier sat a circle of women, wrapped in their black mantles, who rocked themselves to and fro with strange wailings. The men, relatives and friends of the murdered man, fully armed, stood around the room, mad with thirst for revenge. Then one of the women the wife or mother or sister of the dead man with a sharp scream would snatch the bloody shirt, and, waving it aloft, begin the vocero, the lamentation. This rhythmic discourse was made up of alternate expressions of love for the dead and hatred of his enemies ; and its startling images and tremendous curses were echoed in the faces and mutterings of the armed mourners. It was by a not unnatural tran- sition that the phrase "bloody shirt" became applied to demagogical utter- ances concerning the Southern Rebellion. Blue is a favorite adjective for the impossible in popular phrase and fable. The Blue Flower of the German romanticists represented the ideal, the unattainable ; and in France Alphonse Karr has domesticated the similar expression "blue roses." "Once in a blue moon" means never. "To blush like a blue dog," an expression that is preserved in Swift's " Polite Conver- sation," means not to blush at all. More than a century earlier, however, Stephen Gosson, in the " Apologie for the School of Abuse" ( 1579), speaks with similar meaning of "blushing like a black dog." Sometimes blue is used as an intensive. Thus, school-boys speak of "blue fear" and "blue funk," and the phrase to "drink till all is blue" is at least as old as Ford's "Lady's Trial" (1639). "Blue ruin" is a popular English epithet for an inferior sort of gin, and finds its analogue in the French "vin bleu" applied to thin sour wine. In French also, as in English, blue is a synonyme for despondency. "To be in the blues," "to have a fit of the blue devils," has its Gallic equivalent in "en voir des bleues" a variant of "en voir des grises" and "en etre bleu," " en rester tout bleu," all meaning to despair, to 108 HANDY-BOOK OF meet with suffering or disappointment. In English slang "to talk blue" is to talk immodestly. " Blue blazes" means hell, probably from the sulphur associated with it. A "blue apron" is an amateur statesman, from the blue apron once borne by tradesmen generally, now restricted to butchers, fish- mongers, poulterers, etc. Blue Blood. This term comes from the Spanish expression sangre azul applied to the aristocracy of Castile and Aragon. After the Moors were driven out of Spain, the aristocracy was held to consist of those who traced their lineage back to the time before the Moorish conquest, and especially to the fair-haired and light-complexioned Goths. Their veins naturally appeared through their skin of a blue color, while the blood of the masses, contaminated by the Moorish infusion and to lesser degree by miscegenation with negroes and Basques, showed dark upon their hands and faces. So the white Span- iards of old race came to declare that their blood was blue, while that of the common people was black. Owing to intermarriage, there is very little genuine blue blood left in Spain ; but a Spanish family remaining perfectly fair and purely Gothic, and holding position and rank for centuries, is to be found in Yucatan at the present day. In England, however, it was anciently held that the thick and dark blood was the best. " Thin-blooded" or " pale-blooded" means weak and cowardly. Shakespeare never loaded words more heavily with significance than when he made Lucio call Angelo, in " Measure for Measure," A man whose blood Is very snow-broth ; one who never feels The wanton stings and motions of the sense. Blue Hen's Chickens, a nickname for the inhabitants of Delaware. The accepted origin is that one Captain Caldwell, who commanded a Delaware regiment, was notorious for his love of cock-fighting. He drilled his men admirably, and they were known in the army as "Caldwell's game-cocks." The gallant captain held a peculiar theory that no cock was really game unless it came from a blue hen ; and this led to the substitution of Blue Hen's Chickens as a nickname for his regiment. After the Revolutionary war the nickname was applied indiscriminately to all Delawareans. Blue Lights, an American political term. When the British fleet lay off New London, Connecticut, during the war of 1812, blue-lights were frequently seen near the shore. These Commodore Decatur, whose ships lay near by, attributed to traitors ; though, indeed, facts go to prove that no American was ever discovered burning one. Goodrich, in his " Recollections," says, " Blue Lights, meaning treason on the part of Connecticut Federalists during the war, is a standard word in the flash dictionary of Democracy." Again, "Con- necticut Blue Lights are the grizzly monster with which the nursing fathers and mothers of Democracy frighten their children into obedience just before elections." Blue Nose, a common nickname for a Nova-Scotian, sometimes explained as an allusion to the purple tinge not rarely seen on the noses of Nova-Sco- tians, and presumably due to the coldness of the winters ; sometimes derived from the Blue-nose potato, a great favorite for its delicacy. It is more prob- able that the name of the potato was based on the sobriquet, and not vice versa. Hence Blue-nose potato means a Nova Scotia potato. Blue-Stocking, a humorous and rather contemptuous epithet applied to an authoress or a lady of any literary pretensions or attainments. With the altered standard of judgment as to female education the term has fallen into comparative disuse. In the eighteenth century and the beginning of the LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 109 present it was very common. The familiar explanation is that the term was first applied to a female coterie in Dr. Johnson's time. But it is a question whether it arose at Mrs. Montagu's or at Mrs. Vesey's receptions, or what was the exact reason of its adoption. One story states that a Mr. Stillingfleet was one of the males admitted to Mrs. Montagu's evening parties, that his dress was remarkably plain, even to a pair of blue worsted stockings in lieu of silk, but that his conversation was so stimulating that in his absence the remark was frequently made, "We can do nothing without the blue stock- ings." And thus by degrees the title was established. This version seems to be supported by a passage in one of Mrs. Montagu's letters dated 1757, where she observes that Mr. Stillingfleet "has left off his old friends and his blue stockings, and has taken to frequenting operas and other gay assemblies." But in the "Memoirs" of one of the greatest of all the Blue-stockings, Mrs. Elizabeth Carter herself (published in 1816), it is said of Mrs. Vesey's literary parties that " there was no ceremony, no cards, and no supper. Even dress was so little regarded that a foreign gentleman who was to go there with an acquaintance was told in jest that it was so little necessary that he might appear there, if he pleased, in blue stockings. This he understood in the literal sense, and, when he spoke of it in French, called it the Bas Bleu meet- ing. And this was the origin of the ludicrous appellation of the Blue Stocking Club." Hannah More, also, in the "advertisement" to her pleasant little poem "The Bas Bleu; or, Conversation," writes, "The following trifle owes its birth and name to the mistake of a foreigner of distinction, who gave the literal title of the Bas Bleu to a small party of friends who have often been called, by way of pleasantry, the Blue-Stockings." Surely Hannah must have known something definite about the derivation of the title of her own beloved clique. She, too, states that the society used to meet at Mrs. Vesey's, not at Mrs. Montagu's. Blue, True. The fancy that blue was the color of truth, as green was of in- constancy, is a very ancient one, dating back to the party distinctions in ancient Rome. In the factions of the Circus of the Lower Empire the emperor Anas- tasius secretly favored the Greens^ Justinian openly protected the Blues: thence the former became the emblem of disaffection, and the latter of loyalty. The idea appears very early in English literature. Thus, in the " Squiere's Tale" of Chaucer, we read, And by hire bedde's hed she made a mew, And covered it with velouettes blew, In signe of trouthe that is in woman sene. So in his "Court of Love," line 246 : Lo yondir folke (quod she) that knele in blew, They were the color ay and ever shal, In signe they were and ever wil be true, Withoutin change. "True blue" as the partisan color of the Covenanters, in opposition to the scarlet badge of Charles I., was first adopted by the soldiers of Lesley and Montrose in 1639, partly under the influence of the Mosaical precept, "Speak to the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments, throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a riband of blue" (Numbers xv. 38). The phrase true blue now has a general application, and means stanch, loyal, firm in the faith. Boat, To be in the same, a proverbial expression, common to many lan- guages, meaning to be embarked in the same enterprise, to be in the same condition, especially if unfortunate. The words " we are in the same boat" 10 110 HANDY-BOOK OF were used by Clement I., Bishop of Rome (circa A.D. 91 to too), in a letter to the church of Corinth on the occasion of a dissension. The letter, which is still extant, is prized as an important memorial of the early Church. Have ye pain, so likewise pain have we, For in one boat we both embarked be. HUDSON : Judith, iii. 1. 352 (1584). Boat, To have an oar in another's. To meddle with other people's affairs. The pope must have his ore in everie man's bote, his spoone in everie man's dish. Ho- LINSHED : Chronicles, ii. 173 (1577). Bobolition, Bobolitionist, derisive epithets for Abolition, Abolitionist, used by the enemies of the emancipation movement in its early days. A cor- respondent of the New York Nation remembered having seen the word bobo- lition at least as early as 1824 "on a broadsheet containing what purported to be an account of a bobolition celebration at Boston, July 14. At the top of the broadsheet was a grotesque procession of negroes. Among the toasts, or sentiments, were the following : " Massa Wilberforce, de brack man bery good friend ; may he nebber want a bolish to he boot." " De Nited State ; de land ob libity, 'cept he keep slave at de South. No cheer ! Shake de head !" " Dis year de fourth ob July come on de fifth ; so, ob course, de fourteenth come on de fifteenth." Bock beer, a corruption of " Eimbecker" beer, its original home being the little town of Eimbeck, Hanover. So famous was it all through the Middle Ages that no other beer, nor even the costliest wine, could compare with it in popularity. Attempts were soon made to produce it in other local- ities. Thus the remembrance of the original name was gradually lost. "Eim- beck" became successively " Eimbock," "ein bock," and finally plain "bock." This popular word-transformation is already several hundred years old, for in the Land- und Polizeiordnung of 1616 a "bock meet" is referred to, which "should only be brewed to meet the necessities of the sick." Popular ety- mology, of course, insists that bock beer means goat beer, bock being German for goat, and this fancy is perpetuated by the picture of a goat rampant, which usually appears on tavern-signs and other advertisements of the beer. Tra- dition even furnishes a myth to explain the phrase. Long ago, it is said, the devil appeared in the guise of a goat to a love-sick and rejected swain, and taught him the secret of making bock beer for the customary price of his soul. The people raved over the new decoction. The brewer prospered and married his sweetheart. At the end of the stipulated time the devil appeared to claim his own, but was skilfully inveigled into a bock beer intoxication, and when he awoke from his drunken stupor he was glad to sneak home without his prize. Bock beer, it may be added, differs from ordinary lager only in that an excess of malt is added to make it sweeter. It will not keep as long as lager. Brewed in January or February, it is placed on the market in April or May, and is in season for about a month. Bogus, American slang for counterfeit, spurious, fictitious, which has now passed into general circulation. The amateur etymologist has made many interesting guesses as to the origin of this word, but none have any philo- logical value. Here is the most amusing and the most widely current, copied from the Boston Daily Courier of June 12, 1857 : The word " bogus," we believe, is a corruption of the name of one Borghese, a very corrupt individual who, twenty years ago or more, did a tremendous business in the way of supplying LITERARY CURIOSITIES. Ill the great West and portions of the Southwest with a vast amount of counterfeit bills, and bills of fictitious banks which never had any existence out of the " forgetive brain" of him, the said " Borghese." The Western people, who are rather rapid in their talk when excited, soon fell into the habit of shortening the Italian name of Borghese to the more handy one of Bogus, and his bills, and all other bills of like character, were universally styled bogus currency." The earliest use of the word so far discovered is recorded in the " New English Dictionary" as occurring in the Painesville (O.) Telegraph of July 6 and November 2, 1827. It is there a substantive, applied to an apparatus for coining false money. Dr. Murray has a sly hit at the " bogus derivations circumstantially given," but does not commit himself to any. Boiled or Biled Shirt, a white shirt, especially when newly laundried, a term of mild derision, if not actual reproach, which sprang up among the pioneer miners of the Western States, and is still more common in the West than in the East. But they were rough in those times ! If a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt or a stovepipe hat, and he would be accommodated. For those people hated aristocrats. They had a par- ticular and malignant animosity toward what they called a biled shirt. MARK TWAIN : Roughing It. Boodle. There are two American slang words spelt thus, each distinct in meaning and apparently of different origin and etymology. The first and elder word, which now appears more frequently in the intensified form caboo- dle, meaning a crowd, a company, is not impossibly derived from the old English bottel, a bundle, and there is reason to believe that it is a survival of a former English colloquialism. F. Markham, in his "Book of Honour," iv. 2, speaks of "all the buddle and musse" of great men. The later and now more common word, meaning money, and especially money gained by gam- bling, venality, or uther dubious methods, or employed for corrupt political pur- poses, may be a form of the Dutch word buidel, which means " pocket" and also " purse." The Professor has been to see me. Came in, glorious, at about twelve o'clock, last night. Said he had been with " the boys." On inquiry, found that " the boys" were certain baldish and grayish old gentlemen that one sees or hears of in various important stations of society. Then he began to quote Byron about Santa Croce, and maintained that he could " furnish out creation" in all its details from that set of his. He would like to have the whole boodle of them (I remonstrated against this word, but the Professor said it was a diabolish good word, and he would have no other), with their wives and children, shipwrecked on a remote island, just to see how splendidly they would reorganize society. O. W. HOLMES : Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, p. 120. Book. "The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it." This saying has been attributed both to Beaconsfield and to Archbishop Thomson. But before the time of either, Lord Kames (1696- 1782), according to Tytler's Life, had advised Sir Gilbert Elliot, who com- plained of a lack of information on a certain branch of political economy, " Shall I tell you, my friend, how you will come to understand it ? Go and write a book upon it." And over in France one of Lord Kames's contempo- raries had given vent to exactly the same idea : " The best way to become familiar with any given subject is to write a book upon it." But a far safer rule is that propounded by the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (p. 134), as applicable to writing as to speaking: "Don't I read up various matters to talk about at this table or elsewhere ? No, that is the last thing I would do. I will tell you my rule. Talk about those things you have long had in your mind, and listen to what others say about subjects you have studied but recently. Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much used till they are seasoned." Book, Beware of the man of one. A proverbial expression frequently . 112 HANDY-BOOK OF quoted in the Latin form, "Cave ab homine unius libri." The phrase is often attributed to Terence, but is not to be found in his extant works. Probably it originated in the story of St. Thomas Aquinas, thus related by Jeremy Taylor : " Aquinas was once asked with what compendium a man might best become learned. He answered, By reading of one book ; meaning that an understanding entertained with several objects is intent upon neither, and profits not." Southey, in " The Doctor," commenting on this passage, says, " The man of one book is, indeed, proverbially formidable to all conversational figu- rantes. Like your sharp-shooter, he knows his piece perfectly and is sure of his shot." And he quotes the following lines from Lope de Vega : Que es estudiante notable El que lo es de un libro solo. Que quando no estavan llenos Be tantos libros agenos, Como van dexando atras, Sabian los hombres mas Porque estudiavan en menos. Johnson tells how he once met the poet Collins, after the latter became deranged, carrying with him an English Testament. " I have but one book," said Collins, " but it is the best." This is alluded to in his epitaph in Chich- ester Cathedral : Sought on one book his troubled mind to rest, And wisely deemed the book of God the best. Sometimes the phrase is used in a derogatory sense. Thus, Edward Everett applies it " not only to the man of one book, but also to the man of one idea, in whom the sense of proportion is lacking, and who sees only that for which he looks." Book-plate. A label bearing a name, crest, monogram, or inscription pasted in a book to indicate its ownership, as well as its position in a library, etc. Mr. Leicester Warren, in his treatise on " Book-Plates," complains that the word is clumsy and ambiguous, inasmuch as it might readily be inter- preted plates to illustrate books. Abroad the term used is ex-libris, and he regrets that it cannot be domesticated. Book-plates are at least as old as Albert Diirer, who engraved several, the best-known being a wood-cut designed for his friend Wilibald Pirckheimer, the Nuremberg jurist. Other contemporary engravers executed them. Beham made one for the Archbishop Albert of Mentz, his patron, about 1534. An im- pression, believed to be unique, is in the Print-Room at the French Biblio- theque Nationale. In England the custom of using book-plates was of much later date, the oldest yet identified bearing the date 1668 and the name of Francis Hill. The 68 is filled in with a pen. The whole number of book- plates in the seventeenth century is very small, amounting only to those of thirteen persons, some of whom, however, had two. As to the name " book- plate," that seems to be of still later date, and cannot be traced back farther than the year 1791, when it is used of some of Hogartli's early engravings by his biographer, Ireland ; though, twenty years earlier, Horace Walpole almost used it, for he speaks of a "plate to put in Lady Orford's books" being engraved by George Virtue. Book-plates of an artistic or non-heraldic character are comparatively modern, not to be found, perhaps, before the French Revolution. Men fond of books were contented then with the plain name, if they had no crest or did not care to incur the tax for show- ing it. It is evident that the bibliographical and historical value of a book might be greatly enhanced by the book-plate so long as it remains pasted therein. LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 113 The interest of the plate is communicated to the book, and that of the book to the plate. But latterly an unfortunate fad has sprung up for book-plates alone, book-plates dismembered from the books which give them an intelli- gible value, and only leaving in the holder's hand a beggarly engraving of a coat of arms, such as he might have obtained out of an ordinary peerage. True, not all plates are armorial. Some bear only a name and an inscription. The earliest of these latter is probably Pirckheimer's " Inicium Sapienciae Timor Domini." It is astonishing how many book-mottoes are directed against the cultivated seekers of wisdom from books not their own. Says a Saturday Reviewer, " We have in our possession a copy of Paley's ' Gothic Architecture,' on which the name and the address of the pious Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck having been given, we find a verse from Psalm xxxvii. : 'The wicked borroweth and payeth not again,' a sentence which makes us hasten to affirm that we bought and did not borrow the book." The same text reappears in the books of other collectors. Another text frequently selected as a motto is from the Parable of the Ten Virgins : "Go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for yourselves." The following lines, of uncertain parentage, are also great favorites : Si quis hunc librum rapiat scelestus Atque furtivis manibus prehendat, Pergat at tetras Acherontis undas Non rediturus. These verses remind one of the English distich which school-boys are in the habit of scrawling in their text-books, not infrequently illuminated with a picture of a man swinging from what appears like a rudimentary conception of a gallows : Steal not this book, my honest friend, For fear the gallows will be your end. And what modern Diogenes was it who used to put in all his books, "Stolen from the library of " ? In suave and gentlemanly contrast to these truculent mottoes is the inscription which one of the famous Groliers is said to have inserted on the fly-leaf of his books : "Jo. Grolierii et Ami- corum," Joseph Grolier and his Friends. Exactly the same story is told of Michel Begon, and it is further related that when that gentleman was cau- tioned by his librarian against lending his books, for fear of losing them, he replied, " I would rather lose them than seem to distrust any honest man." A mild and palatable caution was this one used by Theodore Christopher Lilienthal (circa 1750), who placed it under a picture of lilies surrounded by bees, probably an allusion to his own name : Utere concesso, sed nullus abutere libro, Lilia non maculat sed mode tangit apis. And this was long before Darwin had promulgated his views as to the fertilization of flowers by insects ! The following macaronic bit of geniality is from the fly-leaf of a copy of Virgil, 1582: Iste liber pertinet beare it well in mind, Ad me Jacobum Weaver, so courteous and so kind, A pena sempiterna, Jesus Christ me bringe Ad vitam eternam, to life (ever) lastinge. Per me JACOBUM WEAVER. Bookworm, originally the general name given to the larvae of certain insects which feed upon the leaves of books : hence a term for a great reader, one who, in metaphorical language, " devours books." Probably this use of the word has been influenced by the directions which the angel gave to St. John in handing him the book with the seven seals: "Take it, and eat it up; and h 10* 114 HANDY-BOOK OF it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey" (Rev. x. 9). The Latin form, " Accipe librum et devora ilium," was frequently used as an inscription on mediaeval book-plates. Bookworms are now almost exclusively known in the secondary and derivative meaning of the word as porers over dry books ; but there was a time when the real worms were as ubiqui- tous as our cockroaches. They would start at the first or last page and tunnel circular holes through the volume, and were cursed by librarians as bestia. audax and pes'es chartarui/i. There were several kinds of these little plagues. One was a sort of death-watch, with dark- brown hard skin ; another had a white body with little brown spots on its head. Those that had legs were the larva of moths, and those without legs were grubs that turned to beetles. They were dignified, like other disagreeable things, with fine Latin names, which we spare our readers. All of them had strong jaws and very healthy appetites ; but we are happy to find that their digestive powers, vigorous as they were, quail before the materials of our modern books. China clay, plaster of Paris, and other unwholesome aliments have conquered ihepestes ckartaruni. They sigh and shrivel up. Peace to the memory, for it is now hardly more than a memory, of the bestia audax. Bookworm, vol. iv. Boom, in American slang, the effective launching of anything with eclat on the market or on public attention. The " New English Dictionary" traces this use of the word primarily to a particular application of its meaning of "a loud, deep sound with resonance," with reference not so much to the sound as to "the suddenness and rush with which it is accompanied." But there is noted as possibly modifying the meaning " association original or subsequent with other senses of the word." The St. Louis Globe Democrat claims to have originated the expression in 1879, when the Grant third-term movement was started. The power of the press has never been more beautifully illustrated than in the recent history of the word " boom." It was always a good, sonorous word, but its latent possibilities have only recently been discovered. As applied to the booming of a cannon or of rushing waters, it is euphonious and expressive, but it was left for the press to develop its general adaptation to human affairs, and its especial significance in a political sense. The word was first applied to the Grant movement, which, on account of its sudden, rushing character, was aptly termed a boom. The papers took it up somewhat cautiously at first on account of its slangy aspect, but gradually the word was taken into favor until all the papers were talking about the Grant boom. Its use by the press made it popular, and the people adopted it. Then there came the Sherman boom, the Elaine boom, the Tilden boom, and many others. Nearly every public man had a boom, or wanted one. From politics the word passed into general use, and we had the business boom, the wheat boom, the iron boom, etc. A business-man remarked yesterday, " Nearly everything has had a boom except soap, and I am looking for a soap boom every day." A year ago the word was hardly known, now it is in universal use, and one almost wonders how we ever got along without it. All this has been accomplished by a free and un- trammelled press. Great as the innate capabilities of the word are, they might have lain dor- mant hundreds of years longer, as they had already lain hundreds of years, if the press, with its mighty power of dissemination, had not taken it up and sent it booming through the land. Since the Ohio election one or two Democratic papers have suggested that the word has an unpleasant sound, and ought to be done away with, but it is evident this suggestion springs from base partisan motives. It is a good word, and answers a great many purposes. Let it boom. Indianapolis Journal, October, 1879. Borrowed Days. The last three days of March are known as " the bor- rowed days." At the firesides of the Scottish peasantry the origin of these days is given in this quaint rhyme : March said to Aperill, I see three hoggs upon a hill, And if you'll lend me dayes three, I'll find a way to make them dee ; The first o' them was wind and wet, The second o' them was snaw and sleet, The third o' them was sic a freeze It froze the birds' nests to the trees ; When the three days were past and gane, The three silly hoggs came hirplin' hame. Borrowing. Shakespeare has summed up an immense amount of worldly wisdom in Polonius's advice to Laertes : LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 115 Neither a borrower nor a lender be ; For loan oft loses both itself and friend ; And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. Hamlet, Act i., Sc. iii. The Old Testament recognizes that the position of a borrower is humiliat- ing : "The borrower is servant to the lender" (Prov. xxii. 7). " He that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing," says Franklin, in " Poor Richard's Almanac" for 1757, a phrase that he cribbed from Thomas Tusser : Who goeth a-borrowing Goeth a-sorrowing. five Hundred Points : June. But Tusser himself was only remoulding a proverb familiar long before his day. Bosh, slang for nonsense, fudge ; originally a Turkish word meaning empty or useless, it first appeared in England in 1834, when it was popularized by Morier's Oriental novel " Ayesha." It is probably derived from the Arabic ma-fish, " there is no such thing," an expression much used in Yemen and Egypt for the single negative not, and in the Maghribi or Egyptian dialect corrupted to mush, which by the simple interchange of m and b becomes bdsh, the Turkish word. Bottle-holder, the second in a prize-fight, one of whose duties is to hold the water-bottle, while another assistant sponges the principal between the rounds : hence the term is sometimes extended to one who seconds or advises, or backs a person or a cause. In 1851, Lord Palmerston told a deputation who waited upon him to congratulate him on the success of his effort to liber- ate Kossuth, that the past crisis was one which had required much generalship and judgment, and that a good deal of judicious bottle-holding was obliged to be brought into play. The London Times made a furious onslaught on Pal- merston for thus using the phraseology of the pugilistic ring, and shortly after- wards Punch appeared with a cartoon representing the noble lord as the "Judicious Bottle-Holder, " a nickname that clung to him. Bouts-rimes (Fr., literally, "rhymed ends"), a form of literary amusement in which rhymes being given the participants, they fill up the verses. Accord- ing to Menage, the notion of this frivolity was derived from a saying of the French poet Dulot, whereby he accidentally let the cat out of the bag, or, to change the metaphor, let the public in behind the scenes. Complaining one day of the loss of three hundred sonnets, his hearers marvelled at his having about him so large a collection of literary wares, whereupon he explained that they were not completed sonnets, but the unarticulated skeletons, in other words, their prearranged rhyming ends, drawn out in groups of fourteen. All Paris was in a roar next day over Dulot's lost sonnets. Bouts-rimes became the fashion in all the salons. Ladies imposed the task of making them upon their lovers ; the beaucc-esprits amused their leisure in the same way. Menage himself confesses that he had tried and failed. In vain Sarasin attempted to ridicule the fad in his " La Defaite des Bouts-Rimes." It flourished apace in France ; it crossed the Channel in due course, and established itself in high favor with the more ponderous wits of Albion. There were public competitions of bouts-rimes at Bath, under the patronage of the blue-stocking Lady Millar, and all the rank, beauty, and fashion of the place the beaux and belles, old dandies and reigning toasts entered into the contest, and the successful competitor was crowned with myrtle. Mrs. De- lany, too, was addicted to bouts-rimes, and very different people Dr. Priest- ley and Mrs. Barbauld (then Miss Aikin) worked at them in the spare evenings of their Warrington Academy life. Il6 HANDY-BOOK OF Macaulay, alluding with fine scorn to some of Fanny Burney's friends at the time of her first brilliant debut into literature, numbers among them " Lady Millar, who kept a vase wherein fools were wont to put bad verses, and Jer- ningham, who wrote verses fit to be put into the vase of Lady Millar." Let us treat more kindly these kindly affectations of the past. Lady Millar's vase has a history that is not unentertaining. When on a tour in Italy with her husband, Sir John Millar, the excellent, though addle-pated, lady had procured the vase at Frascati. It was an admirable bit of antique ware. Lady Millar brought it home with her and placed it in her villa. Every Thursday she invited her friends to that temple of the Muses, where she officiated as high- priestess, and every one was expected to drop in the vase his or her version of the rhymes given out the preceding Thursday. Only one specimen of these effusions has survived, the composition of the then Duchess of Northumber- land. The rhymes given were brandish, standish, fatten, satin, olio, folio, puffing, muffin, feast on, Batheaston. It will be seen that they were not very easy to fill in, also that the rhymes are a little shaky. After all, making due allowances, the result was not so bad : The pen which I now take and brandish Has long lain useless in my standish. Know every maid, from her in patten To her who shines in glossy satin, That could they now prepare an olio, From best receipt of book in folio, Ever so fine, for all their puffing, I should prefer a buttered muffin, A muffin Jove himself might feast on, If eat with Millar at Batheaston. In the " Correspondence of Mrs. Delany," the editor, Lady Llanover, refers to this amusement, and gives a specimen written by Mrs. Delany in reply to words which had been sent her : When friendship such as yours our hours bless, It soothes our cares, and makes affliction less ; Oppressed by woes, from you I'm sure to find A sovereign cure for my distempered mind ; At court or play, in field or shady grove, No place can yield delight without your love. Not content with this, however, Mrs. Delany gave a second verse on the same words : When me with your commands you bless, My time is yours, nor can I offer less ; There so much truth and love I find, That with content it fills my mind, Happy to live in unfrequented grove, Assured of faithful Nanny's love. On another occasion a noted instance was afforded by Horace Walpole on the words brook, why, crook, I : I sit with my toes in a brook ; If any one asks me for why, I hits them a rap with my crook ; " 'Tis sentiment kills me," says I. So prevalent had the amusement become that, in 1814, the "Musomanik Society" was established at Anstruther, in Fifeshire, Scotland, the parent of numerous similar societies which cultivated this form of literature on a little oatmeal. These worthy gentlemen actually went so far as to publish a vol- ume made up of their improvised stanzas. Here are three efforts based on the words pen, scuffle, men, ruffie. They are neither better nor worse than the average : LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 117 One would suppose a silly pen A shabby weapon in a scuffle ; But yet the pen of critic men A very hero's soul would ruffle. I grant that some by tongue or pen Are daily, hourly, in a scuffle ; But then we philosophic men Have placid tempers naught can ruffle. Last night I left my desk and pen, F'or in the street I heard a scuffle, And there, torn off by drunken men, I left my coat-tails and shirt-ruffle. But the king of all Bouts-Rimeurs was a certain young American, a na- tive of Albany, of the name of Bogart. His talent for improvisation seems to have been very remarkable. On one occasion certain of his friends, in- cluding Colonel J. B. Van Schaick and Charles Fenno Hoffman, determined to put it to a crucial test. Van Schaick took up a copy of " Childe Harold." "Now," he said, "the name of Lydia Kane" (a belle of that period) "contains the same number of letters as a stanza of ' Childe Harold' has lines. Suppose you write them down in a column." Bogart did as he was told. " Now," continued the colonel, " I will open the poem at random, and will dictate to you the rhymes of any stanza on which my finger happens to rest. See if you can, within ten minutes, make an acrostic on Lydia Kane whose rhymes willl be identical with those of Byron's stanza." The stanza happened to be the following : And must they fall, the young, the proud, the brave, To swell one bloated chief's unwholesome reign? No step between submission and a grave ? The rise of rapine and the fall of Spain ? And doth the Power that man adores ordain Their doom, nor heed the suppliant's appeal ? Is all that desperate valor acts in vain? And counsel sage, and patriotic zeal, The veteran's skill, youth's fire, and manhood's heart of steel? Bogart cleverly performed his task by producing the following verse within the stated time : lovely and loved, o'er the unconquered brave Kour charms resistless, matchless girl, shall reign, -Dear as the mother holds her infant's grave, 7n Love's warm regions, warm, romantic Spain. And should your fate to courts your steps ordain, A'ings would in vain to regal pomp appeal, And lordly bishops kneel to you in vain, JVbr Valor's fire. Love's power, nor Churchman's zeal Endure 'gainst Love's (time's up) untarnished steel. These are a few specimens of acknowledged bouts-rimes. But suppose that all poets were as honest as Dulot, as willing to yield up the secret of their inspiration. Do not the best of them have to seek for their rhymes ? A thought, perchance, having arrived at or about its sonorous harbor from the sea, cannot get in at first, but has to bob about outside till the little pilot-tug of some rhyme comes up with the steam up and the flag flying and takes it in tow to its moorings. Nay, may it not even occur, after one or two pilot-tugs have come up, a bargain cannot be made, or the bar is dangerous for the tonnage, and the vessel makes for another port ? Are there not such things as rhyming dictionaries (the ingenious reader will perceive that we have dropped meta- phor for plain fact), and have we not the confessions of good poets Byron, for example that they have used these helps, or that, in their absence, they Il8 HANDY-BOOK OF have been glad to revert to a kind of mental substitute, chasing out a suitable rhyme to the word same, for example, by running through the entire alphabet, aim, blame, came, dame, fame, etc. ? Have they not even gone further_and allowed the rhymes to bring the thought into motion from the first? In her " Recollections of Literary Characters" (1854) Mrs. Thomson tells us ex- pressly that this was Campbell's practice, and that he openly avowed he had written " Lochiel's Warning" as a sort of exercise in bouts-rime's : " The rhymes were written first, and the lines filled in afterwards, the poet singing them to a sort of cadence as he recited them to his wondering friend." One can imagine the scene and figure to one's self the poet shouting, Lochiel, Lochiel, ow-6w-ow-a day, Wow-6w, ow-ow-ow, ow-6w, ow array. Leigh Hunt once had an article in the Liberal wherein he proposed that all poetry should be turned into a sort of bouts-rimes. A number of words, he insists, are so invested with connected clusters of associations that they form in themselves a sort of poetical short-hand, and the mere succession of them, arranged in rhyming pairs, or as the ends of rhyming stanzas not yet in ex- istence, tells the story almost as well as if the blank couplets or stanzas were filled up. Take these words : dawn each fair me ray rains spoke mine two heat lawn beech hair free P' a V swains yoke divine woo sweet Repeat them slowly, with a pause after each, and a longer pause after each four. Can you not conjure up before your mind a pastoral love-scene quite as effectively as if you had the five elegiac stanzas which these ends suggest ? Here is a short poem which is complete without any exercise of the imagi- nation. The rhymes need no precedent clauses : they are heads and tails at once. In their simple way they tell the sad story of a common domestic tragedy : Boy, Gun Gun ; Bust. Joy, Boy Fun. Dust. Here is a sonnet built up on the same plan by a modern French poet, M. J. de Resseguier : Fort Frele Rose Bris Belle Sort. Close; L'a Elle Quelle La Prise. Dort. Mort : Bowery Boy, the typical New York tough of a generation or two ago, named from the street which he chiefly affected, a well-known thoroughfare (Dutch bouwerij, from bouwen, to " till," to " cultivate," the street having origi- nally been cut through Governor Stuyvesant's farm). He rather prided himself on his uncouthness, his ignorance, and his desperado readiness to fight, but he also loved to have attention called to his courage, his gallantry to women, his patriotic enthusiasm, and his innate tenderness of heart. A fire and a thrill- ing melodrama called out all his energies and emotions. When I first knew it, both the old Bowery Theatre and the old Bowery boy were in their glory. It was about that time that Thackeray, taking some notes in Gotham, had an en- counter with the Bowery boy that seems to have slipped into history. The caustic satirist had heard of the Bowery boy, as the story goes, and went to see him on his native heath. He found him leaning on a fire-hydrant, and accosted him with, "My friend, I want to go to Broad- way." Whereupon the Bowery boy, drawing up his shoulders and taking another chew on his cigar, " Well, why the don't you go, then ?" Chicago Tribune. Bow-wow way, a colloquial expression indicating a haughty, over- powering, or grandiloquent manner. It seems to have originated with Lord LITERARY CURIOSITIES. 119 Pembroke, who said that Johnson's sayings would not appear so extraor- dinary " were it not for his bow-wow way." Scott, in his Diary (1832), speaking of Miss Austen, says, "That young lady has a talent for describing the in- volvements of feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going ; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me." The Bow-wow theory is a nickname occasionally applied to the theory that human speech originated in the imitation of animal sounds. Boycott, a word much used by the Irish Land-leaguers, meaning a combi- nation that refuses to hold any relations, either public or private, business or social, with any person or persons on account of political or other differences. It arose in the autumn of 1880. Captain Boycott, of Lough Mask, Conne- mara, was agent of Lord Earne, an Irish land-owner. His severity made him unpopular with the tenants, who petitioned for his removal. Lord Earne turned a deaf ear to all complaints. Then, in retaliation, the tenants and their sympathizers laid a taboo upon Boycott, refusing to work for him or to allow any one else to do so. His servants and his farm-hands deserted him, and if anybody undertook to assist him in any way, or even deal with him, that person was included in the taboo, his old friends cut him as an acquaintance and shunned him as a seller or a buyer. Boycott saw temporary ruin staring him in the face, when relief came in the shape of certain Ulster men, pro- tected by armed troops, who husbanded the crops. But the system grew to be a recognized institution for harrying the enemies of the Land-league, and so early as December, 1880, the Daily News records, "Already the stoutest- hearted are yielding to the fear of being Boycotted." The word, usually spelt with a small b, is now applied to all forms of intimidation by taboo. The thing, of course, is not new. Napoleon strove to institute a gigantic boycott against England on the part of continental Europe. In a pamphlet called "The Example of France," by A. Young (1793), loyal Englishmen are advised to combine in a resolution "against dealing with any sort of Jacobin tradesmen." More primitive instances will be found in the citations below. And if it be so that the Kynge do a tresspass, as sla a man or swilke another notable thing, he schall be deed therfore. Bot he schall not be slaen with mannez hand, bot they schall for- bede that na man be so hardy to make him company, ne spekewith him, ne come to him, ne giffe him mete ne drinke ; and so for euen pure need and hunger and thrist and sorow that he schall haf in his hert he schall dye. MAUNDEVILLE : Travels, ch. xxvii. Man cannot be adequately defined as a Boycotting animal. The lower creation also practises this art. The herd proverbially Boycotts the stricken deer ; sheep, birds, and even fishes, we believe, have the sense and spirit to shun the diseased or unlucky members of their society, and behave, to alter Bill Sykes's praise of his dog," quite like (Irish) Christians." In Europe, Boycotting flourishes most in Irish and " exclusive" circles ; but it is one of the chief institu- tions of primitive men, whose whole life is spent in Boycotting and being Boycotted. The part which the institution plays in the Mosaic law is well known, and so stringent are the rules of " uncleanliness" that a great part of the community must have daily found itself marching to Coventry. Among contemporary savages a violent and almost excessive dislike of the dul- ness of family parties seems to have been the chief agent, or one of the chief agents, in making this exclusiveness fashionable. Most members of the domestic circle Boycott each other habitually under the sanction of terribly severe penal laws. To speak to a mother-in-law or a sister at any time, or a father-in-law or many other relations at certain fixed times, is almost a capital offence. Saturday Review, March 12, 1881. Brazil, As hard as. This, the Athen