[527] The journals of this week, (March 18,) relate a most astonishing feat of the great modern chess-player, Dr. Harwitz. He has just played three games simultaneously, against three most eminent players, without once seeing any of the boards, or even entering the room in which the moves were made, during the entire time! He won two of the games—the third being a drawn one.
[528] The most recent information regarding this curious subject is contained in a report by Dr. Aufrecht, which Bunsen has printed in his Christianity and Mankind, III., p. 87, and foll; See also Mommsen’s Unter-italische Dialekten.
[529] Letter of January 15, 1857.
[530] Cardinal Wiseman told me of a priest who, after having lived for twenty years in France, was mortified to find himself discovered as an Englishman, by the way in which he said “ah!” in expression of his acknowledgment of an answer given to him by a person to whom he addressed a question in a crowd. This may explain an anecdote in Moore’s Diary, which he could not himself understand. A lady was coming in to dinner, and, on her passing through the ante-room, where Talleyrand was standing, he looked up and exclaimed insignificantly “ah!” In the course of the dinner, the lady, having asked him across the table why he had uttered the exclamation of “oh”! on her entrance, Talleyrand, with a grave self-vindicatory look, answered; Madame, je n’ai pas dit oh! j’ai dit ah, (Memoirs VII., p. 5).
One of the standing jokes against the capuchins in Italy is about an “alphabet” which they are supposed to learn during the noviciate, and which consists exclusively of the interjection O!—which single sound, by the varieties of look, gesture, air, and expression which accompany it, is made to embody almost every conceivable meaning.
Much light is thrown on more than one obscure passage in the Latin classics by the gesticulations which still prevail in modern Italy, especially in Naples. See the Canon De Jorio’s extremely curious and learned book, “Mimica degli Antichi investigata nel Gestire Napolitano.”
[531] Supra, p. 379.
[532] The pun is less observable in writing than in speaking; the words weiss-haar and weiser resemble each other more closely in sound, than in appearance. It might be rendered:
“Would to God, that, as I have become whiter, so I had also grown wiser!”
[533] This is a mistake. The work published at Philadelphia is not a general treatise on the Indian Languages, but a Grammar of the Lenni-Lennape Language nor is it an original work of Du Ponceau: but a translation by him, with notes, from the German MS. of David Zeisberger. It is in 4to. and was published at Philadelphia in 1827. Du Ponceau’s own work on the Indian languages, was published in Paris, 8vo. 1838.