“The African Magician never minded all their scoffs and holloaings, or all they could say to him, but still cry’d Who’ll change old Lamps for new ones? which he repeated so often about the Princess Badroulbondour’s Palace, that that Princess, who was then in the Hall with the four-and-twenty Windows, hearing a Man cry something, and not being able to distinguish his Words, by reason of the holloaing of the Mob about him, sent one of her Women Slaves down to know what he cry’d.
“The Slave was not long before she return’d, and ran into the Hall, laughing so heartily, that the Princess could not forbear herself. ‘Well, Gigler,’ said the Princess, ‘will you tell me what you laugh at?’ ‘Alas! Madam,’ answered the Slave, laughing still, ‘who can forbear laughing to see a Fool with a Basket on his Arm, full of fine new Lamps, ask to change them for old ones, which makes the Children and Mob make such a Noise about him?’”
What a fool they thought him, and no wonder. Yet surely a magician need not come all the way from Africa to teach the public this strange rate of exchange. In Europe, Asia, and America too, as far as it has yet been colonised, such one-sided bargains are made every day.
Old lamps for new, kicks for halfpence—“Heads I win, Tails you lose”—such are the laws of equity by which man deals with his neighbour; and so the contest goes on, if, indeed, as Juvenal says, that can be called a contest—
“Ubi tu pulsas, ego vapulo tantum.”[1]
The slave of the princess with the long name had passed more of her life in the palace than the streets, or she would not have found the magician’s cry so strange: would have felt uncomfortably conscious that the day might come when she, too, would barter new lamps for old, perhaps humbly on her knees, entreating permission to make the unequal exchange. In all the relations of life, but chiefly in those with which the affections are concerned, we constantly see gold for silver offered with both hands.
That “it is better to give than to receive” we have Scriptural warrant for asserting. That—
“Sure the pleasure is as great
In being cheated as to cheat,”
we learn from Butler’s quaint and philosophical couplets. I am not going to assert that the man who puts down sovereigns and takes up shillings has really the worst of it; I only maintain that the more freely he “parts” with the former, the more sparing will he find the latter doled out to him in return.