“Mortal cannot live by wit alone,” commented that philologist.
“Being immortal, I can,” said Johnson.
“Mark that down, Boswell, even if Shakespeare does object to the doctor’s company on the Mount of Parnassus. A man of perpetual inspiration ought to use a fountain pen, but in the absence of a point to Johnson’s wit, Demosthenes will lend you a pebble.”
“As I live in a glass hot-house, I never throw stones,” gurgled the orator, after a vain effort to clear his throat of a pill from the laboratory of Nature.
“On earth I always kept a box of bon mots on my chimney piece,” put in Sydney Smith.
“If they had been chocolate bon bons, you would have been a sustaining favorite among the ladies,” chuckled King Henry the Eighth.
“Where knowledge of women is concerned, I bow to your marital Majesty,” acquiesced Smith. “Mere man never becomes a post-graduate on femininology, but he can manage to get up a bowing acquaintance with women after he is married to six of them. It seems to me that Utah would be a good place to study her ‘of infinite variety.’ I have often thought that much of Solomon’s wisdom came from his three hundred wives.”
“With such a match-making father,” I put in, my newspaper instinct scenting “copy,” “I have often wondered why good Queen Bess never married.”
“I’m sorry Elizabeth didn’t keep up the family reputation,” answered the king, “but I guess she thought I did marrying enough for the whole family. Besides, Bess had her hands full ruling the kingdom and her temper without attempting to rule a husband. However, I never could understand why she turned a deaf ear to Sir Walter’s pleading. He wooed her so long with his eyes that she asked him one day why he was such a mute, inglorious Raleigh. He replied that a beggar who is dumb should challenge double pity. As many another man has done since then, the silent lover lost his head over a woman.”
“That’s the King James version,” retorted Sir Walter. “It seems to me that your Majesty should confine yourself to rattling the skeletons in your own Bluebeard’s closet.”