This is a man, old, wrinkled, faded, wither’d;
and not a maiden as thou say’st he is.
Kath. Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes,
That have been so bedazzled by the sun,
That everything I look on seemeth green;
Now, I perceive, thou art a reverend father....
The resemblance between the English dramatist and the Spanish story-teller is certainly odd, the more so because there is hardly any possibility that either was indebted to the other. Shakespeare’s play was first printed in 1664, and founded on an older play at that, “The Taming of ‘a’ Shrew,” while El “Conde Lucanor,” written in the fourteenth century, was not published till near the close of the sixteenth, in the folio of Seville, 1575. Both writers seem to have drawn their materials from a common stock. Indeed, the story in one form or other was probably in vogue through all the languages of Europe.
THE WIT OF THE EPIGRAMMATISTS
Jowett
The waggish collegians at Oxford aimed their pleasantries right and left at the dons of Balliol. A well-remembered hit at Dr. Jowett was: