A poor man, presenting himself before the King of Spain, asked his charity, telling him that he was his brother. The king desiring to know how he claimed kindred to him, the poor fellow replied, “We are all descended from one common father and mother—viz., Adam and Eve.” Upon which the king gave him a little copper piece of money. The poor man began to bemoan himself, saying, “Is it possible that your Majesty should give no more than this to your brother?” “Away, away,” replies the king; “if all the brothers you have in the world give you as much as I have done, you’ll be richer than I am.”
A certain man reading a book that treated of the secrets of nature, fell upon a chapter in which ’twas said that a man who has a long beard wears the badge of a fool. Upon which our reader takes up the candle in his hand, for ’twas in the night-time, and views himself in the glass, and inconsiderately burns above half his beard off; whereupon he immediately takes up the pen and writes in the margin of the book, “Probatum est,”—that is, I know him to be a fool.
A certain person who was to engage with swords against another, knowing that his antagonist was a braver man than himself, would not stand the trial, but made off as fast as possible. Now it happened, as he was discoursing one day with some of his acquaintance, they reproached him for having run away in so scandalous a manner. “Pooh!” replied he, “I had much rather the world should say that in such a place a coward had been put to flight, than that a brave man had been killed.”
A soldier selling a horse, his captain asked him why he did so. He replied that ’twas in order to fly from the tumult of arms. Says the captain, “I wonder you should sell it for the very same reason for which I imagined you had bought it.”
Tesetto was very angry with Zerbo the physician, when Zerbo saying to him, “Hold your tongue, you scoundrel; don’t I know that your father was a bricklayer?” Tesetto immediately replied, “No one could have told you that but your own father, who carried the lime and the stones to mine.”
A criminal being carried to prison, and hearing his process read, confessed that every article in it was true, and said, “I have done still worse.” Being asked in what, he replied with a sigh, “In suffering myself to be brought hither.”
A certain person, who was desirous to be thought young, said that he was but thirty, when a friend of his who had been his schoolfellow replied, “So, I warrant you, you were not born when we studied logic together.”
A thief going with a trunk full of valuable things from a citizen’s house in the dusk of the evening, was met by some persons who asked him how he came by them. The thief replied, “A man is dead in this house, and I am carrying this trunk, with other things, to another house where I am going to live.” “But if that man be lately dead,” said they, “why don’t they weep and take on?” “You’ll hear them weep to-morrow morning,” says the thief.
A man bemoaning himself to another for the great scarcity of corn, and saying he believed that if it did not rain all the beasts would die, the other replied to him, “Heaven preserve your worship!”
A physician, who had a son of his under cure, gave him no remedy, and prescribed nothing, but only that he should observe a regular course of diet. His daughter-in-law complained, and asked him why he did not treat him like other sick people; and the physician replied, “Daughter, we physicians have medicaments in order to sell them, and not to make use of them ourselves.”