However through the world he's tost—
However disappointed, crost—
Reverses, losses, Fortune's frown,
No chance or change can keep him down.
Upset him any way you will,
Upon his legs you'll find him still.
For ever active, brisk, and spunky,
Stabit jeceris quocunque."
Where, however, we perceive in the last line the rhyme has destroyed the metre of the Latin poet, if the words be really a classical quotation, which I should wish to form into a Query for some of your readers.
But the emblem, as the famous Triquetra, is one of the most ancient and celebrated of antiquity. It figures on the oldest coins of Metapontum; and subsequently on many of those of Sicily, particularly on those of Palermo and Syracuse, as island cities; for to islands, from one use of its name in the Greek word ΧΗΛΗ, as a jutting promontory, a break-water, or a jetty, was it more especially appropriated. Hence it is even now borne in the Neapolitan blazon for Sicily: as Britain, if she followed the continental examples, would be entitled to quarter it in her full imperial escutcheon, not only for Man, but for Malta; by which latter it was early taken as the device. But under this distinctive name as Chele, it only figured the potency which all pointed or angular forms and substances possessed insensitively or in a triple degree. To understand this, we should consider the force that all pointed or sharp instruments possess: the awl, the wedge, the adze, are well known for their assistance to the mechanic; and the transference of the idea to non-physical aid was so easy, and so consonant to the human mind, that, when we speak of the acuteness of an intellect, the point of an epigram, the keen edge of a sarcasm, we are scarcely conscious that we indulge at all in the maze of metaphor.