'Sir—please read some in a great book also, for this is certainly a big case which I have brought to you.'
Everybody knows the story of the fortune hunter who commanded his servant to duplicate in the affirmative, when he should be in conversation, all his assertions. 'I have a fine farm,' said he. 'Faith, ye mane ye have two on thim,' interpolated his Irishman; and so it went on, until the master admitted that he had a cork leg. 'Two false ligs, an' ye know it,' cried out the man. This is somewhat varied and enlarged from the old story as given in the Facetiæ of Bebel, in which the nobleman, remarking to his lady-love that he was 'a little out of sorts,'—'dixit ille, se pallidulum parumque infirmum,' was interrupted by his servant with: 'And no wonder, since you suffer with such a terrible and incurable quotidian disease!'[5]
If all stories and jests are to be traced to a few originals, perhaps the many eccentric tales of Jack on horseback may be found in a very old anecdote of a certain Venetus insuetus ac nescius equitare—a Venetian unaccustomed to and ignorant of riding, who, when mounted on horseback, having inadvertently spurred the animal, exclaimed, as it reared and plunged:
'Lord! the waves of the sea are nothing to those on land,'—thinking that the leaping of his steed was caused by a sudden storm! The anecdotes of absent-mindedness may find a prototype in a very old monk-Latin anecdote of a certain doctor who went riding 'cum Palatino Rheni,' with the Prince Palatine, and who, on being told that he had no breeches on, replied: 'Credebam, ô princeps, mihi famulum ea induisse.' 'I thought, oh prince, that my valet had put them on!' Domine Sampson and the magistrate who appeared un-breeched before General Washington, are both anticipated in these absent small-clothes.
Many of the capital extravagances contained in 'Baron Munchausen' are borrowed literally from the old Latin jest-books. The incident of the wild pig which led about by its tail a blind wild boar, so that when the former was slain the latter was taken home by simply giving it the tail to hold, is of very respectable antiquity—as is also the story of the horse cut in two—attributed by Bebel to a locksmith. The locksmiths, he tells us in the parenthesis, are the boldest of Major Longbows.
There are many jests current in all languages, quizzing the vanity of humble persons suddenly raised to some small dignity. 'Neebors, I am still but a mon,' remarked the Scotchman, who became mayor.[6] Perhaps their type is latent in the 'De rustica præfecti uxore—the village magistrate's wife,—which runs as follows:
'When a certain man had been made a prefect of a small village, he bought his wife a new fur garment (melotam). She, proud of her finery and full of her new honor, entered church, capite elato et superbo, with her head raised, just as all the congregation rose to their feet, when the Gospel was to be read. When she, thinking it to be in her honor, and recollecting her former condition, said: Sit still! I have not forgotten that I was once poor!'
A very great proportion of the shrewd retorts and witty replies attributed to great men are very old. 'What do you think of soldiers who can endure such wounds?' remarked Napoleon, when, showing a frightfully scarred grenadier to an Englishman. 'What does your majesty think of the men who gave the wounds?' was the reply. It is essentially the remark of Louis the Bavarian, who, on enlisting four soldiers famed for incredible bravery, and observing that they were scarred from head to foot, said to them: 'Ye are brave fellows; but I had rather see the men a quibus tot vulnera accepistis—from whom ye received so many wounds.' The number of witty retorts and droll stories associated with the names of Talleyrand, Piron, Voltaire—in fact, to a certain degree, of almost all great men—is so great as to almost persuade the reader who wanders in the neglected field of ancient humor, that no man of the later centuries was ever capable of a single witty and original thought. It is not long since I met with an anecdote, stating that Alexandre Dumas, who had a very unattractive wife, one day surprised a gentleman in the act of tenderly embracing her. In a compassionate and astonished tone the novelist exclaimed: 'Poor man! why do you act so? I am sure that nobody could have compelled you to it against your will.' 'Eh! monsieur, qui est-ce qui vous y obligeait?' The jest is 'old as the hills'—it was old before Dumas was born. So, too, with the amusing bit of naïveté attributed to an English duchess, who, to express her deeply-seated religious prejudices, declared that she would sooner have a dozen Protestant husbands than one Catholic. The same point is expressed as follows, in a very witty but extremely wicked collection of facetiæ of the seventeenth century:[7]
Displicet, insignis, mihi Clericus ordo puella
Inquit et est valde gens odiosa mihi.
Malo decem certè me consociare colonis,
Unicum Clero quam coiisse velim.
Sir Isaac Newton, and I know not how many other philosophers, have been made to learn by a current story how to bear coals—literally. A learned man, it is said, being asked by a little girl for a live coal, offered to bring her a fire shovel. 'It is not necessary,' replied the child, and having laid cold ashes on her palm, she placed a glowing ember on them and bore it away safely. 'With all my wisdom,' said the sage, 'I should never have thought of that!' The jest is of mediæval antiquity—possibly pre-Latin—it was in later days, however, versified by Schurrias—an extremely aged and dying woman being substituted for the learned man.