'Nam nudâ poteris ignea ferre manu?
Parva puella refert: mater, perizomate prunas
Portabo flammæ ne nocuisse queant.
Quid facies igitur, Anus inquit? Serviet hicce
Mi cinis, illa refert; quo super hasce feram.
Mox exclamat Anus: disco, moriorque profecto.
En disco moriens quæ latuere senem:
O, ich lern und stirb!'
A very great number of the 'good stories' current at the present day with new names and faces, are to be found in the works of Rabelais, and in the Moyen Parvenir, now generally attributed to him. It is almost needless to say that few of these were however original with the great French humorist. We find them in the Macaronics of Merlin Coccaius, and in scores of older authorities. Still it must be borne in mind that a similarity does not always establish an identity. There are few persons who cannot cite some droll instance of a sharper or greedy fellow, who, expecting an undeserved reward for some sham service, has found himself drolly overreached. So Rabelais dresses up for us anew the fable of the woodman, who, having lost his hatchet, and wearied Jupiter with prayers for its recovery, was tempted by Mercury with a golden hatchet, and asked if it were the missing article. He answering 'No,' received the precious one for reward. Which being made known, excited great hopes among his neighbors of becoming rich by the same means:
'Ha, ha! said they—was there no more to do but to lose a hatchet to make us rich? Now for that; it is as easy as ——, and will cost us but little. Are then at this time of the year the revolutions of the heavens, the constellations of the firmament and aspects of the planets such that whosoever shall lose a hatchet, shall immediately grow rich? Ha, ha, ha! by Jove you shall even be lost and it please you, my dear hatchet! With this they all fairly lost their hatchets out of hand. The devil of a one that had a hatchet left; he was not his mother's son that did not lose his hatchet. No more was wood felled or cleared in that country, through want of hatchets. Nay, the Aesopian apologue even saith, that certain petty country gents of the lower class who had sold the Woodman their little mill and little field to have wherewithal to make a figure at the next muster, having been told that his treasure was come to him by this only means, sold the only badge of their gentility, their swords, to purchase hatchets to go lose them, as the silly clodpates did, in hopes to gain store of chink by that loss.
'You would have truly sworn they had been a parcel of your petty spiritual usurers, Rome-bound, selling their all, and borrowing of others to buy store of mandates,—a penny-worth of a new-made pope.
'Now they cried out and brayed, and prayed and bawled, and invoked Jupiter: 'My hatchet! my hatchet! Jupiter, my hatchet! on this side, my hatchet! on that side, my hatchet! ho, ho, ho, ho, Jupiter, my hatchet!' The air round about rung with the cries and howlings of these rascally losers of hatchets.
'Mercury was nimble in bringing them hatchets; to each offering that which he had lost, as also another of gold, and a third of silver.
'Every he was still for that of gold, giving thanks in abundance to the great giver Jupiter; but in the very nick of time, that they bowed and stooped to take it from the ground, whip, in a trice, Mercury chopped off their heads, as Jupiter had commanded; and of heads thus cut off the number was just equal to that of the lost hatchets.'
This is but a small portion of the fable as amplified by Rabelais; but what is cited illustrates the accretive power of a jest when it involves a principle of general application. The same idea—that of roguery rewarded according to the letter—is involved in an anecdote, which tells us that a certain alchemist having dedicated to Pope Leo the Tenth a book containing the whole art of making gold, received as recompense a great empty purse, with the words: 'If thou canst make gold, thou art far richer than I; but herein is a purse wherein thou mayest put thy gold.'
In the German Lallenbuch, as well as other works, we find the story of the stupid fellow who, coming to the banks of a river, waited long and in vain until the water should all have rolled by. It is given in the following form in a very droll collection of jests:[8]
'Rustici cujusdam filius à patre in proximam urbem missus, quum ad flumen aliquod pervenisset, diu dum integrum deflueret, sicque transitum præberet, expectans, tandem ubi continuo aquam fluere vidit, domum reversus est, de eo quod sibi accidisset, parentibus conquestus.'