On the other hand, how free from temporary feeling and interest are some of the flowers in this poetical chaplet! How superior to all the mutations and vicissitudes which the land of their birth has since suffered! Their motto is Perennis et fragrans.
Take a few illustrations:—
“Said the lame to the blind, ‘On your back let me rise’;
So the eyes were the legs, and the legs were the eyes.”
“A fool, bitten by many fleas, put out the light saying, ‘You no longer see me.’”
“Why do you fruitlessly wash the body of an Indian? Forbear your art.”
“The thin Diophantus, once wishing to hang himself, laid hold of a spider’s web, and strangled himself.”
“Pheidon neither drenched me nor touched me; but, being ill of a fever, I remembered his name, and died.”
A more pungent jest on a doctor was never uttered, perhaps, than this! Nor would it be easy to discover in our modern collections more telling and ingenious skits than the two next:
“’Tis said that certain death awaits
The raven’s nightly cry;
But at the sound of Cymon’s voice
The very ravens die.”
“Lazy Mark, snug in prison, in prison to stay,
Thought confessing a murder the easiest way.”