“Two men, who had not seen one another for a great while, meeting by chance, one asked the other how he did. He replied, he was not very well, and had been married since he saw him: ‘That’s good news, indeed,’ said he. ‘Nay, not such good news, neither,’ replied the other; ‘for I married a shrew.’ ‘That was bad,’ said the friend. ‘Not so bad, neither; for I had two thousand pounds with her.’ ‘That’s well again,’ said the other. ‘Not so well, neither,’ said the man; ‘for I laid it out in sheep, and they all died of the rot.’ ‘That was hard, indeed,’ says his friend. ‘Not so hard,’ says the husband; ‘for I sold the skins for more than the sheep cost.’ ‘That made you amends,’ said the other. ‘Not so much amends, neither; for I laid out my money in a house, and it was burnt.’ ‘That was a great loss, indeed.’ ‘Nay, not so great a loss, neither; for my wife was burnt in it.’”
A capital anecdote, assuredly; but the cue is too sustained for a casual encounter. It has the air of a hint taken and worked humorously out.
As there are cases in which matters of fact are edited ad hoc, so does it occasionally happen that a joke is invented to suit certain given conditions. The name of a person or place, coupled with some flexible incident, suggests to an ingenious mind an ex post facto happy phrase or figure, as we see in the commonly accepted tradition of the actor, Andrew Cherry, who informed a manager that he had been bitten by him once, and that he was resolved he should not make two bites of A. Cherry.
The story of Diogenes and Alexander, where the former asks the king as a favour to stand from between him and the sun, is obviously a literary evolution from the accredited character of the so-called cynic; and the same may be predicated of that where Diogenes flings away the cup on seeing some one drink water from his conjoined hands. The office of biographer, from the dearth of material and stock-in-trade, had already become merged in those of inventor and romancist.
I have elsewhere taken occasion to suggest that the philosopher’s so-called tub was some Hellenic pleasantry at the expense of a, no doubt, very humble and contracted dwelling. So we are accustomed to speak of a man living in a box or a crib.
The dits with which we are so liberally regaled about exalted personages and crowned heads, are interesting in their way, and here and there may have come down to us pretty nearly as they left the mouths of the reputed authors—as, for example, the annexed:—
“The town of Chartres was besieged by Henry IV. of France, and capitulated. The magistrate of the town, on giving up the keys, addressed his Majesty: ‘This town belongs to your highness by divine law, and by human law.’ ‘And by cannon law,’ replied the king.”
The only difficulty is, that cannon law is not the phrase which the speaker would have used. An English translator has for once improved his original.
I have stated that the same conditions are apt from time to time to produce identical trains of thought. A little trait of the famous founder of the Bourbon dynasty in France is on exactly parallel lines with an actual incident which occurred within our personal knowledge, and might have done so within that of a thousand others. The rank of one of those concerned in the original anecdote communicates to it, however, an additional zest. It is said that, on one occasion, as Henry IV. was leaning out of window, a fellow about the palace, mistaking him for an intimate, slapped him behind. The king turned round sharply, and the other, in a terrible fright, stammered out that he thought it was So-and-so—Jacques or Jean. “Well,” returned Henry, good-naturedly, “if it had been, you need not have hit so hard.” An involuntary gravitation to a certain portion of our frame seems to be a universal and immemorial instinct of human nature. The truth to say, this choice morceau has been attributed to Sully as well as to his royal master.
But too many sayings are either vamped-up and utterly worthless, or are laid before us in a shape which arises from sheer ignorance of the costume of the subject, like the ridiculous descriptions which occur in the Bravo of Venice and other melodramatic romances. To any one who is conversant to a fair extent with the strict and stern régime under the old French monarchy, what can be more absurd and self-convicting than the subjoined relation?—