“An honest dragoon, in the service of Louis XIV., having caught a man in his house, after some words told him he would let him escape that time; but if ever he found him there again, he would throw him out of the window. Notwithstanding this terrible threat, in a few days he caught the spark there again, and was as good as his word. Sensible that what he had done would soon be known, he posted to court, and throwing himself at the king’s feet, implored His Majesty’s pardon. The king asked what his offence was; on which the soldier told him how he had been injured. ‘Well, well,’ said the king, laughing, ‘I readily forgive you; for, considering the provocation, I think you were much in the right to throw his hat out of the window.’ ‘Yes, please your Majesty,’ said the man; ‘but then his head was in it.’ ‘Was it?’ replied the king: ‘well, my word is passed.’”
There was scarcely a court in Europe with which such an incident could have been less happily associated; and it is almost difficult to call to mind any constitutional system, except perhaps that of the first Napoleon or our own Charles II., where such a tête-à-tête, so to say, could have taken place.
Nearly the whole stock which exists up and down the market of Irish bulls, Sawniana, gasconades, gaulardisms, and Mrs. Partingtoniana, has submitted to the churn. A pattern is produced; and any given or desired number of impressions may be had to order—no two alike exactly, and no two very different.
Which was the absolute jocus princeps about the Scotch, it is probably at this time impossible to discover; but it is obvious that they are all grafted on one parent stem, and scarcely yield a second moral. The entire assemblage forms a satirical exposure of the alleged parsimonious egotism of the nation. Ex uno disce omnes:—
“A Scotch pedestrian, attacked by three highwaymen, defended himself with great courage and obstinacy, but was at length overpowered and his pockets rifled. The robbers expected, from the extraordinary resistance they had experienced, to lay their hands on some rich booty, but were not a little surprised to discover that the whole treasure which the sturdy Caledonian had been defending at the hazard of his life, consisted of no more than a crooked sixpence. ‘The deuce is in him,’ said one of the rogues; ‘if he had had eighteenpence, I suppose he would have killed the whole of us.’”
And it is the same with another group, to which I have lately adverted:—
“‘Soldiers must be fearfully dishonest,’ says Mrs. Partington, ‘as it seems to be a nightly occurrence for a sentry to be relieved of his watch.’”
Mrs. Partington was nothing more than a lay-figure, on which the ingenious could pass off the jeu de mot, which begins to form an element in the facetiæ of the seventeenth century. She was a convenient personification, like her successors Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Brown.
