The majority of our books of facetiæ contain, however, a reasonable percentage of matter special to themselves; the unacknowledged recourse to other authorities is only an incidental form of transgression; and the cases of wholesale piracy, the extent of the series considered, are not numerically important. The recommittal to the press of forgotten miscellanies, with a mere change in the title or the hero, is almost countable on the fingers.
Some allowance is to be made, as I have said, for the intuitive recurrence of the same idea, moreover; as where, in Scogin’s Jests, one of the stories—“How the Scholar said that Tom Miller of Oseney was Jacob’s father”—is the original of the joke enunciated with a probable unconsciousness of plagiarism or anticipation by the Christy Minstrels; and, again, as where the account of the gruff old gentleman and the boy Sheridan is forestalled in that highly succulent collection brought out under the auspices of Jack of Dover.
In the latter, a physician and a boy enter into conversation; and when the boy has, as we should say, chaffed his senior pretty freely, the doctor testily observes: “Thou art a rare child for thy wit; but I fear thou wilt prove like a summer apple, soon ripe, soon rotten; thou art so full of wit now, that I fear thou wilt have little when thou art old.” “Then,” said the boy, “I gather by your words that you had a good wit when you were young!” The students of Sheridaniana will recognise a familiar acquaintance here in a strange dress.
CHAPTER X.
Affiliation of Stories—Parallel Illustrations—The Literary Club—Reynolds, Johnson, and Garrick—Two Tudor Jest-books—European Grafts on Oriental Originals—Martin Elginbrod—Parson Hobart—The “Bravo of Venice.”
BUT it must not be supposed that those who have interested themselves in the manufacture of these agreeable diversions made any rule of waiting for the objects of appropriation to grow old. The account of Dr. Parr mistaking his saturated wig, as it dried at the fire, for rothe gothe, was equally narrated and believed of his contemporary Dr. Farmer; and that about Bishop Watson and the Old Cock at Windermere is nothing more than a re-issue, with a change in the bill, of the Duke of Cumberland and the Original Old Grey Ass. It demanded in neither case the possession of archæological insight to detect the double paternity; for the two versions and the two men were living nearly abreast.
Where a certain type is before the world as a model, it seldom fails to multiply itself with trivial variations. Take, for example, three articles from sources dated between 1640 and 1790; the same thing, too, is recorded of Sydney Smith:—