“A soldier upon his march found a horse-shoe and stuck it at his girdle, when, passing through a wood, some of the enemy lay in ambush, and one of them discharged his musket; and the shot by chance lighted against the fellow’s horse-shoe. ‘Ha! Ha!’ quoth he, ‘I perceive that little armour will serve a man’s turn, if it be put on in the right place!’”
“A chorister, or singing-man, at service in a cathedral church, was asleep when all his fellows were singing; which the Dean espying, sent a boy to him to waken him, and asked him why he did not sing. He, being suddenly awaked, prayed the boy to thank Master Dean for his kind remembrance, and to tell him that he was as merry as those that did sing.”
There is a story about Barkstead, the poet and actor, which is hardly suitable for repetition, although it reminds us of one narrated of St. Louis of France; and there is a second of Field the dramatist, which is not worth quoting. The account of the drowsy chorister really refers to Richard Woolner, who belonged in the early years of Elizabeth to the choir at Windsor, and whose propensity for somnolence was doubtless occasioned or aggravated by his voracious appetite. This Richard Woolner was a pleasant fellow in his intervals of consciousness; and in 1567 an account of him and his oddities, no longer known, appears to have been printed. Sir John Harington mentions him in his Brief View of the State of the Church.
CHAPTER XVII.
The Subject continued.
THE taste for these Analecta grew with the supply. They proved popular and easy reading, and did not exact much reflection on the part of the peruser or a large amount of literary skill in the compiler. No operation is perhaps simpler than the construction of a book out of a series of paragraphs found at intervals and strung together at random. Tarlton’s Jests seems to have led the way and set the fashion, and the press has been busy with such olla podrida ever since.
Judgment in selection is, of course, the grand postulate in this as in every department of art, and it is precisely there that the workman in all times has fallen short of success; so that the whole mass of pirated matter, from first to last, is capable of yielding scarcely more than sufficient to fill a volume of fair compass.