credible account of Rome or the Romans for more than four hundred years
after the foundation of the city; and that the first book of Livy,
containing the regal period, can lay claim, when severely tested, to no
higher authority than Lord Macaulay's Lays. Livy states that whatever
records existed prior to the burning of Rome by the Gauls--three hundred
and sixty-five years after its foundation--were then burnt or lost. We
are left, therefore, in the most embarrassing uncertainty whether
Tarquin outraged Lucretia; or Brutus shammed idiotcy, and condemned his
sons to death; or Mutius Scaevola thrust his hand into the fire; or
Curtius jumped into the gulf--if there was one; or Cloelia swam the
Tiber; or Cocles defended a bridge against an army. We could fill pages
with skeptical doubts of scholiasts, who would fain deprive Diogenes of
his lantern and his tub, AEsop of his hump, Sappho of her leap, Rhodes of
its Colossus, and Dionysius the First of his ear; nay, who pretend that
Cadmus did not come from Phoenicia, that Belisarius was not blind,
that Portia did not swallow burning coals, and that Dionysius the Second
never kept a school at Corinth. Modern chemists have been unable to
discover how Hannibal could have leveled rocks, or Cleopatra dissolved
pearls with vinegar. A German pedant has actually ventured to question
the purity of Lucretia."
Hayward (translator of Faust), in his article on Pearls and Mock Pearls
of History, says, "We are gravely told, on historical authority, by
Moore, in a note to one of his Irish Melodies, that during the reign of
Bryan, King of Munster, a young lady of great beauty, richly dressed,
and adorned with jewels, undertook a journey from one end of the kingdom
to another, with a wand in her hand, at the top of which was a ring of
exceeding great value; and such was the perfection of the laws and the
government that no attempt was made upon her honor, nor was she robbed
of her clothes and jewels. Precisely the same story is told of Alfred,
of Frothi, King of Denmark, and of Rollo, Duke of Normandy. Another
romantic anecdote, fluctuating between two or more sets of actors, is an
episode in the amours of Emma, the alleged daughter of Charlemagne, who,
finding that the snow had fallen thickly during a nightly interview with
her lover, Eginhard, took him upon her shoulders, and carried him some
distance from her bower, to prevent his footsteps from being traced.
Unluckily, Charlemagne had no daughter named Emma or Imma; and a hundred
years before the appearance of the chronicle which records the
adventure, it had been related in print of a German emperor and a damsel
unknown. The story of Canute commanding the waves to roll back rests on
the authority of Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote about a hundred years
after the Danish monarch. 'As for the greater number of the stories with
which the ana are stuffed,' says Voltaire, 'including all those humorous
replies attributed to Charles the Fifth and Henry the Fourth, to a
hundred modern princes, you find them in Athenaeus and in our old
authors.' Dionysius the tyrant, we are told by Diogenes of Laerte,
treated his friends like vases full of good liquors, which he broke when
he had emptied them. This is precisely what Cardinal de Retz says of
Madame de Chevreuse's treatment of her lovers. There is a story of
Sully's meeting a young lady, veiled, and dressed in green, on the back
stairs leading to Henry's apartment, and being asked by the king whether
he had not been told that his majesty had a fever and could not receive
that morning, replied, 'Yes, sire, but the fever is gone; I have just
met it on the staircase, dressed in green.' This story is told of
Demetrius and his father. The lesson of perseverance in adversity taught
by the spider to Robert Bruce is said to have been taught by the same
insect to Tamerlane. 'When Columbus,' says Voltaire, 'promised a new
hemisphere, people maintained that it did not exist; and when he had
discovered it, that it had been known a long time.' It was to confute
such detractors that he resorted to the illustration of the egg, already
employed by Brunelleschi when his merit in raising the cupola of the
cathedral of Florence was contested. The anecdote of Southampton reading
The Faery Queen, whilst Spenser was waiting in the ante-chamber, may
pair off with one of Louis XIV. As this munificent monarch was going
over the improvements of Versailles with Le Notre, the sight of each
fresh beauty or capability tempts him to some fresh extravagance, till
the architect cries out that if their promenade is continued in this
fashion it will end in the bankruptcy of the state. Southampton, after
sending first twenty, and then fifty guineas, on coming to one fine
passage after another, exclaims, 'Turn the fellow out of the house, or I
shall be ruined.' On the morning of his execution, Charles I. said to
his groom of the chambers, 'Let me have a shirt on more than ordinary,
by reason the season is so sharp as probably may make me shake, which
some observers will imagine proceeds from fear. I would have no such
imputation; I fear not death.' As Bailly was waiting to be guillotined,
one of the executioners accused him of trembling. 'I am cold,' was the
reply. Frederick the Great is reported to have said, in reference to a
troublesome assailant, 'This man wants me to make a martyr of him, but
he shall not have that satisfaction.' Vespasian told Demetrius the
Cynic, 'You do all you can to get me to put you to death, but I do not
kill a dog for barking at me.' This Demetrius was a man of real spirit
and honesty. When Caligula tried to conciliate his good word by a large
gift in money, he sent it back with the message, 'If you wish to bribe
me, you must send me your crown.' George III. ironically asked an
eminent divine, who was just returned from Rome, whether he had
converted the pope. 'No, sire, I had nothing better to offer him.'
Cardinal Ximenes, upon a muster which was taken against the Moors, was
spoken to by a servant of his to stand a little out of the smoke of the
harquebuse, but he said again that 'that was his incense.' The first
time Charles XII. of Sweden was under fire, he inquired what the hissing
he heard about his ears was, and being told that it was caused by the
musket-balls, 'Good,' he exclaimed, 'this henceforth shall be my music.'
Pope Julius II., like many a would-be connoisseur, was apt to exhibit
his taste by fault-finding. On his objecting that one of Michel Angelo's
statues might be improved by a few touches of the chisel, the artist,
with the aid of a few pinches of marble dust, which he dropped adroitly,
conveyed an impression that he had acted on the hint. When Halifax found
fault with some passages in Pope's translation of Homer, the poet, by
the advice of Garth, left them as they stood, but told the peer that
they had been retouched, and had the satisfaction of finding him as
easily satisfied as his holiness. When Lycurgus was to reform and alter
the state of Sparta, in the consultation one advised that it should be
reduced to an absolute popular equality; but Lycurgus said to him, 'Sir,
begin it in your own house.' Had Dr. Johnson forgotten this among
Bacon's Apophthegms when he told Mrs. Macaulay, 'Madam, I am now become
a convert to your way of thinking. I am convinced that all mankind are
upon an equal footing, and to give you an unquestionable proof, madam,
that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil, well-behaved
fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire that he may be allowed to sit
down and dine with us'?" Boswell once said, "A man is reckoned a wise
man, rather for what he does not say, than for what he says: perhaps
upon the whole Limbertongue speaks a greater quantity of good sense than
Manly does, but Limbertongue gives you such floods of frivolous nonsense
that his sense is quite drowned. Manly gives you unmixed good sense
only. Manly will always be thought the wisest man of the two." Corwin, a
brilliant wit and humorist of the Sydney Smith stamp, and in his time
the greatest of American stump-orators, was often heard to say that his
life was a failure, because he had not been, with the public, more
successful in serious veins. A friend relates that he was riding with
him one day, when Corwin remarked of a speech made the evening before,
"It was very good indeed, but in bad style. Never make the people laugh.
I see that you cultivate that. It is easy and captivating, but death in
the long run to the speaker." "Why, Mr. Corwin, you are the last man
living I expected such an opinion from." "Certainly, because you have
not lived so long as I have. Do you know, my young friend, that the
world has a contempt for the man that entertains it? One must be
solemn--solemn as an ass--never say anything that is not uttered with
the greatest gravity, to win respect. The world looks up to the teacher
and down at the clown; yet, nine cases out of ten, the clown is the
better fellow of the two." Sydney Smith is reported to have said to his
eldest brother, a grave and prosperous gentleman: "Brother, you and I
are exceptions to the laws of nature. You have risen by your gravity,
and I have sunk by my levity." In one of Steele's Tatlers, Sancroft
asked the question, why it was that actors, speaking of things
imaginary, affected audiences as if they were real; whilst preachers,
speaking of things real, could only affect their congregations as with
things imaginary. Bickerstaff answered, "Why, indeed, I don't know;
unless it is that we actors speak of things imaginary as if they were
real, while you in the pulpit speak of things real as if they were
imaginary." This answer, besides being borrowed by Betterton, has been
credited to every famous actor since Steele printed it. Every reader of
Charles Lamb remembers his amusing essay on the Origin of Roast Pig. The
legend of the first act of oyster-eating is enough like it to remind one
of it. It is related that a man, walking one day by the shore of the
sea, picked up one of those savory bivalves, just as it was in the act
of gaping. Observing the extreme smoothness of the interior of the
shells, he insinuated his finger that he might feel the shining surface,
when suddenly they closed upon the exploring digit, causing a sensation
less pleasurable than he anticipated. The prompt withdrawal of his
finger was scarcely a more natural movement than its transfer to his
mouth, when he tasted oyster-juice for the first time, as the Chinaman
in Elia's essay, having burnt his finger, first tasted cracklin. The
savor was delicious,--he had made a great discovery; so he picked up the
oyster, forced open the shells, banqueted upon the contents, and soon
brought oyster-eating into fashion. Nothing, it is said, puzzled
Bonaparte more than to meet an honest man of good sense; he did not know
what to make of him. He would offer him money; if that failed, he would
talk of glory, or promise him rank and power; but if all these
temptations failed, he set him down for an idiot, or a half-mad dreamer.
Conscience was a thing he could not understand. Rulhiere, who was at St.
Petersburg in 1762, when Catherine caused her husband, Peter III., to be
murdered, wrote a history of the transaction on his return to France,
which was handed about in manuscript. The empress was informed of it,
and endeavored to procure the destruction of the work. Madame Geoffrin
was sent to Rulhiere to offer him a considerable bribe to throw it into
the fire. He eloquently remonstrated that it would be a base and
cowardly action, which honor and virtue forbade. She heard him patiently
to the end, and then calmly replied, "What! isn't it enough?" Lord
Orrery related as an unquestionable occurrence that Swift once commenced
the service, when nobody except the clerk attended his church, with,
"Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry
places." Mr. Theophilus Swift afterward discovered the anecdote in a
jest-book which was published before his great kinsman was born. In
Domenichi's Facetiae, and other old Italian books, there is this story of
Dante. The famous poet, returning home one day out of the country, was
overtaken by three gentlemen of Florence, his acquaintance; who,
knowing how ready he was in his answers, they all three resolved, by way
of proof, to make three successive attacks upon him in the following
manner. The first said to him, "Good day, Master Dante;" the second,
"Whence come you, Master Dante?" the third, "Are the waters deep, Master
Dante?" To all of which, without once stopping his horse, or making the
least pause, he answered thus: "Good day, and good year; From the Fair;
To the very bottom." Not unlike this is a story of Henry IV. of France,
who was overtaken upon the road by a clergyman that was posting to
court; the king, putting his head out of his coach, asked the man in his
hasty way, "Whence come ye? Whither go ye? What want ye?" The clergyman,
without any ceremony or hesitation, made answer: "From Blois; To Paris;
A benefice." With which the king was so well pleased, he instantly
granted his request. It is related of Raphael, that one day, after he
had begun the Galatea, and was already well advanced with it, while he
was absent a visitor called to see him. The scaffoldings were around the
room preparatory for the other decorations, and the visitor, after
looking at the Galatea for a while, mounted the ladder, and with a
fragment of charcoal drew a colossal head on the wall beneath the
cornice. Raphael did not return, however, and after waiting for some
time the visitor departed, refusing to give his name to the servant, but
saying, "Show your master that, and he will know who I am." Some time
after, Raphael came in, and on inquiring if any one had been there, his
servant told him a small black-bearded man had been there and drawn a
head on the wall by which he said he would recognize him. Raphael looked
up, saw the head, and exclaimed, "Michel Angelo!" A similar story is
told of Apelles and Protogenes. It is told by Pliny, and the point of it
is, that Apelles, on arriving at Rhodes, immediately went to call upon
Protogenes, who was then living here. Protogenes, however, was absent,
and the studio was in charge of an old woman, who, after Apelles had
looked at the pictures, asked the name of the visitor to give to her
master on his return. Apelles did not answer at first, but observing a
large black panel prepared for painting on an easel, he took up a pencil
and drew an extremely delicate outline on it, saying, "He will recognize
me by this," and departed. On the return of Protogenes, being informed
of what had happened, he looked at the outline, and, struck by its
extreme delicacy, exclaimed, "That is Apelles--no one else could have
executed so perfect a work." An anecdote is told of Sir George Beaumont
going in a coach to a tavern with a party of gay young men. The waiter
came to the coach door with a light, and as he was holding this up to
the others, those who had already got out went round, and getting in at
the opposite coach-door came out again, so that there seemed to be no
end to the procession, and the waiter ran into the house, frightened out
of his wits. The same story is told of Swift and four clergymen dressed
in canonicals. "Men of the world," says Goldsmith, in one of the papers
of the Bee, "maintain that the true end of speech is not so much to
express our wants as to conceal them." How often, said Irving, is this
quoted as one of the subtle remarks of the fine-witted Talleyrand! Every
one remembers another familiar witty repartee attributed to the latter.
When seated between Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier, and pouring
forth gallantry, first at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de
Stael suddenly asked him if she and Madame Recamier fell into the river,
which of the two he would save first? "Madame," replied Talleyrand, "you
could swim!" This pretty reply has been matched by Mrs. Jameson with one
far prettier, and founded on it. Prince S. was one day loitering on the
banks of the Isar, in the English garden at Munich, by the side of the
beautiful Madame de V., then the object of his devoted admiration. For
a while he had been speaking to her of his mother, for whom he had ever
shown the strongest filial love and respect. Afterward, as they wandered
on, he began to pour forth his soul to the lady of his love with all the
eloquence of passion. Suddenly she turned and said to him, "If your
mother and myself were both to fall into this river, whom would you save
first?" "My mother," he instantly replied; and then, looking at her
expressively, immediately added, "To save you first, would be as if I
were to save myself first." There is yet another variation. Captain
Morgan, with whom Leslie crossed the Atlantic, had a good story apropos
to everything that happened, and Leslie has preserved a specimen of his
amusing inventions. Single ladies often cross the water under the
especial care of the captain of the ship, and if a love affair occurs
among the passengers, the captain is usually the confidant of one or
both parties. A very fascinating young lady was placed under Morgan's
care, and three young gentlemen fell desperately in love with her. They
were all equally agreeable, and the young lady was puzzled which to
encourage. She asked the captain's advice. "Come on deck," he said, "the
first day when it is perfectly calm,--the gentlemen will, of course, all
be near you. I will have a boat quietly lowered down; then do you jump
overboard, and see which of the gentlemen will be the first to jump
after you. I will take care of you." A calm day soon came, the captain's
suggestion was followed, and two of the lovers jumped after the lady at
the same instant. But between these two the lady could not decide, so
exactly equal had been their devotion. She again consulted the captain.
"Take the man that didn't jump; he's the most sensible fellow, and will
make the best husband." A sculptor relates an incident of General Scott,
of whom he once made a bust. Having a fine subject to start with, he
succeeded in giving great satisfaction. At the last sitting he
attempted to refine and elaborate the lines and markings of the face.
The general sat patiently; but when he came to see the result, his
countenance indicated decided displeasure. "Why, sir, what have you been
doing?" he asked. "Oh," answered the sculptor, "not much, I confess; I
have been working out the details of the face a little more, this
morning." "Details?" exclaimed the general warmly; "---- the details!
Why, man, you are spoiling the bust!" Sir Joshua Reynolds once went with
one of his pupils to see a celebrated painting. After viewing it for a
while, the young man gave it as his deliberate opinion that the picture
"needed finishing." "Finishing?" exclaimed Sir Joshua, a little
impatiently; "finishing would only spoil the painting." Judge Rodgers
related a death-bed incident of a neighbor of his,--a poor honest
Scotsman, a woodsawyer,--whose admiration and solace, all through his
hard life, had been Scotia's great poet. The good man, worn out and
weary, was told by his physician that his last hour had come--that he
must soon die. He received the announcement philosophically, and after
naming a few things for which he expressed a desire to live, he said to
the judge--about the last thing he said on earth, "Yes; for these things
I should like to live; but--but--judge--(they had many a time read the
poet together)--I shall see--Burns!" Socrates, upon receiving sentence
of death, said, amongst other things, to his judges, "Is this, do you
think, no happy journey? Do you think it nothing to speak with Orpheus,
Musaeus, Homer, and Hesiod?" "Shakespeare's Joan of Arc," says Hayward,
"is a mere embodiment of English prejudice; yet it is not much further
from the truth than Schiller's transcendental and exquisitely poetical
character of the maid. The German dramatist has also idealized Don
Carlos to an extent that renders recognition difficult; and he has
flung a halo round William Tell which will cling to the name while
Switzerland is a country or patriotism any better than a name. Yet more
than a hundred years ago the eldest son of Haller undertook to prove
that the legend, in its main features, is the revival or imitation of a
Danish one, to be found in Saxo Grammaticus. The canton of Uri, to which
Tell belonged, ordered the book to be publicly burnt, and appealed to
the other cantons to cooperate in its suppression, thereby giving
additional interest and vitality to the question, which has been at
length pretty well exhausted by German writers. The upshot is that the
episode of the apple is relegated to the domain of the fable; and that
Tell himself is grudgingly allowed a commonplace share in the exploits
of the early Swiss patriots. Strange to say, his name is not mentioned
by any contemporary chronicler of the struggle for independence. Sir A.
Callcott's picture of Milton and his Daughters, one of whom holds a pen
as if writing to his dictation, is in open defiance of Dr. Johnson's
statement that the daughters were never taught to write. There is the
story of Poussin impatiently dashing his sponge against his canvas, and
producing the precise effect (the foam on a horse's mouth) which he had
been long and vainly laboring for; and there is a similar one told of
Haydn, the musical composer, when required to imitate a storm at sea. He
kept trying all sorts of passages, ran up and down the scale, and
exhausted his ingenuity in heaping together chromatic intervals and
strange discords. Still Curtz (the author of the libretto) was not
satisfied. At last the musician, out of all patience, extended his hands
to the two extremities of the keys, and, bringing them rapidly together,
exclaimed, 'The deuce take the tempest; I can make nothing of it.' 'That
is the very thing,' exclaimed Curtz, delighted with the truth of the
representation. Neither Haydn nor Curtz had ever seen the sea. Sir David
Brewster, in his life of Newton, says that neither Pemberton nor
Whiston, who received from Newton himself the history of his first ideas
of gravity, records the story of the falling apple. It was mentioned,
however, to Voltaire by Catherine Barton, Newton's niece, and to Mr.
Green by Mr. Martin Folkes, the President of the Royal Society. 'We saw
the apple-tree in 1814, and brought away a portion of one of its roots.'
The concluding remark reminds us of Washington Irving's hero, who
boasted of having parried a musket bullet with a small sword, in proof
of which he exhibited the sword a little bent in the hilt. The apple is
supposed to have fallen in 1665. Father Prout (Mahony) translated
several of the Irish Melodies into Greek and Latin verse, and then
jocularly insinuated a charge of plagiarism against the author. Moore
was exceedingly annoyed, and remarked to a friend who made light of the
trick, 'This is all very well for your London critics; but, let me tell
you, my reputation for originality has been gravely impeached in the
provincial newspapers on the strength of these very imitations.'" Dr.
Johnson's Latin translation of the Messiah was published in 1731, and
Pope is reported to have said, "The writer of this poem will leave it a
question for posterity, whether his or mine be the original." Trench, in
a note to one of his Hulsean lectures, says, "There is a curious account
of a fraud which was played off on Voltaire, connecting itself with a
singular piece of literary forgery. A Jesuit missionary, whose zeal led
him to assume the appearance of an Indian fakir, in the beginning of the
last century forged a Veda, of which the purport was secretly to
undermine the religion which it professed to support, and so to
facilitate the introduction of Christianity--to advance, that is, the
kingdom of truth with a lie. This forged Veda is full of every kind of
error or ignorance in regard to the Indian religion. After lying,
however, long in a Romanist missionary college at Pondicherry, it found
its way to Europe, and a transcript of it came into the hands of
Voltaire, who eagerly used it for the purpose of depreciating the
Christian books, and showing how many of their doctrines had been
anticipated by the wisdom of the East. The book had thus an end worthy
of its beginning."