i .J < . The Book Lover's Library. Edited by Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A. IN JOCULAR LITERATURE. A POPULAR SUBJECT MORE CLOSEL Y CONSIDERED. BY W. CAREW HAZLITT. ffe may reproiies sans cause, quar man cntent est de bone amour. LONDON: ELLIOT STOCK, 62 PATERNOSTER ROW 1890 CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE REAL USE AND IMPORTANCE OF JESTS AND ANECDOTES I II. ORIGIN OF THIS CLASS OF LITERATURE, AND ITS DEPENDENCE ON THE CON- DITIONS OF SOCIETY JESTS BEFORE JEST-BOOKS INFLUENCE OF THE ARTS OF WRITING AND PRINTING LONG SUBSEQUENT TO THE IN- TRODUCTION OF CARICATURE AND HUMOUR 13 III. LITERATURE AND THE DRAMA AS CONTRIBUTORIES TO JOCULAR LlTE- RATURE DEPENDENCE ON SUR- ROUNDINGS AND CIRCUMSTANCES . 22 IV. JUSTIFICATION FOR THE PRESENT UN- DERTAKING LITERARY INTEREST OF THE SUBJECT THE VARIOUS CLASSES OF JEST THE SERIOUS ANECDOTE THE ORIGINAL TYPE, AND THE JEST AN EVOLUTION .GREEK AND ROMAN EXAMPLES THE " DEIPNOSOPHIST^E " OF ATHEN^EUS . 29 2040808 vi Contents. CHAP. PAGE V. THE "NOCTES ATTICS" PECULIAR VALUE OF THE WORK THE " LIVES OF THE PHILOSOPHERS," BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS CHARACTER OF THE BOOK THE GOLDEN TRIPOS 46 VI. THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY GREEK EPIGRAMS HERODOTUS ARISTO- PHANES PLATO . . . .57 VII. FORMULATION OF THE JEST EDITORIAL TREATMENT OF STORIES SOPHISTI- CATED VERSIONS . . . .69 VIII. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED THE ANECDOTE-MONGER . . . .79 IX. THE MARRED ANECDOTE GAULARD- ISMS M. GOUSSAUT THE RETORT AND THE PUN " MALONIANA " METRICAL ADAPTATIONS SECOND- HAND F ACETIC PARALLEL VER- SIONS 92 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 " . .in Contents. vii CHAP. PAGE XI. THE BALLAD AND THE NURSERY RHYME PHILOSOPHICAL SIDE OF THE QUESTION " JACK THE GIANT- KILLER" 129 XII. CONTINENTAL INFLUENCE THE "ANA" THE "CONVIVIAL DIS- COURSES" WHIMSICAL INVENTIONS SHAKESPEAR JEST - BOOKS CHANGE IN PUBLIC TASTE . .142 XIII. THE "HUNDRED MERRY TALES" THE AUTHORSHIP DISCUSSED . 156 XIV. "MERRY TALES AND QUICK ANSWERS" 162 XV. FACETIOUS BIOGRAPHIES . . .168 XVI. ANALECTA 177 XVII. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED . . 183 XVIII. "JoE MILLER'S JESTS" HISTORY, CHARACTER, AND SUCCESS OF THE PUBLICATION JOHN MOTTLEY THE EDITOR 188 XIX. JEST-BOOKS CONSIDERED AS HISTO- RICAL AND LITERARY MATERIAL THE TWOFOLD POINT ILLUSTRATED LOCALISATION OF STORIES . ' . 200 viii Contents. XX. THE SO-CALLED " TALES OF SKELTON " SPECIMENS OF THEM SIR THOMAS MORE AND THE LUNATIC THE FOOLISH DUKE OF NEWCASTLE- PENNANT THE ANTIQUARY THE " GOTHAMITE TALES " STORIES CONNECTED WITH WALES AND SCOT- LAND .... 2IO STUDIES IN JOCULAR LITERATURE CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE REAL USE AND IMPORTANCE OF JESTS AND ANECDOTES. |NE of the Anglo-Saxon kings gave the manor of Walworth to his jester Nithardus; and we have all heard how the magnifi- cent benefaction of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, subsequently repaired by Sir Richard Whittington, was founded by Rahere, the joculator and favourite of a later monarch of this isle. In former days, to be a fool within certain lines, or a buffoon of a special type, was a walk of i 2 Studies in life not to be despised either by a man or by his friends. The jokes which he made were negotiable securities of first- class value. Not a five-pound note, but broad lands and the smiles of a prince, awaited the fortunate utterer of the bon- mot and the fountain of merriment and good humour. Even in the time of Charles II. the prosperity of the vocation had sensibly declined. Charles liked people who con- tributed to his amusement; but shabby constitutional restraints precluded him from endowing a pleasant fellow, who could play a conjurer's tricks with the risible muscles and the purse-strings of his sovereign, with a large and valuable estate. Nay, before the Stuart era, Henry VII., whose parsimony has been exaggerated, and who gave freely to many charitable objects, had to content himself with pre- senting the makers of jeux cT esprit with a few shillings the shillings, of course, of that epoch. The greater rarity of learning, and its status as a special mystery or cult, sur- rounded these ancient scholars with an Jocular Literature. 3 atmosphere which we have not only a difficulty, but a sort of delicacy, perhaps, in thoroughly penetrating, so as to enable us to arrive at an absolutely accurate valu- ation of their gifts. Among their contempo- raries and even immediate descendants they were regarded as something more than human; and this sentiment, while it, as a rule, limited itself to worshipful awe, not unfrequently degenerated into a superstitious dread fatal to the possessors of incomprehensible faculties. The first impression of nine persons out of ten, on taking up a Book of Jests or Anecdotes, is that it is merely a volume prepared for their momentary diversion to be bought at a stall for a trifle, cursorily studied, and thrown on one side. But the moment that one approaches this description of literature in a critical spirit, it begins to wear a changed, and yet perhaps a more interesting, aspect. The application of a microscope of very inconsiderable power is found by a philo- sophical student of the subject to be adequate to the detection of much that 4 Studies in is new and curious, lying either on the surface or not very far from it. Anecdote-literature, in which I always desire to understand as included the Jest, seems to me fairly resonant with the life of other days in larger measure than has been usually supposed, simply because on a superficial view we are very apt to content ourselves with the foregone con- clusion, that a story, whether humorous or otherwise, is nothing but a story. The notes to the series of Old English Jest-Books, edited by myself in 1864, and the frequent citations of such works in our philological literature, bring us to the consideration of another point of view, in which it is well, perhaps, that we should try to tolerate these facetious miscellanies, and regard with indulgence their sins alike against propriety and against wit. A dull story is frequently redeemed, it may be observed in studying such publications, by the light which it sheds on an otherwise unintelligible phrase or allusion or, in- deed, by the service which it renders in having rescued one from oblivion. The accidental formation, more than Jocular Literature. 5 twenty years ago, of this acquaintance with our own jocular literature, and the periodical renewal of it in an editorial capacity, have naturally led me to pay rather close attention to the JEST in its numerous varieties and stages of growth, and to cast from time to time a scrutini- sing eye over the contents of the extensive series of works in this class which has come under my notice. The result, almost unconsciously to myself, has been that the theory on the subject, with which I started in life, has made room for one of a different com- plexion and drift j and I propose to offer in the following pages some suggestions for reducing to a better and more intel- ligent order certain of the facetia and jeux d'esprit, by way of sample, in the Collections, and to point out, to the best of my ability, how they have been sub- jected to disguising or transforming pro- cesses by political, literary, or commercial inducements. Although the independent reading of the more thoughtful and studious had long brought them, of course, to a more 6 Studies in enlightened inference, I almost apprehend that, until Mr. Wright's volume on Gro- tesque and Caricature appeared, the loose general notion was that there was not much worth regarding in the present direction beyond the imperishable pages of Joe Miller ; and I certainly think that a very narrow minority conceived in how wide and many-sided a meaning the Jest is susceptible of being understood. On the contrary, the Jest offers itself to our consideration in a surprising diver- sity of types and garbs; and the project which I have now before me is, in fact, an attempt to treat for the first time, in a catholic and critical spirit, a theme which has been usually viewed as frivolous and undignified. It is a matter of notoriety that some of our best antiquaries have loved to trace to their sources the comic and romantic tales which we have borrowed from the Continent, and to note the variations introduced for the sake of novelty, local requirement, or dramatic exigency, by a succession of writers in the same or in different languages. Jocular Literature. 7 A vast amount of labour and scholar- ship has been expended in illustrating by this light the works of Shakespear and our other early playwrights, as well as in recovering the clues to the material on which Chaucer and Spenser built their undying productions. Moreover, both in England and abroad, a great deal has been achieved in elucidating the literary history of our ancient jest-books, and improving our intimacy with the true origin of the stories and their subsequent adventures, in more or less numerous disguises, from the Hundred Merry Tales to Joe Miller or what may perhaps be termed the Milkriana. But when one has assiduously sifted all this learning, one finds that it very naturally limits itself, as a rule, to the very early books, so far as faceticz are concerned, to that branch of the subject which belongs to Archaeology; and, in short, I do not know that I have been to any but the most trifling extent forestalled in the design which I here try to carry out, of arranging and analysing the humorous traditions which we have 8 Studies in received from our forefathers touching the celebrities of all ages and countries, yet more exclusively those who flourished within a measurable distance of time, or those whom no distance of time is capable of affecting ; or, once more, such relations as owe, not to the names, but to the matter, their continuity of life. The origin of all jocular or semi-serious literature and art is referable, of course, to a stage of human development when the deviation from a certain standard of feeling or opinion could be appreciable ; and it does not require the long esta- blishment of a settled society, judging from the habits of savage and illiterate communities, before a sense of the ludic- rous and grotesque begins to form part of the popular sentiment. The ludicrous and grotesque are, to a certain extent, relative or conditional terms. The canons of propriety and right in primitive life are so widely different from those which prevail in a state of civilisation, that what we should regard as fit material for a jest-book is elsewhere treated as a piece of serious history. A departure Jocular Literature. 9 from the line of expression or deportment sanctioned by common usage has proved in all countries and all ages a fertile source of satire and caricature; but then that line, like the needle, is subject to variation, and the fixture of character is not, as is the case with straight and curved lines in mathe- matics, a matter of doctrine and fact, but one mainly of local circumstance and costume. The joke has proved in all ages a factor of manifold power and use. It has ridiculed and exposed corruptions in the body politic and in the social machinery. It has laughed at some things because they were new, and at others because they were old. It has preserved records of persons and ideas, and traits of ancient bygone manners, which must otherwise have perished ; and it frequently stands before us with its esoteric moral hidden not much below its ostensible and immediate purport. Jests present humanity to our observa- tion in its holiday attire, its Sunday best, or at least under some exceptional and temporary aspect. Quin and Foote, i o Studies in Mathews and Sydney Smith, Frank Talfourd and Henry Byron, had their grave, and very grave, intervals. Hood himself said that he had to be a lively Hood for a livelihood ; and it was mourn- fully true, as the records of his every-day life, chastened by illness and sorrow, only too well establish. The pleasant or comic episodes may be an occasional incidence of the least happy existence or the least fortunate career; and the anecdotes, humorous or otherwise, of celebrated men and women are receivable with allowance as traits of character and conduct, for which some special circumstance, or a union of circumstances, is answerable. In the general tenor of the most favoured experiences the serious element is apt to preponderate ; the heyday of our years is like short, intermittent sunshine ; and we ought to come to the study of ANA, if we wish to judge them correctly, with a recollection of what they are, and also what they are not. They who have enjoyed the privilege of a personal ac- quaintance with the gayest of our modern humourists and there are many such Jocular Literature. 1 1 (including the present writer) among us still are best qualified to pronounce an opinion upon this point ; and they know how much of darkness and anguish often there is behind the scenes or off the boards. The jokes by or about any given individual do not, after all, amount to a great deal, when they are spread over thirty or forty years : all the genuine sayings of Theodore Hook or Douglas Jerrold would not fill more than a few octavo pages ; and these things are to be taken, not as indices to the habitual unbroken mood of the man, but rather as samples of felicity of phrase or thought to be gotten, like mineral ore, under auspicious conditions from a wealthy soil. We are too grossly subservient to habit and use. We naturally accustom our- selves, unless we reflect, to figure the clown with his tongue perpetually in his cheek and the wit discharging his shafts without cessation or repose just as, on the contrary, no one would be prepared to believe, without the strongest proof, that a tailor had made a pun, or that a railway porter had written a Greek epigram. 1 2 Studies in Jocular Literature. If we try to realise in our imagination Grimaldi stretched on a bed of sickness, a jovial companion in a gouty paroxysm, or an excellent friend, the author of utter- ances which have delighted and convulsed the stage, in the extremity of mental de- pression or physical suffering, we shall be better able to see that the Anecdote generically, and the Jest in particular, are fortuitous emanations and not parcel of our daily being. Facetious narrations are too seldom subjected to the test of circumstantial evidence. We are not apt to ask our- selves the question, who delivered the joke, or ushered it into print? There are cases, of course, where the author of a sally or rejoinder himself repeats it to a third party, possibly in its original shape, possibly with embellishments; but there must be, nay, there are numberless in- stances in which a funny thing is given to a person, not because he said it, but because he might or would have done so. It is an assignment by inference and likelihood. CHAPTER II. ORIGIN OF THIS CLASS OF LITERATURE, AND ITS DEPENDENCE ON THE CON- DITIONS OF SOCIETY JESTS BEFORE JEST-BOOKS INFLUENCE OF THE ARTS OF WRITING AND PRINTING LONG SUBSEQUENT TO THE INTRODUCTION OF CARICATURE AND HUMOUR. JJHE earliest form or phase of the JEST was the product of an illiterate age. A knowledge of the art of writing was a discovery long subsequent to the rise of a taste for the expression of the laughable, for the sake either of amusement or of ridicule. The primitive authors of jokes were men who employed, not the pen, but the chisel and the brush; and the most venerable existing specimens of this branch of human ingenuity belong to art, not to 14 Studies in literature; and to Egypt, the cradle and nursery of art. In his admirable History of Caricature and Grotesque, 1865, Wright has accumu- lated such an immense body of information on this most interesting subject of inquiry that, so far as it goes, it will supersede the necessity for traversing the ground again. He has traced with singular industry and scholarship the growth and development of the jocular sentiment in all its varied points of view, from its first infancy among the Egyptians, through the Greeks and Romans, to modern times and our own country. For while during centuries the feeling for the grotesque or absurd, together with the almost inborn propensity for the ex- posure of foibles and vices in an enemy, a rival, or an obnoxious public character, had its outlets only through the agency of art, and the sculptor or draughtsman was the sole resource of those who loved caricature and farce, the introduction of caligraphy by no means diminished the call for the graphic delineators of comedy and satire. The English artists of the Jocular Literature. 15 Georgian epoch were equally prolific and unsparing; and even now, when all the civilised communities of the world have their printing presses without number at command, the pencil remains a favourite vehicle for the exhibition of humorous or unpopular traits in distinguished per- sons of the day, and among many con- noisseurs and students a volume of Gillray or Rowlandson is a more welcome object of attention or notice than a printed record. The engraving has in all ages enjoyed over its literary counterpart or equivalent the great advantage, that it immediately attracts the eye, and enables one to em- brace every point of view and the whole story at a glance ; whereas in the other case the same effect is scarcely produced on the mind by many pages of letterpress or the most elaborate inscription on metal or stone. The spectator is in fact a far older student than the reader or the lis- tener to a reading, or than the audience of the minstrel of yore. The organs of sight have been the direct media through which innumerable generations of mankind 1 6 Studies in have received all the knowledge and cul- ture which they ever possessed; and we perceive at the present moment how far the cheap print and the gay shop-window go to supply such Englishmen of the nineteenth century as have small leisure and perhaps equally small inclination for books with notions of current sentiments and transactions. The manuscript or printed page has not a co-ordinate power with the mural sketch or other pictorial representation, with or without its adjunct of hyperbole and broad colouring, in an instantaneous ap- peal to the passions, or to the sense of the ridiculous, or, again, to the public instinct of wrong. Trie press bears its part; but whatever its development in the future may prove to be, it will never completely obliterate the demand and admiration for the labours of the graphic illustrator, whose origin is positively lost in antiquity, and whose pursuit was, doubtless, among the subjects of the Rameses dynasty themselves an accom- plishment derived from Oriental (possibly Turanian) instructors ; for the most archaic Jocular Literature. I 7 published examples manifest a tolerable intimacy with design and the combination of effect, as well as a capability of awaken- ing hilarious sensations by the burlesque perversion of serious matters. The joke-wright and the anecdote- monger may be treated as two excep- tionally fortunate professional persons, who enter the field of their labours and researches with a light heart and an empty budget. Their accumulation of stock is immense. The capital of all their ancestors becomes their fee simple ex officio. There need be among them no struggling beginners, no modest appren- ticeship ; and all that is expected at their hands is a certain proficiency in convey- ancing, and the addition, before they and the world bid each other farewell, of a donation or two to the bank for the benefit of the public and of ensuing freeholders for evermore. The introduction of typography, in jocular as in all other branches of litera- ture, was instrumental in accomplishing a transition from oral delivery to the 2 1 8 Studies in printed collection. In lieu of the minstrel and the bordeur, such sections of the public as could read might have in their closets and window-recesses garlands of facetiae in prose or verse. The press slowly superseded the reciter and the professional buffoon with his budget of witticisms and tales. But the process was of course a very gradual one, so long as the diffusion of culture remained im- perfect and partial ; and for a great length of time the old-world system of reading from the MS., or repeating extempore to an audience, and of the passage of jests and tales from mouth to mouth, continued more or less to flourish, just as it does in the form of a revival, among certain classes of the modern English community, who seem to do from choice what their forerunners did from need. A vein of exaggeration, which is apt to characterise anecdotes as they are repeated from mouth to mouth, or trans- ferred from one book to another, resolves itself into mere innocuous caricature or gasconade, where the plot is of a comic turn ; but where a certain indelicacy or Jocular Literature. 19 double sense accompanies the original version, the new-renderer has it in his power to pander to the prevailing taste by making a gross story immeasurably more exceptionable, either by simple in- tensification or by connecting incidents and expressions with persons to whom they never in point of fact belonged. Now, this I take to be very much the case with the Jests of Scogin, a compila- tion of the Tudor era by a doctor, as it is said, who was guilty of writing a fair amount of matter in a similar vein, but who, if these Jests were truly of his composition, shewed by his Book of the Introduction of Knowledge, and one or two other works, that he was capable of something higher. I refer to Doctor Andrew Borde, a learned and ingenious man, as we may perceive, but far from being fastidious in his writings, or (which is worse) in ascribing to the most exalted characters of an antecedent epoch a toler- ance of the most outrageous and vulgar buffoonery. It is exceedingly likely that the court of the susceptible and profligate Edward IV., 2 o Studies in to which Scogin is supposed to have resorted, was a scene of coarse simplicity and no model of decorum; and so late down as the reign of George II. the great ladies permitted themselves a licence in speech, which prevented the editor of Maloniana from printing the whole of the MS. But so far as the latter circum- stance goes, these were mostly passages inter se (so to speak) ; and it remains incredible, that some of the adventures with which Scogin is reported to have met within the very precincts of the palace, can have actually happened under the eyes of the queen and her attendants. Dr. Borde, I apprehend in fact, has committed the impropriety of transferring to another age the manners of his own, which was so far venial enough, and consonant with dramatic usage ; but he has most unwarrantably taken some of his characters from a sphere of life in which the enactment of such low pranks would hardly have been suffered. To cast aspersions on the representatives of an extinct dynasty, however, was a tolerably safe game. The Jests of Scogin Jocular Literature. 2 i had no political significance; and the occasional reflections on the clergy were not calculated to give serious offence in influential quarters, or to Henry VIII. himself, just at the juncture when the Reformation was imminent. Not in the pages of Borde alone, but throughout the literature of the later part of Henry's reign, sly strokes at the doomed papal hierarchy were eyed with evident in- dulgence and favour. Borde knew his ground and his customers : had his satire been levelled at the Government in an infinitely milder and more covert way, the stake or the block would have been his portion; had his book been published twenty years sooner, his stric- tures on the Church would scarcely have been prudent; but he confined his pen, where he rose above a humble social level, to names which were little more than historical, and to an institution whose days were numbered. CHAPTER III. LITERATURE AND THE DRAMA AS CON- TRIBUTORIES TO JOCULAR LITERATURE DEPENDENCE ON SURROUNDINGS AND CIRCUMSTANCES. llTERATURE and the Drama have been the most munificent contributors to our ANA. If the sayings reported of or by actors and authors were subtracted from the grand total, the residuum would assuredly dis- play a very deplorable shrinkage ; and this is easily capable of explanation in a manner which itself explains the corrupt form in which much of this lore has descended to us. For the whole atmo- sphere of the theatre is conducive to the suggestion of odd circumstances and situations, and the professional writer en- joys peculiar facilities, through his reading and associates, for making himself master Studies in Jocular Literature. 2 3 of the good sayings of his own circle and of other times. As Bacon observed, " Reading makes a full man, and con- versation a ready man " ; the caterer for the stage or the booksellers finds that it enters into his business to store his brain with such bons-mots and pieces of harm- less scandal as he picks up in books or in society ; and these are naturally apt to undergo, before they reach other ears, a polishing operation or the action of the churn. For, as they came to him, they offended in some particular, perchance, his artistic eyes, or it seemed good to change the bill. To this kind of agency, no doubt, is owing the large stock, which survives in print in most languages, of various read- ings of stories ; but a second and very different influence, not less potential, has been concurrently at work in the same direction. From time immemorial the professional joke-dresser has ranged at will over the whole field, and kept the market excellently well supplied with goods of this special description in every variety at the lowest possible figure. 2 4 Studies in Malone, in his Recollections, says of Richardson the artist : " He was a great news and anecdote monger, and in the latter part of his life spent much of his time in gathering and communicating intelli- gence concerning the King of Prussia, and other topics of the day, as Dr. Burney, who knew him very well, informs me." This extract furnishes in some degree the key to the origin of a large share of the amusing tales, jeux d'esprits, and re- partees, which the various extant collec- tions offer to our consideration that is to say, to their origin in a second or third state, as the printseller expresses it; and beyond question, if there is any branch of facetious biography or history which has reached us in an artificial condition, it is par excellence that which deals with alleged episodes in the careers of high- born personages, not merely of remote times, but 'of an approximate generation or so nay, even of the great folks with whom we might touch elbows, si fas esset. If it be the case that " a jest's prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it," it is equally true that a pleasantry depends for Jocular Literature. 25 its thorough success on the atmosphere in which it receives utterance, and on the personality of the narrator. Something which might seem racy and piquant to an Oriental, would very probably fall flat in an ancient Greek and Roman gathering ; and it demanded all the surrounding cos- tume of Greece or Rome to give salience and effect to those specimens of wit, which do not often, as they are recorded, strike us as remarkably brilliant. It is as if we put old wine into new bottles. The liquor is there ; but the crust and the beeswing have vanished. So it is with the facetious heritage which comes to us from our own imme- diate ancestors. The substance and outline are with us ; but the setting, the context, and the genius loci, are too fre- quently to be desired; and, besides, an editor has perhaps come upon the ground, and turned what was rough copy into a sentence or a paragraph " teres atque rotundus." It becomes a readable article of sale : but it is a sort of handiwork, and no longer a spontaneous sally or a faithful report. 2 6 Studies in On the other hand, it may happen that a jest bears upon some permanent inci- dence of human society, and passes with merely verbal changes from one age, one language, and one country, to another ; like the episode mentioned by Lucian in his Hetairai) and likewise by Gellius, of the lady who, when her admirer sent her a cask of wine, commending its age, retorted that it was very small for its age, where we observe that the conditions, being neither local nor temporary, are capable of universal and perpetual appli- cation. The reduction of pleasantries and satiri- cal thrusts to form must be an outcome of topographical, climatic and social con- ditions, and is necessarily dependent on habits of life, pronunciation, diet, and dress nay, on the most trifling minutiae connected with national usages. The happiness of a witticism or of a taunt hangs on its relationship at some sort of angle to the customs and notions prevalent in a country. It exists by no other law than its antagonism or contrast to received institutions and matters of common belief; Jocular Literature. 27 and hence what in one part of the world is apt to awaken mirth or resentment, in another falls flatly on the ear. The essence and property of a saying lie under very weighty obligations to local circumstances and colouring. There can be no more familiar illustration of my meaning to an English reader than the large debt which an Irish or Scottish piece of humour owes to the Irish or Scottish brogue. But it has been the same everywhere from all time. Among the ancient Greeks an Ionian would have found much difficulty in appreciating the point of an Attic sally, while among the modern Italians a Tuscan would listen with unmoved countenance to a jeu d' esprit in the Venetian patois. The turn of a syllable, the inflexion of a vowel, is enough to mar the effect ; and a similar observation holds good of the numberless dialects spoken throughout the German Fatherland and the Low Countries. It is comparatively easy to comprehend a joke, when there is a well-understood acceptation of terms and a community of atmosphere and costume ; but to study 2 8 Studies in Jocular Literature. these matters at a distance both of time and place, and to have to allow for altered circumstances or surroundings is im- measurably more difficult ; and this is what I do not think we always remember that we have to do in estimating the good things of our own precursors on this soil, and still more those of individuals governed in all their ways of thinking and acting by considerations which we can never per- fectly bring home to ourselves. Taking the United States, again, the same expression will be treated in one part as of obnoxious significance ; in an- other it will perhaps raise a smile ; and in a third it will bear no meaning whatever. CHAPTER IV. JUSTIFICATION FOR THE PRESENT UNDER- TAKING LITERARY INTEREST OF THE SUBJECT THE VARIOUS CLASSES OF JEST THE SERIOUS ANECDOTE THE ORIGINAL TYPE AND THE JEST AN EVOLUTION GREEK AND ROMAN EXAMPLES THE " DEIPNOSOPHIST.E " OF ATHEN^EUS. JUSTIFICATION for the pre- sent inquiry may be found, then, in the historical, biogra- phical and literary interest with which it abounds, and in the multiplicity of aspects under which the topic is capable of being contemplated. The Jest resembles a tree of many branches. It is couched in a wide variety of shapes namely, the Riddle, the Epi- gram, the Apologue or Tale, the Repartee, the Quibble, and the Pun. 3O Studies in Of these, the Apologue and the Riddle are the most ancient the latter being entitled to priority, if we take into account its positive origin in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves, although the jocular or comic development is so much more recent. The same criticism applies to the Apologue which was transplanted from Oriental soil, where it has ever been a favourite method of conveying instruction and amusement, into the oldest Western vehicles for the same twofold purpose, such as the Gesta Romanorum, the Fables of ^Esop, and Reynard the Fox. These productions, with many others, were designed as a method of inculcating moral precepts and political lessons under a fictitious or romantic garb. The facetious adaptation was a later growth, and first manifests itself in the French and Latin fabliaux in prose or verse edited for us by Meon and Wright. Next in the scale of antiquity to the Apologue and Riddle we may be warranted in ranking the Epigram ; and this, too, like the two others to which I have been refer- ring, was in its inception and early employ- ment satirical rather than burlesque for the Jocular Literature. 31 most part. Humour did not enter at first into its composition or design. Any one who looks through the Greek Anthology may see that the productions in that lan- guage are serious narratives treated in a terse and condensed style. The Quibble and Repartee were toler- ably popular features and characteristics in the jest-books of the seventeenth cen- tury, when the formation of literary clubs, and the increased correspondence between men of parts and wit, naturally led to the growth of that large body of sayings which the printed and MSS. collections have handed down to us. The age imme- diately succeeding that of Shakespear saw the uprise of the quip and crank, and the retort courteous, " conceits, clinches, flashes, and whimzies," and all the rest of the merry, motley company. Such utterances they were as undoubtedly ap- pealed with success to their auditors and readers ; but so thorough is the change which has stolen over our taste and feeling in these matters, that, in turning over the leaves of a volume of faceticR, which was once read with avidity and delight, the 3 2 Studies in impression now produced is a mingled one of surprise and disappointment. The humorous literature, like the coin- age, of a particular era, seems as if it were part of it; and it is in a vast majority of instances incapable of assimilation or transfer, as I shall endeavour to prove by a few casual selections from miscellanies which were in prime vogue and favour when James I. was on the throne, and those three renowned hostelries, the Mer- maid, the Mitre, and the Devil, were flourishing centres of all that was culti- vated and spiritual. The serious Anecdote naturally took precedence of its jocular evolution or offspring; and indeed the latter, as is obvious enough, could hardly exist as a congener, till artificial and more or less complicated forms of social life had been developed. Even the entries in such books as Plutarch, where he narrates some incident in the biography of one of his heroes of a nature less grave than usual, and of a sufficiently playful or salient nature to have tempted the editors of the ancient collections of faceti