266 Here is another production, also anonymous, but obviously of later date than the other, which, indeed, it imitates: Whom should I marry? Should it be A dashing damsel, gay and pert, A pattern of consistency, Or selfish, mercenary flirt? Quoth Echo, sharply, " Nary flirt." What if, a-weary of the strife That long has lured the gay deceiver, She promised to amend her life And sin no more-can I believe her? Quoth Echo, with decision, "Leave her." But if some maiden with a heart On me should venture to bestow it, Pray, should I act the wiser part, To take the treasure or forego it? Quoth Echo, very promptly, "Go it." But what if, seemingly afraid To bind her fate in Hymen's fetter, She vows she means to die a maid, In answer to my loving letter? Quoth Echo, very coolly, "Let her." What if, in spite of her disdain, I find my heart entwined about With Cupid's dear, delicious chain. Quoth Echo, laughingly, "Get out." But if some maid with beauty blest, As pure and fair as Heaven can make her, Will share my labor and my rest Till envious Death shall overtake her? Quoth Echo (sotto voce), “ Take her." We will close our list with a handful of jeux d'esprit. The first appeared in the Sunday Times in 1836, when the Orpheus of Music was charming all London at exorbitant rates: What are they who pay three guineas Echo-Pack o' ninnies. The second, which appeared in 1886, is attributed to an echo that haunts the Sultan's palace at Constantinople. Abdul Hamid is supposed to question it as to the intentions of the European powers and his own resources : I'd fain praise your poem, but tell me, how is it, What must be done to conduct a newspaper right ?-Write. What would give a blind man the greatest delight?-Light. What is the best counsel given by a justice of the peace?-Peace. What cry is the greatest terrifier?-Fire. What are some women's chief exercise?-Sighs. Eclipse first, the rest nowhere, the famous declaration made by Captain O'Kelley at Epsom, May 3, 1769, when the horse Eclipse distanced the field. It has passed into a familiar illustration. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has distanced all competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.-MACAULAY: Review of Croker's Boswell's Johnson. Écrasez l'infâme! ("Crush the infamous thing !") the motto adopted by Voltaire : I end all my letters with "Crush the infamous thing," just as Cato always said, my opinion, et delenda est Carthago."-Letter to D'Alembert, June 23, 1760. Explaining the meaning of his term more definitely, "Such is I want you to crush the infamous thing, that is the main point. It is necessary to reduce it to the state in which it is in England; and you can succeed in this if you will.-Ibid. Furthermore he writes, By the infâme you will understand that I mean superstition; as for religion, I love and respect it as you do ("Vous pensez bien que je ne parle que de la superstition; car pour la religion, je l'aime et la respecte comme vous"). A quotation from a letter of D'Alembert to Voltaire, May 4, 1762, shows that infâme was understood by them to be of the feminine gender, agreeing with chose understood: Écrasez l'infame, me répétez-vous sans cesse. Ah, mon bon Dieu, laissez-la se précipiter elle-même, elle y court plus vite que vous ne pensez. As the fight grew hotter and the combatants more numerous, he settled upon Écrasez l'Infame as the battle-cry of the faithful. He rang all the changes upon these words. Sometimes he used them in jest; often with passionate vehemence. Not unfrequently, in the haste of finishing his letter, he would abbreviate the words to Ecr. l'Inf., and sometimes he would repeat this abbreviation many times in the same letter. Occasionally he would write, in the only corner left, É l'I. And what was this infamous thing which he was so passionately desirous of crushing? And why this access of zeal, in the decline of his life, when he was panoplied about from dangerous attack by a splendor of reputation and princely opulence never before enjoyed, still less won, by a poet? This question is one which demands an explicit answer. The Infame of Voltaire was not religion, nor the Christian religion, nor the Roman Catholic Church. It was religion claiming supernatural authority, and enforcing that claim by pains and penalties. It was the most ancient and powerful of all alliances, that of the medicine-man and the chief, with modern means and appliances to assist both.— PARTON: Life of Voltaire, vol. ii. p. 287. Delenda est Carthago ("Carthage must be destroyed"), the words referred to above by Voltaire, are the words with which the elder Cato always ended his speeches, whatever the subject might be, and thus incited the Romans to the third Punic war. He drank great quantities of absinthe of a morning, smoked incessantly, played roulette whenever he could get a few pieces, contributed to a small journal, and was especially great in his hatred of l'infâme Angleterre. Delenda est Carthago was tattooed beneath his shirtsleeves. Fifine and Clarisse, young milliners of the students' district, had punctured this terrible motto on his manly right arm.—THACKERAY: The Newcomes, vol. i. chap. xxxiv. Edelweiss means "noble whiteness" or "noble purity;" its tender starshaped flowers are familiar to all Alpine tourists. The plant is scarce and very partial. It is found in the Engadine, seldom in the Bernese Oberland, and has particular corners and mountains that it affects. This scarcity and partiality gave to the edelweiss a somewhat unhealthy notoriety. The rarer it became, the more ambitious was the tourist to possess it. Every cockney hat was adorned with the curious bloom, purchased, not by laborious and perilous enterprise, but for a few centimes. Edelweiss was sold by the handful at Interlaken, Chamouni, and Grindelwald. Guides, porters, and boys were tempted to rifle the mountain of its peerless flowers. When the rage for "art greens" broke out in England, æsthetic young ladies crowned themselves with wreaths of these soft petals, or even appeared at fancy balls in the character of The Alps, smothered in edelweiss. At last the Swiss government determined to put down by law the wholesale destruction of this popular flower. It was rapidly disappearing from the country, when an enactment made it penal to take a plant up by the roots. The dignity and importance of legislation gave a new impetus to the interest that was attached to the plant, and going in search of the edelweiss has again become as attractive a source of danger as any to be found in Switzerland. Edge-tools, There's no jesting with. The line is from Beaumont and Fletcher's "The Little French Lawyer," Act iv., Sc. 7. Tennyson has a similar phrase: The wisdom thus embodied has found other modes of expression,-.g., Don't monkey with the buzz-saw, a rather slangy but forcible American colloquialism. Égalité, a sobriquet popularly given to Philip, Duke of Orleans, father of Louis Philippe, because he sided with the revolutionary party and was fond of quoting their motto, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Nevertheless the republicans doubted the sincerity of a prince's conversion, and sent him to meet the great leveller Death on the guillotine (1793). Eggs. Dr. De Morgan holds that the proverb "As sure as eggs is eggs" (always quoted in this ungrammatical form) is a corruption of the logician's announcement of identity, "X is X." "From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step, from X to eggs hardly so much." (Notes and Queries, third series, vi. 203.) Egypt, a sobriquet applied to the southern portion of the State of Illinois, -a figurative allusion to the Egyptian darkness of ignorance and immorality that was anciently credited to this section. But a more honorable explanation is that the extreme fertility of the soil made it the only portion of Illinois to escape the corn-famine of 1835, whence inhabitants of neighboring regions went down, as of old they went down into Egypt, to buy and carry back corn. Elephant, To see the, American slang, to see life, to see the world, especially the underside of life and the world. There is at least a very interesting connection between this phrase and an East Indian custom mentioned by Montaigne. Quoting from Arrian's "History of India," ch. xvii., he tells us that, though chastity was held in high esteem in India, a married woman was allowed to part with her honor in exchange for an elephant, and indeed gloried in the fact that she was so highly estimated. Barrère and Leland mention as another possible origin for the phrase an old ballad of a farmer, who while driving his mare along the highway met with a showman's elephant, which knocked him over, spilt his milk, and destroyed his eggs. The farmer consoled himself for his loss by reflecting that he had at least seen the elephant. And he said,— Now in future no one can declare That I've not seen the elephant,-neither the mare. Elzevirs, the general name given to the productions of the famous printinghouse founded by Lewis Elzevir in Leyden, his first publication bearing date 1583. By an interesting coincidence, the last of the Aldines is dated 1583. Thus the new house obscurely arose just when their great predecessor was declining. Aldines and Elzevirs are always linked together as the two chiefest glories of the bibliophile. Yet there are notable contrasts in the histories of the two great houses and in their publications. Aldus was a member of a great family, with a princely love of learning for its own sake. The Elzevirs were merely successful tradesmen,-crafty money-grabbers, who pilfered and pirated whenever they had a chance. And even Heinsius, the scholar who supplied what Aldus had and the Elzevirs lacked, a knowledge of letters, was a distinctly unlovable character, full of malice and all uncharitableness. The Dutch house, therefore, has none of the picturesque interest of the Venetian. Nevertheless their editions are typographically as well as intrinsically beautiful. They have always run a very close race with the Aldines, and at certain moments have even distanced them in the favor of bibliomaniacs. There were fourteen Elzevirs in all. The first was Lewis. His sixth son, Bonaventure, struck out in the line which has given the Elzevirs their peculiar eminence when, in 1629, he commenced the publication of cheap and neat editions of the classics in duodecimo. After the death of Daniel Elzevir, in 1680, at Amsterdam, the firm rapidly degenerated in the hands of Abraham (the second), great-grandson of the founder of the house, and came to an inglorious end at his death, in 1712. There are Elzevirs and Elzevirs, as the beginner in bibliography soon learns to his cost. And then there are Elzevirs which are not Elzevirs. Not only are many of the genuine publications of the house practically worthless (the "good dates" range only from about 1626 to 1680, and not all the "good dates" are borne by valuable examples), but it comforteth the soul to know that these pirates were themselves pirated. Spurious Elzevirs are as thick as blackberries. More than one hundred and fifty are known to experts. There are many little niceties also about the editions which no one could intuitively know unless he were afflicted with some form of hereditary bibliomania. Thus, the most desirable of all Elzevir rarities is the Cæsar of 1635, the acknowledged masterpiece of the house. Bookmen grow rapturous over the type, the ornaments, the paper, the printing, the purity of the text. Now, there were three impressions of this masterpiece issued in the one year, 1635. The last two correct the only imperfection in the first issue, where pages 149, 335, and 475 are by mistake printed as 153, 345, and 375 respectively. These are worth comparatively little. The right Cæsar with the wrong pages is worth anywhere from twenty to fifty pounds. Another anomaly: the Cæsar is the acknowledged masterpiece of the Elzevirs, therefore it is the most highly prized? Not a bit of it: at least not by bibliomaniacs. An entirely valueless cookery-book, "Le Pâtissier François," printed by Lewis and Daniel Elzevir in 1665, sold some years ago for four hundred pounds. Yet it is only a rare book in the sense that it is extremely scarce in the market. At least forty copies are known to exist. Ember-days (in Latin, Jejuna quatuor tempora, "the four fasting seasons"), the English name for the periods of fasting and prayer which the Catholic and other liturgical Churches have appointed to be observed respectively in the four seasons of the year. They are the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after the first Sunday in Lent, after Whit-Sunday, after September 14, and after December 13. The weeks in which these days fall are called Ember-weeks. Never was a term better contrived for an etymological pitfall than this. Bailey, rushing in with that cheerful alacrity which affords its quota of merriment to the more fearsome philological angel of to-day, derives it "from a custom anciently of putting Ashes on their heads on those Days, in Token of Humility." But no such custom ever existed. It is a pure invention to account for the name. Others assert that the Ember-days are so called because they occur in Dec-ember and Sept-ember, forgetting that they occur also in months that have no such convenient ending. A still more ancient authority, Tarlton, in "Newes out of Purgatorie," describes how in his imaginary place of torture “One pope sat with a smock sleeve about his necke, and that was he that made the imbering weekes, in honour of his faire and beautiful curtizen Imbra" (p. 64 in Shakespeare Society reprint). Dr. Murray, who thinks it not wholly impossible that the word may have been due to popular etymology working upon some vulgar Latin corruption of quatuor tempora (cf. German Quatember, Ember-tide), prefers the derivation from the Old English ymbryne, period, revolution of time. No doubt a fancied connection with dust and ashes has influenced the modern form. Emblematic, Figurate, or Shaped Poems. There is pity, or even forgiveness, for all forms of human folly, imbecility, error, and crime. Yet the makers of what are known by any one of the above titles strain the divinity of forgiveness to an almost diabolic tension. A famous saint, variously specified by various hagiologists, used to say, "There, but for the grace of God, goes Anthony of Padua," or what not, when he saw a thief, a murderer, or other malefactor brought to the bar of justice. But no one has ever said, "There, but for the grace of God, goes Brown," or Jones, or Robinson, when some addle-pated versifier has been caught red-handed in the act of "shaping" a poem. No one, save a hardened criminal of this type, has ever been willing |