stant man he always had been, she appeared to him as the ghost of herself, at which he seemed not at all dismayed. At length disclosing herself to him, he then appeared pretty much surprised. A person by said, 'Why, sir, you seem more afraid now than before! Ay, replied he, most men are more afraid of a living wife than of a dead one.' So, too, with parsons. However firmly they may be attached to their Church and to their minister, most men like to meet on the pleasant neutral ground of laughing at a parson. And not only they, but clergymen also, often even the preachers themselves, agree in thinking sermons a fair target for all the shafts of ridicule. There is some drollery about the following: "A vicar and curate of a village, where there was to be a burial, were at variance. The vicar not coming in time, the curate began the service, and was reading the words 'I am the resurrection,' when the vicar arrived almost out of breath, and, snatching the book out of the curate's hands, with great scorn cried, 'You the resurrection! I am the resurrection,' and then went on.' The feeling against parsons cannot, however, be so strong as that against wives, for occasionally the parson is allowed to come off triumphant and have the best of the story. As thus: "The witty and licentious Earl of Rochester, meeting with the great Isaac Barrow in the Park, told his companions that he would have some fun with the rusty old put. Accordingly he went off with great gravity, and, taking off his hat, made the doctor a profound bow, saying, Doctor, I am yours to my shoe-tie.' The doctor, seeing his drift, immediately pulled off his beaver and returned the bow with, 'My lord, I am yours to the ground.' Rochester followed up his salutation by a deeper bow, saying, 'Doctor, I am yours to the centre.' Barrow, with a very lowly obeisance, replied, My lord, I am yours to the antipodes.' His lordship, nearly gravelled, exclaimed, Doctor, I am yours to the lowest pit of hell.' 'There, my lord,' said Barrow, sarcastically, I leave you,' and walked off." This story has some kinship to a kind of joke which has now passed away, and the wonder is how it ever can have existed, so elaborate is it and requiring to be supported by such complicated machinery. For example, in Joe Miller we read that "a gentleman being at dinner at a friend's house, the first thing that came upon the table was a dish of whitings, and, on being put upon his plate, he found it smell so strong that he could not eat a bit of it; but he laid his mouth down to the fish as if he was whispering with it, and then took up the plate and put it to his own ear. The gentleman at whose table he was inquiring into the meaning, he told him that he had a brother lost at sea about a fortnight ago, and he was asking that fish if he knew anything of him. And what answer made he?' said the gentleman. He told me,' said he, that he could give me no account of him, for he had not been at sea for three weeks."" Now let us fancy this in real life. You see a man whispering over his plate, and if we suppose that in politeness you pass over the action as simply idiotic, the whole joke is irretrievably lost. But you are kind enough to inquire what he means. His answer is wholly enigmatic. The natural rejoinder would be to ask what on earth he was driving at; but the convenient gentleman of the story inquires what the fish has been saying, and this affords the jester an opening to come to his point. So, too, we are told that "an Englishman going into one of the French ordinaries in Soho, and finding a large dish of soup with about half a pound of mutton in the middle of it, began to pull off his wig, stock, and coat; at which one of the monsieurs, being much surprised, asked him what he was going to do. Why, monsieur,' said he, I mean to strip, that I may swim through this ocean of porridge to yon little island of mutton.' Let us suppose that nobody had noticed the man after he had got off his wig, stock, and coat, and that the "monsieurs" had quietly consumed the island of mutton, the miserable jester, instead of discomfiting the Frenchman with a joke, would simply have had to re-dress and lose his dinner. Whether such jokes were ever ventured on in real life it is hard to say. The extreme absurdity of the joker's position if his joke hung fire, and the probability that in the majority of cases it would hang fire, seem such obvious considerations that we can hardly understand any one overlooking them. It is, however, possible that the public may have been trained to appreciate and assist such jokers, for these jests are said to have been favored by persons whose countenance was sure to command respect and provoke imitation. It is related of James I. that on one of his progresses he asked, "How far it was to such a town. They told him, six miles and a half. He alighted from his coach, and went under the shoulder of one of the led horses. When some one asked his majesty what he meant, I must stalk, for yonder town is shy and flies me.' An absurd king can make absurdity fashionable, and if subjects see the sovereign stalking under the shoulder of a led horse, they need not be ashamed of whispering to putrid fish or taking off their coats to get at the meat in a basin of soup. Miller, To drown the, an Americanism, meaning to put too much water in the flour in making bread. Barrère and Leland scout Bartlett's attribution of this saying to an English source and attempted affiliation with such English phrases as "putting the miller's eye out," used when too much liquid is put to a dry or powdery substance. "As water-mills are far more common in the United States than windmills, Mr. Bartlett might easily have found an apter illustration for the saying than that which he has adopted, and left both England and the baker out of the question. The water is said to 'drown the miller' when the mill-wheels are rendered useless for work in flood-time by superabundance of the fluid. The saying was exemplified by the American miller, whose wife, in his opinion, was a great poetess, who, seeing that the useful mill-stream had become a raging, useless torrent, looked up to it, her eye in a fine frenzy rolling, and exclaimed,— "This here water Comes down much faster than it ought ter !'"' "To give one the miller" is an English expression, meaning the same as to mill,-i.e., to beat, to pound with the fist or with stones. Millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute. When John Jay, in 1796, made his famous treaty with England which threatened to involve the United States in a war with France, the Directory would not receive the American ambassador, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, but intimated that the payment of a certain sum might settle the dispute. Pinckney indignantly answered with the now historic phrase. It is said, however, that, long afterwards, when Pinckney was asked in his club whether he had ever uttered it, he replied, "No; my answer was not a flourish like that, but simply, 'Not a penny, not a penny.' Mind. My mind to me a kingdom is, the first line of a poem by Edward Dyer (1540-1607), which has been much imitated: In Byrd's "Psalmes, Sonnets, etc." (1588), this, first, stanza appears as follows: My mind to me a kingdom is; As far exceeds all earthly bliss That God and Nature hath assigned. Though much I want that most would have, Yet still my mind forbids to crave. Robert Southwell's imitation is the best known: My mind to me an empire is, While grace affordeth health. ROBERT SOUTHWELL (1560-1595): Loo Home. Milton's lines are only remotely analogous : The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. Paradise Lost, Book i., l. 253. All these expressions, however, may be referred back to Seneca's Therefore Spenser rightly says,— The noblest mind the best contentment has. But it finds it within itself, and there alone: Faerie Queene. Vain, very vain, my weary search to find Mind and matter. When Bishop Berkeley, in his "Theory of Vision" (1709), first acquainted the English public with the metaphysical theory that the world of matter has no existence save in the minds of thinking men (in metaphysical language, that matter is phenomenon, not noumenon), there was an outburst of derision among the wits and "the men of sense.' Even the great Dr. Johnson thought he had scored a point when, in answer to Boswell's claim that those who were convinced the theory was untrue could not refute it, he struck his foot against a stone and cried, "Sir, I refute it thus." Again, when a Berkeleyite, after a long argument, was leaving the company, Johnson exclaimed, "Pray, sir, don't leave us; for we may perhaps forget to think of you, and then you will cease to exist." Humor of this sort might have been more properly left to the gentlemen described by John Brown in his "Essay on Satire, occasioned by the Death of Mr. Pope:" And coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a grin. Yet Byron, who was no mere coxcomb, has echoed it : When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter," They say his system 'tis in vain to batter, Too subtile for the airiest human head; And yet who can believe it? I would shatter An anonymous hand has produced the following: but this is rather a jeu-d'esprit than a burlesque on any particular theory. If Berkeley has been traduced, so have all who held views that assimilated to Berkeley's. The following is an imaginary epitaph on Hume: Beneath this circular idea, vulgarly called tomb, Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter All our old Beliefs would scatter: Stuart Mill exerts his skill To make an end of Mind and Matter. But had I skill like Stuart Mill, His own position I could shatter: The weight of Mill I count as Nil If Mill has neither Mind nor Matter. LORD NEAVES: Songs and Verses. We can't assume, so Comte declares, a first or final cause, sir; Is "Nothing is, and nothing's not, but everything's becomin'." Mind diseased. In “Macbeth,” Act v., Sc. 3, Macbeth asks the doctor,— Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, And, with some sweet, oblivious antidote, Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff And when the physician answers that in such case the patient "must minister to himself," Macbeth cries impatiently, Throw physic to the dogs! I'll none of it. The impotence of medicine in the presence of moral and mental distress had become a commonplace with the poets even before Shakespeare's time. In "Lancelot of the Laik," 1. 2075, are the lines, Here are a few parallels from Shakespeare's contemporaries or immediate predecessors: Nature, too unkind, O ye Gods, have ye ordeyned for euery malady a medicine, for euery sore a salue, for euery paine a playster, leauing only loue remedilesse?-LYLY: Euphues, Arber's ed., p. 61. Mind's Eye. In my mind's eye, Horatio," says Hamlet (Act i. Sc. 2) And elsewhere Shakespeare says,— For much imaginary work was there; Lucrece, l. 1422-28. The phrase, however, was a common one long before Shakespeare. It may be found in the classics. Thus, Ovid, Cunctaque mens oculis pervidit usa suis, Ep. ex Ponto, I., viii. 34; and Cicero, "Oculis mentis videre aliquid" (Orat. 102). A parallel phrase in Aristotle runs, &ç yàp owμarı ipis, év ýuxñ vớûç (Eth. Nic., I., vi. 12). In the New Testament (Ephesians i. 18) there occurs the expression περwτOμÉVOVS TOÙS óóðaλμùç tùs kapdias; where the reading of some cursives, and of the textus receptus, has diavolas. So Estius in his Commentary gives oculos mentis as the proper translation of the Greek. In Tyndale's, Cranmer's, and the Genevan versions the translation is "the eyes of youre myndes;" while the Bishops' Bible has the slightly varying form "the eyes of our mindes :" so that this was a Scriptural phrase in Shakespeare's time. The Authorized Version, it may be added, has "the eyes of the understanding." But indeed, as J. Carrick Moore points out, the earliest example of the use of this metaphor goes back to the very origin of language. They who invented the word idea from a verb which meant to "see," and who used the same word oda to express "I have seen" and "I know," were using this metaphorical expres. sion. Minerva Press, the name of a printing-establishment in Leadenhall Street, London, which has become almost a synonyme for literary inanity, from the flood of trashy, ultra-sentimental, but very popular "novels of real life" which issued from it in the early part of the present and the end of the last century. They were remarkable for their complicated plots and the labyrinths of diffi culties into which the hero and heroine got involved before the final consummation. It is often referred to by English writers: Scarcely in the Minerva Press is there record of such surpassing, infinite, and inextricable obstruction to a wedding or a double wedding.-CARLYLE. The heroes of its issue are described by Lamb as "persons neither of this world nor of any conceivable one; an endless string of activities without purpose, of purposes without a motive." Hesperus and Titan themselves, though in form nothing more than "novels of real life," as the Minerva Press would say, have solid metal enough in them to furnish whole circulating libraries, were it beaten out into the usual filigree.-CARLYLE: Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. Mirth and melancholy. Hood, in his "Ode to Melancholy," has the lines, There's not a string attuned to mirth This is exactly the "humorous sadness" which Jaques discovers in himself: "It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness."-As You Like It, Act iv., Sc. I. The great humorists, indeed, have always been melancholy. Young, the author of the sombre "Night Thoughts," might be gay and flippant in his every-day mood, but Molière, Rabelais, Swift, and Heine carried a great gloom in their hearts, and, in Byron's phrase, laughed that they might not cry. (See LAUGHTER.) There is a famous story told usually of Grimaldi, but sometimes of other famous clowns or comedians. A patient applies to a doctor, praying for some cure for acute melancholia. "Go and see Grimaldi," suggests the medical man. "Alas! I am Grimaldi." Anecdotes run in cycles. This story is authentically related of Dr. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the more famous Charles. He went down to London to consult a |