Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1881-03-29
THE DAILY RECORD UNION.
WIT AND HUMoR.
Some odd Things About Ancient Humorists
and Testers.

When the Yankee enthusiast in Dick
ens's novel says that his home IS IN the
setting sun he is really Miltonic without
knowing it and all the queer stories OF
gigantic crops, of Titanic trees, and OF I'M
measurable pumpkins, have their originals
In such books az the Travels of Baron
Munchausen. or in the various volumes of
Fqcetie from which many of the Mum
chausen incidents are gathered. All our
notions of the sea-serpent are to be found
in a refined and sublimated form in Para
disc Lost. Take the picture of Satan, for
instance, who,
With head uplift above the wave, and eyes
That sparkling blazed his other parts beside
Prone on the floor, extended long and large,
Lay floating many rood.
The humorist tells us that a colony sent
out mistook the sea-serpent for an island,
and having landed on him, so to speak,
built church and houses in a row and
so lived happily until, by single dive, ne
made an end of the settlement, One can
not read OF this without being reminded
of Millions huge Leviathan which bewil-
dered sailors mistake for an island, and SO
make fast to him, with fixed anchor in
his scaly rird." The temptation of the
IMAGINATION Is W OAie--R ldbhCA ohSsA w
diminish and it is for this reason that
heroes, however short in the flesh, are apt
to grow gigantic in history and tradition.
Louis XIV. was really thought to have
been tall man until he was exhumed and
measured. Ia the time of Francis the
First, King of France, there was
TRADITION
That Roland, nephew Of Charlemagne, was
a person Of gigantic hight. But Francis
was skeptical, and ordered the sepulcher
of Roland to be opened. The bones were
gone, and so was the bow of the hero, but
the armor being still sound, the king or
dered it to be secured, and then, trying it
on, he found that it fitted him exactly,
though he was not, as Camerarius says,
excessively tall or big" This reminds
US of the exceedingly tall clergyman of
whom it was said that he did not need to
pray for blessings ne had only to reach
up for them and take them ad 6bitum.
And this again reminds us, as fine in
stance of application, of the Prayer" in
Sheridan's Critic"
Behold thy votaries submissive beg
That thou wilt deign to grant them all they ask !!
Assist them to accomplish all their ends
And sanctify whatever means they use
To gain them
By way Of closing this episode of the large,
or lofty, or numerous, let me tell story of
Ferdinand of Naples, that royal lover of at
least unlimited macaroni. Like many good
housewives, he thought that libraries might
be too large After he was well seated on
the throne from which Murat had Just been
expelled, his Minister set down in the
budget the usual sum for libraries.
''What's this." said his Majesty chow
many volumes have you already" One
hundred and fifty thousand, sire. J." Have
they all been read through" "No SIRE"
f'Then buy no more until they have.
Perhaps housewives who have groaned over
the perpetual accumulation of books, for
which home no longer afforded room, will
sympathize with the Neapolitan monarch.
THE GREEKS AS TESTERS.
The Greeks were excellent testers :
quiet piquant and infalhbly refined.
Aristophanes is coarse and sometimes
riotously so, but his coarseness is clean
like that of Rabelais, and has none of the
smirch which befouls English comedy. 1t
was not considered decent for a woman,
hardly for boy, to be present at the
presentation of the Athenian comedies.
In the "Wasps" of Aristophanes there is
a Dicast, who seems to have been sort of
Justice of the Peace, and in the unctuous-
ness with which he describes his dinner he
reminds US of Shakspeare's justice, Sin
fair round belly with good capon lined"
He boasts, like Falstaff, of his "supping
and swilling and rieting, of the girl upon
his knee, and of his appetite's warmth
and duration" Socrates has come down
to us so nearly like wisdom per-
sonifed, that hardly anybody knows
anything about his wit, his conyivial capa-
bilities, and those manners which made the
charge of butfoonery entered against him
plausible one. He was, perhaps, the
ugliest of men, as testers have often been !;
for who can forget poor Piron, the French
humorist, describing himself candidly as
shaped like the letter z If the truth is
told by tradition perhaps there never was
an uglier creature in human shape than this
sage Of the ages, with his bald head, bulg
ing eyes, stumbling walk and nose fiattened
to the face-a sort of exaggerated Silenus.
1t is long skip from Socrates to the
Facetia assigned to Hierocles, the Neo-
Piatonist Of the fifth century, but doubt
less the old Greeks had their jest-books, as
they certainly had their jests.
THE FUNNY STORIES
OF Hierocles are much the same which are
told of bull making Irishmen-his Scholas-
tikos, who does and says all manner of
absurd things, has the true Hibernian
flavor. He was the original man who,
when he had house to sell, carried about
brick as specimen of it, from which we
keep the phrase specimen brick to this
day. He was the first who, having heard
that crow would live thousand years,
bought one to try the experiment with
Baconian precision. Cicero, we are told,
compiled a textbook, which is lost, but if
there were any good stories in it, probably
they were borrowed from the Greeks, for
the great, grim soldiers and conquerers of
the world did not have much humor In
their constitutions.
To come down nearer modern times, an
excellent story may be mentioned which
the reader will find in the {" Colloquia of
Erasmus, ghost story, of which the ex-
uberant fun makes the Latin text as Jolly
as a modern farce. The scene is laid in
England, where one Polus, finding out that
a spirit is supposed by the country people
W t1C
everybody by pretending to see in the sky
"a huge dragon, armed with fiery horns,
with his tail turned up in a circle" No
body would admit at first that he saw the
sight, but Polus continued to asservate
and direct their eyes to the place until
(mark the irony of Erasmus y they were
ashamed not to see what was so plain. 4"
After supper Polus keeps up the fun, by
hiding himself and believing like demon.
a priest is called in to exercise the spirit,
and here Erasmus revels in his sneers at
the crosses used and "the huge vessel full
of holy water" The priest, we are told,
is not far removed from fool the horse
play goes furiously on, and ends with a
letter sent to the priest from the celestial
regions, telling him that ga place is re-
served for him near st. Anthony, which is
next to the choir of the Apostles. With
such drollery as this was the mighty and
serious work Of the Reformation favored
THE HuMoR OF OLD.
Everybody remembers the old Joe Miller
story OF student who, sitting down at
table, proved that two fishes which were
on the trencher were three, thus This
is one and this is two two aud one make
three = and what the father said to the
Young Sophomore Exactly so / will
take one, and John one, and you may have
the third for your great learning" But in