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The Button Makers' Jests, by Geo. King of St. James', is "Printed for Henry Frederick, near St. James' Square;" a coarse squib upon royalty. One Fisher entitled his play Thou shalt not Steal; the School of Ingratitude. Thinking the managers of Drury Lane had communicated his performance, under the latter name, to Reynolds the dramatist, and then rejected it, he published it thus: "Printed for the curious and literaryshall we say? Coincidence! refused by the Managers, and made use of in the farce of Good Living,'" published by Reynolds in 1797. Harlequin Premier, as it is daily acted, is a hit at the ministry of the period, "Printed at Brentafordia, Capital of Barataria, and sold by all the Booksellers in the Province, 1769." "Printed Merrily, and may be read Unhappily, betwixt Hawke and Buzzard, 1641," is the satisfactory imprint of The Downe fall of temporising Poets, unlicensed Printers, upstart Booksellers, tooting Mercuries, and bawling Hawkers. Books have sometimes been published for behoof of particular individuals; old Daniel Rogers, in his Matrimonial Honour, announces "A Part of the Impression to be vended for the use and benefit of Ed. Minsheu, Gent., 1650."

"CHERRY RIPE."

There is a quaint grace in this lyric, perfect in its kind, characteristic of the song-writing of the time. It is from a work entitled An Hour's Recreation in Music, by Richard Alison, published in 1606 :—

There is a garden in her face,

Where roses and white lilies grow;
A heavenly Paradise is that place,
Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.
There cherries grow, that none may buy,
Till cherry ripe themselves do cry.

These cherries fairly do inclose
Of orient pearl a double row,
Which, when her lovely laughter shows,
They look like rosebuds fill'd with snow,
Yet there no peer nor prince may buy,
Till cherry ripe themselves do cry.

Her eyes, like angels, watch them still:

Her brows like bended bows do stand,
Threatening with piercing frowns to kill
All that approach with eye or hand,
Those sacred cherries to come nigh,
Till cherry ripe themselves do cry.

PASQUINADES.

The following admirable epigram was written, it is said, by one of the most accomplished scholars of the university of Oxford:

Cum Sapiente Pius nostras juravit in aras:
Impius heu Sapiens, desipiensque Pius.

Thus translated:

The wise man and the Pius have laid us under bann,

Oh Pious man unwise! oh impious Wise-man!"

1850.

In May, 1851, these verses were placed upon Pasquin's statue in Rome, translated into Italian :

Quando Papa o' Cardinale

Chies' Inglese tratta male,
Quel che chiamo quella gente
Pio? No-no, se sapiente.

Pope Leo XII. was reported, whether truly or not, to have been the reverse of scrupulous in the earlier part of his life, but remarkably strict after he became Pope, and was much disliked at Rome, perhaps because, by his maintenance of strict dis

was

cipline, he abridged the amusements and questionable indulgences of the people. On account of his death, which took place just before the time of the carnival in 1829, the usual festivities were omitted, which gave occasion to the following pasquinade, which was much, though privately, circulated:

Tre cose mal fecesti, O Padre santo;

Accettar il papato,

Viver tanto,

Morir di Carnivale

Per destar pianto.

On the decease of Pope Clement IX. in 1669, Cardinal Bona was named amongst those worthy of the tiara, when a French Jesuit (Père Dangières), in reply to a line inscribed, as usual upon those occasions, on the statue of Pasquin, "Papa Bona sarebbe un solecisma," made the following epigram:

Grammaticæ leges plerumque Ecclesia spernit:

Forte erit ut liceat dicere Papa Bona.
Vana solæcismi ne te conturbat imago:

Esset Papa bonus, si Bona Papa erit.

The successful candidate, however, was Cardinal Emilio Altieri, who assumed the name of Clement X., in April, 1670: Bona (Giov.) died in October, 1674.

These two epigrams were affixed to the statue of Pasquin at Rome, in the year 1820, upon two Cardinals who were candidates for the Popedom :

PASQUINALIA.

Sit bonus, et fortasse pius-sed semper ineptus-
Vult, meditatur, agit, plurima, pauca, nihil.

IN ALTERUM.

Promittit, promissa negat, ploratque negata,
Hæc tria si junges, quis neget esse Petrum.

APULEIUS ON MESMERISM,

The following passage in Apuleius seems to be an allusion to Mesmerism :

Quin et illud mecum reputo, posse animum humanum, præsertim puerilem et simplicem, seu carminum avocamento, sive odorum delenimento, soporari, et ad oblivionem præsentium externari; et paulisper remota corporis memoriâ, redigi ac redire ad naturam suam, quæ est immortalis scilicet et divina; atque ita, veluti quodam sopore, futura rerum præsagire.-Apuleius, Apol. 475. Delph. ed.

BABBLING.

In his Aggravations of Vain Babbling, speaking of gossips, Baxter says:—

If I had one to send to school that were sick of the talking evil-the morbus loquendi-I would give (as Isocrates required) a double pay to the schoolmaster willingly; one part for teaching him to hold his tongue, and the other half for teaching him to speak. I should think many such men and women half cured if they were half as weary of speaking as I am of hearing them. He that lets such twattling swallows build in his chimney may look to have his pottage savour of their dung.

PROVERBIAL EXPRESSIONS.

Smelling of the Lamp.-Plutarch vit. Demosth., c. 8, attributes to Pytheas the expression Avxvíwv olew, to smell of the lamp-wick.

The Nine of Diamonds.-Why the nine of diamonds is called the curse of Scotland is thus explained in Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue :

Diamonds imply royalty, being ornaments to the imperial crown, and every ninth King of Scotland has been observed for many ages to be a tyrant, and a curse to that country.

The Two Kings of Brentford.-These celebrated worthies

made their first appearance in the farce of The Rehearsal, written by Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, with the assistance of Butler, Sprat, and others. Dryden is satirized in it under the name of Bayes.

A little Bird told me.—The origin of this phrase is doubtless to be found in Ecclesiastes, x. 20:—

Curse not the king, no, not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bed-chamber: for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.

By Hook or Crook. This saying is probably derived from a forest custom. Persons entitled to fuel wood in the king's forest, were only authorized to take it of the dead wood or branches of trees in the forest, "with a cart, a hook, and a crook."

To Eat Humble Pie.-The humble pie of former times was a pie made out of the "umbles" or entrails of the deer, a dish of the second table, inferior, of course, to the venison pasty which smoked upon the dais, and therefore not inexpressive of that humiliation which the term "eating humble pie " now painfully describes. The "umbles" of the deer are constantly the perquisites of the gamekeeper.

Grin like a Chesire Cat.-Some years since Chesire cheeses were sold moulded into the shape of a cat, bristles being inserted to represent the whiskers. This may possibly have originated the saying. Charles Lamb's ingenious theory that Chesire was a county Palatine, and that the cats, when they think of it, are so tickled that they cannot help grinning, is not entirely satisfactory

"The Wise Men of Gotham."-In Thoroton's Nottinghamshire, vol. i. pp. 42, 43, the origin of the general opinion about the wisdom of these worthies is thus given, as handed down by tradition :

King John intending to pass through Gotham towards Nottingham, was

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