Finally we have Reinhold Köhler's meritorious annotations and additions to Albert Cohn's "Shakespeare in Germany," while the latter's "Life of Shakespeare," now in progress, promises to leave nothing wanting to be desired in that way. MY NILE BOAT. The travesties of Ducis, as well as the later repro- | Shakespeare on the Weimar Stage," discusses the ductions of Dumas, are only proofs that the views German adaptations for the theatre, and in a fresh of Voltaire are those of his nation, and that all at- and lively manner sets forth the merits and detempts to adapt Shakespeare to the French stage merits of Dingelstedt's acting versions. are too much imbued with this same shrug of the shoulders. The only proper exception to this rule is Victor Hugo. That Elze in this paper joins the most of our educated countrymen in underestimating Victor Hugo's book, only shows that we do not, one and all, comprehend the value of that volume to France. It is a merest prejudice that makes Elze put Victor Hugo down at once, without any particular criticism or analysis, as a most vicious My redoubtable one-eyed dragoman, Abool Hootranslator; while at the same time he gives place to sayn, an astute Cairene, is in the height of his enjoythe affected Chatelain, with all his crudest stuff, ment. I hear from the innermost cabin of that snug passing it off as the genuine vernacular. Victor Nile boat, the "Isis," of one hundred and fifty ardebs Hugo's judgment upon some of Shakespeare's char-burden, the purring, soothing gurgle of his cocoanut acters is certainly at times far from fitting, and some narghileh, or water pipe, through which he inhales of that which is a mere echo of German tones is not the purified essence of the best Syrian tobacco, as the better for it. Contrary to our usual manner with a sallow, thin, and rather vultury face, he sits of minute detail in the exposition, we find in Vic-cross-legged on his sacred canteen chest, and watches tor Hugo a far broader treatment and more general view of the matter. The criticism of Guizot, Villemain, and Barante is much nearer our own method, if indeed it is not largely prompted by the influence of our German literature. Elze points out that it is always as the author of Hamlet that Shakespeare is thought of in France; and it is with a critique or exposition of that play that every French Shakespearian seems to think it incumbent on him to begin his career. It is in France the oftenest translated and the fullest annotated of the plays. A comparison of the various versions of the well-known soliloquy in Hamlet, of which Elze presents several, is one of the best ways of discovering the different merits of the sundry French translators. To us, that of Alexander Dumas is the most satisfactory; and, indeed, in some respects there is no small resemblance in this genuine romancer to the famous Briton. Despite our failure to agree with him, we have found this article of Elze's both learned and attractive. The next paper, upon "Shakespeare and Sophocles," written by Adolf Schöll, is the only one in the volume which takes the broader views from a stand-point of universal literature. It is, moreover, a bold and thoughtful sketch. Hans Köster's "Marginalia to Othello and Macbeth" covers some disputed points in those plays. Some cursory remarks upon Shakespeare's authorship of "The Merry Devil of Edmonton," and "The Two Noble Kinsmen," follow. Then we have "The Modern English Critics of Shakespeare's Text," by F. A. Leo, in which the three classes of later adjusters of the text are characterized as the conservative, the democratic, and the liberal, and the German reader is made acquainted with the merits of Walker, Halliwell, Singer, Knight, Payne Collier, Dyce, and White. The Essay called "Shakespeare a Catholic Poet" is by Michael Bernay, and takes ground against Rio's assumption of Shakespeare's fanatical adherence to popery. Bodenstedt, deeply versed as he is in all the lore of the Elizabethan era, comes next with a critique upon Chapman, giving an analysis of two of his plays. He also furnishes a "Biography and Characteristics of Mrs. Siddons," which is not only an attractive paper, but is also the only article in the volume devoted to the acting qualities of the Shakespearian drama. Ludwig Eckardt, in "The English Histories of with stealthy craft the doings of our Arab crew. We are ten days already out from Cairo, and our boat's head is pointed to Thebes, the hundred-gated. It was sunset an hour ago; and that great orb of day slipped down into darkness in the space of exactly three minutes by my watch. Exactly two minutes after this remarkable but not unusual occurrence, my Nubian cook, Abdallah, prostrated himself on the deck in the Mussulman manner, and repeated his prayers; pressing his forehead to the well-worn planks. In three minutes after he was up and at me with a smoking tureen of orange-colored lentil soup in his nimble hands. But let me describe the Isis, her captain, and her eight sailors. The vessel is one of those known as a dahabeyeh, such as are generally employed by voyagers on the Nile. It has a raised quarter-deck at one end, under which are the cabins, three in number; while the rest of the boat is low and flat, with a gunwale reaching no higher than one's ankle. It has a small swallow-winged sail aft, and another larger one in the fore part, supported by the mainmast, which is short and stumpy; just in front of this is a large square box full of earth and open at the top, which contains our ovens and fireplace. The crew's cooking and coffee-making goes on in a small open chest, containing a large clay bowl full of fire. Here at most hours of the day you may see Achmed, the ship's boy, making coffee, feeding the exhausted fire with short choppings of old rope, or breaking rye bread into a large wooden bowl, a leak in which has years ago been dexterously patched with tin. 66 It is pleasant now that Canopus shines with the brilliancy of a diamond on fire, and the wild-geese fly creaking over our heads, piercing the solid dark in arrowy phalanxes, to hear the barking of the dogs of Beni Ammon, that sugar-growing village in the crocodilyest" portion of the Ocean River. The sounds grow louder and louder; that is a sign we are near land, and are going to moor for the night, for the wind is puffing and stormy. I fear I must confess there are better places than the Nile to rest one's bones on. "Chump-thump!" Do you hear those dull sounds? The sailors are knocking in the mooring-stump, in the way the Egyptians have done for thousands of years, in fact, ever since the time of Joseph, or before. We are to glide past no more mounds of gourds to-day, no more acres of giantbunched millet, no more groves of feathery palm. no more patches of leeks and onions, the grandchildren of those that fed the pyramid builders, no more miles of calcined cliff squared out into cellared tombs. Do you hear that rattling bang which sounds like premeditated assassination? That is the village watchman's friendly greeting. He is in glee, he of the long silver-bound watch-lock, for the one-eyed dragoman will bestow on him fourpence-halfpenny for going to sleep all night on the bank near our boat, -a ceremony which is supposed to be effectual against thieves. The great tawny swallows' wings of sails are folded to rest; the huge glass lantern is duly hung outside our cabin; our candles are lit inside the enclosure where we sing, read and discuss the events of the day; the lentil soup simmers over the fire, its lid jumps up and down as if in excitement and delight; the men shout, "Allah! the great, the merciful!" and squat in a ring round the wide wooden bowl that steams under their grabbing brown fingers. | Syrian tobacco, and that black seal on it is the seal of some Damascus merchant. At the door of our cabin is Abool Hoosayn's great canteen chest, containing a large plated soup-ladle, glasses, brass egg-cups, and Abool Hoosayn of the one eye, and that a very indifferent one, only knows what else. This box is his joy and pride; he rummages in it, he prowls about it, he lifts out trays, he lets the lid down on his chopped fingers; and when he is tired and he is easily tired, is our dragoman, he sits on it cross-legged with a clumsy crooked chibouk, the meanest of all slaves that was ever made, like the gold demon in Eastern stories, to guard hoarded treasures, yes, there he sits and snaps at the noble captain. Near this chest at the one side are the stairs leading up to the quarter-deck, on the other is the square cage that contains the great filter, the water-god of the vessel, beneath whose cool exudations repose the white pots of buffalo milk, the butter, and our tin can of goats' milk. The captain-a solemn, black-bearded, and sullen man-collects himself into a heap in the head of the vessel, and sups in private after many ablu- And talking of goats, that reminds me that half tions. The brown waves may lip and wash below a kid hangs from the rigging, ready for to-morrow's him, the heads of froth may float down, the great dinner, check by jowl with a large bird-cage confish may blunder and tumble,- still he eats and taining two cold fowls of a lean and ascetic conformasmokes, indifferent to all natural phenomena; and, tion, some flaccid herbs, and some chocolate-colored smoking, meditates after the manner of the Moslem. dates. In another cage on the quarter-deck are our Half an hour more and he will be a brown snoring oranges, limes, and pomegranates, near two rude bundle on the quarter-deck, happily wrapt in obliv-sofas for our majesties' use, evening and morning. ion, for "sleep makes us all Pashas," as the Bedouin proverb runs. But, after all, I have not described the internal economy of the boat. It consists of three small low rooms; one of them is devoted to our small nettedin beds, and under them are provision cupboards, gunpowder, and other harmless trifles. The second is our sitting-room; along each side of which are four small windows, and below them long cushioned seats, sacred to dozing, reading, and meditation. The third is our store-room; there our trunks and our wrappers are, our courier bags, our sacks of shot, our boxes of percussion caps, our warm coats and plaids for the cold nights and mornings, our sticks and umbrellas, our gun cleaners, our cases of wadding, our wine, out medicine-chests, and other necessaries and luxuries; for we want more than Adam wanted, now that the best of us have grown so sophisticated. In a rude vermilion chest, inlaid with tawdry brasswork, and close to the fireplace, rest the crew's pipes, coffee-cups, and extra cloaks. From the ambush of the cabin window, while we are dressing, my enthusiastic sporting friend Badger nearly every morning gets a shot at great pelicans, who with their aldermanic pouch come sailing along within reach. He seldom drops one but he gives me glowing accounts of how the shot splashed all over the vast creature, or how it fluttered in a peculiar manner to express surprise at the excellence of the noble sportsman's aim. Not that Badger is a bad shot, but he fires at seldom less than two hundred yards' distance, and with shot three sizes too small; the consequence is, that he flurries wild geese, chips pieces out of crows' wings, staggers vultures, frightens cormorants, but brings little to the bag, though the Nile shores are lined with cranes, purple geese, pelicans, and herons, ranged as if drawn up to be drilled by the king of the birds. Of our bedrooms little need be said, except that under each of our flinty pillows, which custom has rendered softer than the thrice-driven down, lurks As for our sailors, they are good-humored drudges nightly a revolver, - for the villagers about some enough, but sad sluggish chattering, fussy old woparts of the river have a bad habit of visiting Nile men in the hour of danger, if the Isis gets wound boats, beating the passengers, and stripping the about in a whirlpool eddy, and the tow-rope breaks, cabins; a loaded double-barrel for wild duck rests or if sudden fierce blasts of wind were to come against the wall. Nothing disturbs us at night but raging down from the Libyan Mountains or the the perpetual noise of naval tactics, if we are under Birds Hill. They are lean brown fellows, wearing, way; and if we are at rest, the barking of the vil- when on duty, little but long blue night-gowns and lage dogs, and the perpetual cough of Mohammed, tawny felt skull-caps. Often I awake and see them the boy who sleeps outside the cabin under the up to their armpits in the Nile, putting their strong deck, all among the eggs, cabbages, dates, and flour-backs to ease us off a crocodile-haunted sand-bar; casks, where, as he tells me daily, he is much disturbed by the rats, who are as large as cats, and were certainly sent on board for the express torment of true believers. often I see them tie their gowns upon their head, and splashing in a quarter of a mile to shore, to take their turn at dragging at the sacred boat, the Isis, for a burning four hours' spell. Once round Our sitting-room, which has yellow panels, is their supper bowl, beating the drum-head strained adorned with red and green cushions, red curtains, over the earthen jar, or sounding the double pipe, and green Venetian blinds; that old tarnished and they are happy and free from care as children. square-looking glass is as old as the childhood of Their chief peculiarity is their love of joking, and Mohammed Ali, at least; the little leather pillow-their extreme proclivity to sleep. case that swings from the nail of the glass folding- Their captain is a sullen stately man, in a red door leading to the dressing cupboard is full of fine turban, and a coarse black cloak, who stalks with bare feet about the deck like an Othello, and whom, for the first three weeks, I honored as a patriarch and a born monarch of the Nile; but who, on a subsequent misunderstanding about a shirt of mine and a fishing-line, never quite accounted for, sank sadly in my opinion, and whom subsequent lubberly hugging the shore, dread of darkness, and fear of wind have completely deposed from all claim to my admiration. Indeed, a pyramid of gold would never induce me to cross the Red Sea with such a captain. Yet to see him touch his breast, lips, and forehead, and with sullen bashfulness not unseemly murmur to me his morning salutations, you would think him Aaron of Rosetta, the commander of the Faithful himself; but then, after all, the Oriental lubber is, it must be confessed, a grander being than the lubber of our colder and less favored clime. The Reis shouts, commands "emsig" and "rooha," and such hoarse guttural Arabic exhortations, but he does nothing else himself but occasionally pull the boat from the muddy bank in moments of emergency; and this he does with the regal condescension of a Sesostris, though I dare say he would haggle for the last para in a bargain. Achmed, his second in command, is a fine handsome Misraimite. With jaunty green turban, for he is a descendant of the Prophet, and quite as great a rascal, he has sly half-shut black eyes, rather peering, from the habit of often looking at the sun in steering; crisp, shining black beard, and full liberal features; he holds the long helm with the dignity of a Ptolemy, but I have ceased to regard him with the respect of earlier days, since I find he sits down to steer, smokes his chibouk while at the helm, holds guttural discussions with the crew as to the whereabouts of the vessel, dozes while at his post, and breaks his firewood over his own head. He has a blameable tendency, too, of always bumping the vessel on land, just as we get into our first sleep. But let me describe au average day in a Nile boat, say from near Gibbel Tayr or the Birds Hill to Minieh. At about six o'clock, a noise as of a wagon-load of firewood and a ton of rope being tumbled about the deck (which means, being interpreted, that some naval manœuvre is taking place), awakes me and Badger, and we leap simultaneously out of bed like two unanimous harlequins. The boat is generally just on or just off a sand-bar. The crew are on shore towing, all in a row, with halters round their necks, as if they were prisoners of war doomed to the gallows, or are putting their brawny backs to it and heaving the Isis out of some difficulty, or they are swimming across a creek, or perhaps wading in the fat Nile mud up to their knees, or even a trifle higher. not bring them to bag. Badger loads again and is happy. Abool Hoosayn, the crafty dragoman, says, "too far up stairs"; by which he means that the birds were out of reach; at which Badger scoffs, curls the lip of pride, and puts on a copper cap on the blackened nipple of the gun, which is smoking like a little fairy chimney. I look out then, hearing a grinding sound, and see the ship's boy grinding coffee, and the mate roasting some in a little frying-pan over the fire. Gracious! how he grinds it in a small mortar, with a huge wooden pestle five feet long and thicker than a bed-post. No wonder the brown seeds crackle and crush helplessly under this tremendous instrument. And the river, of what color is it, and the bank, of what aspect? The great river, or "the ocean" as the Arabs call it, is of a muddy brown color, holding perpetual mud in solution, but it washes past in pretty glittering waves this breezy morning, when the wind ruffles it. And the bank is now a green wave of sugar-canes, now a strip of desert sand, -now a patch of millet,- -now a mile of acacia groves. That mud fort is the village of Golosany, and those mud pillars are used for supporting the Arab water-raiser's counterpoise. That intensely green strip of ribbon is clover; that endless black margin is Nile mud. Those half-naked brown men, with short and heavy shipwright adzes, are fellaheen, or peasants, hoeing up the ground for a new crop. Those net wigwams are hung up there by fishermen, and those big-headed fish, with long heads, are their finny spoil. Those long knotted purple batons the children carry on their shoulders, and which are three times as long as themselves, are ripe sugarcanes, which all young Egypt seems now to be munching, munching. Here, too, broadside down the river, driven by three boughs instead of oars, comes one of the wonders of Egypt, read of by me in school-books so many long years ago. It is a square raft from Balass, and contains some thousand water-jars for the use of the women of Cairo; but why do I say water-jars? for these are huge amphora. That one, stopped in the Roman manner with adhesive earth, will be used to hold oil, treacle, butter, rice, and other cohesive fluids and meltable solids. How bran-new from the potter's fire they look, with their rough-green whiteness and their tinges of creamy white and red! They are bound together firmly with palm-cord, are packed neatly with dry palmleaves, and are driven bravely down the current by the strong arms of those men of Balass, who strain at the branches which they use as oars. To fill those jars is the chief work of the blue-clad Egyp tian women in town or village. A cry from Badger, who is struggling with a slid- Breakfast now. The smoking curry, the granular ing window-shutter, makes me turn round. There rice, the "mish-mish" or stewed apricots, the conis an enormous pelican, with big pouch parchmenty serve of vegetable marrow, the oven-hatched eggs, and flaccid, floating by gravely, a hundred yards or the pomegranates, the buffalo's milk-butter in flat so off. Bang goes Badger's gun, tearing up the cakes, are pleasant after the smart walk on deck.— water with a scratching splash ten yards or so from Badger's gun is silent, and he is absorbed in the the pompous emblem of charity, who gives a semi- great and mysterious process of digestion. The comic hop, and then flaps his great gray and white-meal safely over, we burn votive cigarettes in gratitipped wings and is away; or, it may be, there is a tude to its memory. long, quivering cord of chattering wild geese that Badger scatters and utterly routs; or, perhaps, a little dark fleet of wild duck. You may be sure he always "stops" them, or "turns" them, or "knocks some feathers out," and they are as pleased as Badger; doubtless he hits them hard, but yet he does Then comes another stroll on deck, a shot at an ibis, a crack with a revolver at a hovering vulture or a sacred hawk. Then a long read aloud from Herodotus, who always knows more than he will tell, and who narrates such pleasant fables about the thief in the trap, and the helmet cup, and the sandal of Perseus, and the fair but indiscreet Rhodope, and the blind king, and the two pyramid builders, and other old friends of our boyhood; or we read the "Arabian Nights," that some think were written in Egypt; with the six hundred thousand Israelites, we fly before the wrathful chariots of Pharaoh; we entangle ourselves in hieroglyphics, or knock our heads against the graven stone of Rosetta. Sometimes we forget ourselves pleasantly in a novel, or, growing tired of truth, we read history. Fifteen miles of cliff already passed, calcined rock, vitreous barren stone, where nothing having life grows; carious bones of the old earth, mere honey-combed pumice-stone, with every gorge, cleft, and hollow sifted up with drifted desert sand, fine as that which fills an hour-glass. Do you see that mud wall, rising fort-like on the very edge of that tremendous precipice? That is the Copt convent of Mariam el Adra, or "Our Lady Mary the Virgin." Those perilous perpendicular steps along the face of the rock lead down to the water. Badger will fire to arouse the monks in their mud nest! Bang! go the twin barrels; a silence of two long seconds, then comes the bursting echo as of a Cyclops hammer falling on the anvil. Instantly two or three dark figures, no larger than those in a Noah's ark, appear on the ramparted cliff; those are two Coptic brothers of our Lady Mary's convent. Lucky for us the wind is high and the water cold and stormy, or we should have those unclean men swimming off to us on swollen goat-skins, and hear them screaming out, "I also am a Christian, O Howagee. Alms, alms, O Howagee!" No mud villages here, surrounded by white flocks of doves; no more bossy palm-trees tufted with leaves, as Arab lances are with ostrich feathers; no more egg ovens, or wavering green sugarcane patches; no more tracts of bunched millet; but now miles of calcined cliff, honey-combed with square burial-vaults, the doors of which look from here no larger than the doors of dog-kennels. No more lizard-haunted sands, or net wigwams of fishermen, but miles of rock graves,—dens where only the hornéd snake creeps, or the vulture stores its carrion. Dinner is ready; a fizzing arises in the kitchen,sure sign of commencing sunset. A pretty-crested bird falls under Badger's terrible and far-resounding gun; a great glory burns out from the west; the eastern cliffs change from a pale dust color to a luminous rose; the green cloudy gray shroud of the martyr day turns to burning gold. The cloud-crocodiles, vapor-dragons, and mysty monsters that point and gibber round the sunset are suddenly drawn into the whirlpool of flame, and shrivel away to shreds of glittering tinsel,-rays from the rising orb fan upwards as from a martyr's crown. A moment more and the eastern cliffs are ashy gray, the rich clouds have dropped like angels' offerings into a martyr's grave. The sky is now of a ghostly green, melting into cold purple; the afterglow is upon us for a moment, the palm-trees are dark against it; then night drops like the portcullis of an Egyptian vault, and God speaks to us in starry hieroglyphics. As Badger fires the dinner gun, Abool Hoosayn bears in in triumph a soup tureen, that smokes like an Arabian censer. But what was that strange object that shone for a moment under the last gleam of sunset? I saw it on that long wet strip of ribby sand where the greedy pelican sat and sulked, because he could not keep his pouch perpetually full. It was a ghastly creature, with scaly back, long and terrible jaws, and small treacherous eyes. It shone as if it was coated with gold-leaf, and it waddled back to the brown tide, honored by a royal salute from Badger's double-barrel. That was the first crocodile we had seen, but it never came into Badger's bag. THE PATERNITY OF ANECDOTES. IT has frequently been suggested that an asylum should be provided for aged and decayed anecdotes, to which they might retire after their many years of active service, when they were maimed, misshapen, disabled, or too weak to serve their original convivial purpose of setting the table in a roar. Such an institution would be useful in relieving society of the task of maintaining or countenancing chronic invalids for whom they had no further need, and of whom they were heartily tired, but on whose public appearances they were compelled, by the usages of the world, to smile a ghastly smile. 66 Foundling hospitals for wit have also been named, in the which might be received the merry bantlings that were cast adrift by Archie Armstrong, Somers, Pasquil, Peele, Tarleton, Skelton, Scoggin, Spiller, Aston, Haines, Pinkethman, and all those other professional jokers and jesters who preceded that Jack Mottley the dramatist who, in 1739, published his Collection of the most brilliant Jests, the politest Repartees, the most elegant Bon-mots, and most pleasant short Stories in the English Language," under the now world-famed title of "Joe Miller's Jests, or the Wits' Vade-mecum." But although much has been done for the collection of ana, little has been accomplished for their proper collocation; and we are disposed to think that a benefit might be conferred upon society by the establishment of an office for the identification and registration of Anecdotes, something between a lost-luggage office and the bureau of the Registrar of Births. A public pound, in which stray jokes might be detained until claimed by their rightful owners, might partly meet the social want; but the institution that we have now suggested appears to us to be more comprehensive and better adapted for the public service. By its means the jeu d'esprit that has been fathered upon more than one person might be traced to its true parent, instead of, as is now so frequently the case, leading a precarious existence by being laid at the several doors of its reputed fathers. If the paternity of the anecdote was properly registered and attested in a trustworthy quarter, there would then be an end to those chance children of Momus who court our attention on grounds which, however plausible, we can scarcely allow to be legitimate. The institution would also be available for the reclamation of that large class of facetia which have hitherto passed the greater portion of their existence as the borrowed brats of professional beggars, or the stolen children whose faces have been stained by their gypsy owners; and in many ways it would be of service for the detection of literary thieves and poachers, and for the restoration of stolen goods to their proper owners. It has always been a favorite device of the dinerout to secure attention and respect for his bon-mot by prefacing it with some such formula as “Sheri dan very wittily said"; or "It was well observed | his congregation as though he dealt in fictions, has by Dean Swift." It scarcely signified which name been variously ascribed to Betterton and Archbishop was used; so that, to paraphrase the well-known Tillotson, Betterton and Archbishop Sancroft, and couplet, "The joke a double duty had to pay; 't was Garrick and “a celebrated divine.” Dean Ramsay, Swift's by night, and Sheridan's by day." Thus in his "Reminiscences," that admirable storehouse Lord Chesterfield, Selwyn, Wilkes, Foote, Quin, of old Scottish "weet," tells us of the minister of Theodore Hook, Sydney Smith, and all other per- Lunan, who, when his audience were drowsing off sons of position who have been known to say good during his sermon, endeavored to rouse them with things, have, in their turn, been the reputed parents an objurgation that terminated with this pointed of a ricketty progeny of jokes with whose existence fact, "You see, even Jamie Fraser, the idiot, does they had had nothing to do. In many instances not fall asleep as many of you are doing." Jamie, such facetiæ were the offspring of their speaker, who was in the front gallery, immediately cried out, who preferred to ascribe their parentage to a more "An' I hadna' been an edeot, I wad ha' been sleepillustrious wit, in order to obtain for his bantlings a ing, too." Now, despite the locality and names that heartier recognition. Just as the face of Liston are given with this anecdote, we must doubt its was sufficient of itself to excite the risible faculties Scotch paternity, because the anecdote in its Engof his audience, so, the mere announcement that lish dress, and merely ascribed to "a country clerthe anecdote you were about to relate emanated gyman," had already been in print many years, and from the brilliant intellects of Sheridan or Sydney may be found at p. 139 of Orr's "Family Jo: MilSmith, would be enough to claim for it an apprecia- ler" (1848); at p. 362 of R. Phillips's "Encyclopative hearing. The presumption of its paternity dia of Wit," published in 1801, and perhaps in still would secure its favorable reception; and the pro- earlier jest-books, if it were worth while to make the fessional diner-out, who makes a study of bon-mots search. and ana as a portion of his stock in trade, acts shrewdly in ascribing his joke to some world-renowned jester, when he does not deem it prudent, by a violent figure of speech, to make himself his own hero, and transfer the good thing from another's mouth to his own. And although, on this side the Channel, society has wellnigh shaken itself free from the incubus of the would-be wit, who gets up his separate jokes for each course and every pause in the entertainment, yet retailers of facetiæ are more than ever welcomed on the printed page, and, to all appearance, are becoming less scrupulous as to the paternity of their anecdotes; so that, what is recorded in one book as the witticism of A, may be encountered in another work as the merry jest of Z. Similarly, the Rev. C. Rogers, in his "Illustrations of Scottish Character," a book little inferior to that of Dean Ramsay's,-transfers to Scotland the paternity of the old English anecdote of the countryman who slept under his own parson, but kept awake when a stranger preached, in order "to watch 'un." Certainly, Mr. Rogers's Scotch beadle gives a new flavor to the old anecdote with his explanation to his minister, "When you are in the poopit yersel' I ken that it's a' richt; but when a stranger preaches I like to watch his doctrine a wee.' It was the witty Dr. South who, when preaching, desired Lord Lauderdale not to snore so loud lest he should wake the king; and, although this anecdote is correctly given at p. 247 of" The Jest-Book" in Macmillan's "Golden Treas 66 a country parson" and "the chief of his parishioners." The same work also repeats another jest, in somewhat different words, on pp. 260, 340, and another at pp. 127, 154, ascribing it in the former place to Jerrold, though it was really told by Albert Smith in his "Mont Blanc" entertainment; but it gives the paternity of the wooden-pavement joke to Douglas Jerrold, and not to Sydney Smith, who is its reputed father (p. 161). It also (p. 209) takes from the latter wit, and transfers to Quin, the remark made to that parson who played whist with dirty hands, "I see that you keep your glebe on your own hands." Other jest-books, too, variously assign to Sydney Smith and Charles Lamb the paternity of that kindred joke, "If dirt were trumps, what a hand you would hold." We are chiefly led to make the remarks from hav-ury Series," yet at p. 155 a similar thing is told of ing read in the Cornhill Magazine for the present month an article on "American Humor," in which "the familiar use of Scriptural language," so "characteristic of American humor," is instanced by the example of "a certain Mr. Lorenzo Dow," who preached from the words, "I can do all things"; and then said, "No, Paul, you are wrong for once. I'll bet you five dollars you can't"; and then laid down a five-dollar bill on the desk, and read the remaining words of the verse; upon which he said, "Ah, Paul, that's a very different thing, -the bet's off." The Cornhill writer remarks, "This decidedly beats any anecdote we ever heard of Mr. Spurgeon"; and we therefore conclude that he is not aware that the paternity of this anecdote must be assigned to the English preacher, Rowland Hill, and not to the American stump-orator, Lorenzo Dow. The incident, however, of the wager is supposed to have been the addition of some foolish imitator of Rowland Hill; and we see that Professor Christmas, in his "Preachers and Preaching" (1858, p. 240), takes this view of the case. But the anecdote altogether belongs to England and not to America, though we might be well content to make that country a present of it. Authors frequently remind us of the preacher who could make his hearers weep by the affecting manner in which he pronounced the word Mesopotamia. Some writers boldly credit Whitefield with this anecdote; others are content by referring it to the mythical and anonymous "celebrated divine"; while Mr. T. A. Trollope, in his "Lindisfarn Chase,' gives it an air of novelty by assigning it to "a great tragedian." The preacher on the eleventh comThe large class of clerical ana are, indeed, pecu- mandment is said, in the "Life of Rutherford," to liarly unfortunate in establishing their paternity on have been Archbishop Usher, the sermon having a sure foundation. The well-known anecdote of the been preached at Anworth in Scotland; but the preacher asking the player how it was that he, when compilers of the "Percy Anecdotes" transferred speaking of things imaginary, could affect his audi- the incident to Quebec, and made the preacher to ence as though he spoke of realities, whilst the be "a chaplain to the garrison." During the resipreacher's discourse upon realities was received by | dence of the Prince of Wales in Oxford, a para |