or in the concluding couplet of his epitaph on the drunken carrier, John Adams: The liquor he drank, being too much for one, He could not carry off, so he's now carrion. Fox, when asked the meaning of the Psalmist's phrase, "He clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment," replied, "I think it is clear enough : the man had a habit of swearing." Horne Tooke's answer to George III. was full of caustic satire. The monarch asked him whether he played cards. "No, your majesty; I cannot tell a king from a knave." Nay, there are puns extant by unknown authors which any one might have felt a pride in fathering. A Cambridge fellow, walking with a visitor, met by chance the Master of St. John's on horseback. "Who is that?" inquired the visitor. "That is St. John's head on a charger." A would-be masher of middle age, who was looking at a house, asked the pretty servant-girl whether she was to let with the establishment. "No, sir," was the answer; "please, sir, I am to be let alone." Here is a pun which hits with both its barrels ; each of its two meanings speaks a volume. The one informs the querist that his admiration must not be expressed too warmly; the other, that an eligible offer is not likely to be ill received. Was ever greater weight of meaning compressed into two words? If so, it is only in Punch's answer to Mallock's query, "Is life worth living ?"-"That depends upon the liver,"-which has been cited as an instance showing "how much wit, science, and moral may be crowded into a pun.” Sydney Smith quotes with approval the story of the anonymous wag who rebuked a careless student for reading the word patriarchs as partridges : "You are making game of the patriarchs." An excellent motto for a teacaddy, "Tu doces" ("Thou teachest"), is mentioned in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1791, and is there somewhat dubiously attributed to one J. Coulson, F.R.S., who flourished half a century before. It has been held that the worse a pun the better it is. Charles Lamb rather agrees with the dictum: "This species of wit is the better for not being perfect in all its parts. What it gains in completeness it loses in naturalness. The more exactly it satisfies the critical, the less hold it has upon some other faculties. The puns which are most entertaining are those which will least bear an analysis." And as an example he gives the following, "recorded with a sort of stigma in Swift's 'Miscellanies :'" An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question: "Prithee, friend, is that your own hair or a wig?" Lamb goes into ecstasies over this jest: "There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof." It is only on this principle that a ghastly pun of Lamb himself can be excused. Writing to Hood to condole with him on the loss of one of his children, he goes on, "I have won sexpence of Moxon by the sex of the dear gone one.' In such a riddle as the following, “If a Frenchman fell into a tub of grease, what English word might he utter?" the answer being "In-de-fat-I-gabble," it is not so much the pun which titillates the fancy as an involuntary image of the luckless victim, and the absurd inappropriateness of his remark. We might put into the same category Burnand's reported explanation of a poet-friend's choice of mince pie to lunch off, "he evidently was getting him inspiration," but when we find the Spectator pronouncing this to be "excruciatingly good" we withdraw our admiration for its excruciating badness, and realize sadly that Americans and English can never be friends if inability to laugh at the same jokes be indeed the severest test of friendship. But then there is Lewis Carroll, and on that common ground both nations can meet. What can be better (or worse) than some of the puns scattered through Alice's various adventures? There is a naïveté and a pathetic simplicity about them which seem somehow to reach the common fount of laughter and of tears. Put me in my little bed, a once common American colloquialism, meaning that the one addressed is beaten or distanced, or has no more to say. It is derived from the refrain of a popular song: Come, sister, come, Kiss me good-night, For I my evening prayers have said; So put me in my little bed. Putrefaction shines in the dark. Lord Chesterfield, in his "Letters to his Son," has this image: "These poor, mistaken people think they shine; and so they do, indeed; but it is as putrefaction shines,-in the dark." Chesterfield's Letters were published at his death in 1773. In Cowper's "Conversation" (1781) the same image reappears: 'Tis such a light as putrefaction breeds In fly-blown flesh, whereon the maggot feeds,- Pyrenees, There are no more. According to Voltaire, in his "Age of Louis XIV.," when the grandson of that monarch, the Duke of Anjou, was departing for Spain to take, under the name of Philip V., the throne left vacant by the death of Charles II., Louis, in his farewell instructions, said, "Be a good Spaniard; it is your duty; but remember that you are French, and that you maintain the union of the two countries." Then, embracing the youth, he added, “Il n'y a plus de Pyrénées." Why," asks Fournier, pertinently, "should Voltaire have written thus, when he might have found that the king never said it? It is a Spanish rather than a French mot, related by Dangeau, a courtier who followed Philip to his new kingdom, as the remark of the ambassador of Spain, who said that the journey between the two countries would be easy, as the Pyrenees were now melted" ("les Pyrénées étaient fondues"). But according to the Mercure Volant, November, 1700, p. 237, the Spanish ambassador used the exact words which Voltaire puts in the mouth of Louis XIV. to that monarch himself: "What joy! There are no more Pyrenees; they are uprooted, and henceforth we are but one." An earlier origin for the sentiment has been found in a poem by Malherbe, celebrating the marriage of Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria: Puis quand ces deux grands hyménées Doit aplanir les Pyrénées, . . . Cowper expresses a similar thought in another way: Mountains interposed Make enemies of nations who had else, The Task, Book ii., 1. Q. Q, the seventeenth letter and thirteenth consonant in the English, as in the Latin, alphabet. In the Phoenician it was the nineteenth character, and had the value of a deeper and more guttural k. The original Greek alphabet had the letter, but abandoned it as useless, because there was no such distinction between the sounds. The Latins unphilosophically retained it, but only in the form qu, which is identical with ku, and through the Latin want of phonetic subtlety this entirely superfluous letter has been admitted into all modern alphabets based on the Phoenician, because in that parent alphabet it had a real office to perform. Quaker City. Philadelphia is popularly so called, having been founded by William Penn and settled and colonized by members of the Society of Friends, who still form an important element in its population. Queen City, sometimes also Queen of the West, a name given to Cincinnati at a time when she was by far the most important commercial centre of that part of the United States. The city has retained the name, and is very often called by the sobriquet at this day. And this song of the Vine, This greeting of mine, The winds and the birds shall deliver To the Queen of the West, In her garlands dressed, On the banks of the beautiful river. LONGFELLOW. Queen's Bus, an alternative name among English thieves for the Black Maria, or prison-van. The story runs that a crazy inmate of Clerkenwell was about to be sent away. He was told that the queen had despatched one of her own carriages for him. "One of them with We R on the side?" "Yes." "Wot's We R stand for?" "Victoria Regina, of course." "No, it don't: it stands for Wagabones Removed," said the prisoner. The same letters are facetiously interpreted to mean Virtue Rewarded. A Queen's Pipe, the name popularly given to a huge oven at the Victoria Dock in London-where from ninety-five to ninety-eight per cent. of the entire imports of tobacco are received-which forms the crematory of the worthless portions of cargoes and the refuse and sweepings of the bonding houses. great deal of misunderstanding exists about the office of this pipe, and it is sometimes held to be a ravenous maw that is eternally smoking the primest of smuggled cigars, cigarettes, and tobacco. But, in fact, contraband tobacco is overhauled after seizure, and the good portions separated from the worthless and supplied to convict prisons, for the consolation of criminal lunatics. Only refuse tobacco finds its way into the Queen's Pipe. When reduced to ashes, the proportion of lime contained in the dust renders it useful for manure. It is disposed of to agriculturists for mixture with other materials in tilling the land. Quem Deus vult perdere prius dementat (L., "Whom God would destroy he first makes mad”), an anonymous translation of a fragmentary line of Greek attributed to Euripides: *Ον θεὸς θέλει ἀπολέσαι πρῶτ ̓ ἀποφρένει. Sophocles, however, refers to it (Antigone, 622) as a remarkable saying of some one unknown. It appears as Maxim 911 in Publius Syrus in this form: "Whom Fortune wishes to destroy she first makes mad." Butler puts the idea into English verse thus: Like men condemned to thunder-bolts, and Dryden, in "The Hind and the Panther,” Quick as thought, a familiar locution common to most modern languages. Most readers have no doubt frequently made use of the expression "quick as thought," but have any of them ever stopped to consider how quick thought is? A writer has made some interesting calculations regarding the comparative length of time it takes to call to mind various every-day facts. It takes about two-fifths of a second to call to mind the country in which a well-known town is situated, or the language in which a familiar author wrote. We can think of the name of next month in half the time we need to think of the name of the last month. It takes on an average one-third of a second to add numbers consisting of one digit, and half a second to multiply them. Such experiments give us considerable insight into the mind. Those used to reckoning can add two or three in less time than others; those familiar with literature can remember more quickly than others that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. It takes longer to mention a month when a season has been given than to say to what month a season belongs. The time taken up in choosing a motion, the "will time," can be measured as well as the time taken up in perceiving. If I do not know which of two colored lights is to be presented, and must lift my right hand if it be red and my left if it be blue, I need about one-thirteenth of a second to initiate the correct motion. I have also been able to register the sound-waves made in the air by speaking, and thus have determined that in order to call up the name belonging to a printed word I need about one-ninth of a second, to a letter one-sixth of a second, and to a color one-third of a second. A letter can be seen more quickly than a word, but we are so used to reading aloud that the process has become quite automatic, and a word can be read with greater ease and in less time than a letter can be named. The same experiments made on other persons give times differing but little from my own. Mental processes, however, take place more slowly in children, in the aged, and in the uneducated. -Nineteenth Century. How fleet is a glance of the mind! Compared with the speed of its flight, And the swift-winged arrows of light. COWPER Lines supposed to have been written 66 Quodlibet, a compound Latin word, meaning as you please," was the term used by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages to designate the subtle questions in casuistry on which they delighted to exercise their dialectical skill. To us they often seem extravagantly absurd, yet they were greeted with the highest respect and admiration, and won for their propounders the guerdon of such fantastic titles as the Seraphic, Illuminated, Subtle, or Invincible Doctor. And indeed the extraordinary subtlety of intelligence which they indicate is not to be set aside with a sneer. It was a phase of evolution through which the human mind had to pass in order to realize its own limitations and fall back upon the every-day light of common sense as a safer illuminator than mystic moonshine. But, while we withhold the sneer, the grotesque naïveté of these hair-splitting controversies cannot fail to awaken a responsive thrill in the most rudimentary sense of humor. Burlesque has done its best, but has produced nothing more delightful. There is the famous question of the pretended Shakespearian Society, "Whether the deceased husband of Juliet's nurse was really a merry man, or whether he only appeared so in the deceptive haze thrown posthu mously around his character by the affectionate partiality of his widow?" There is that no less celebrated problem derisively propounded by Giordano Bruno, himself a schoolman: "Num chimæra bombinans in vacuo possit comedere secundas intentiones" ("Whether a chimera ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions"). These are funny enough. Reid, the Scotch metaphysician, even questioned whether the wit of man could produce a more ridiculous proposition than the second. Perhaps not more ridiculous. But either his memory or his sense of humor was at fault if he failed to recognize that many of the true quodlibets were quite as facetious. Here is an authentic question which was a favorite topic of discussion, and thousands of the acutest logicians through more than one century never resolved it: "When a hog is carried to market with a rope tied about its neck, which is held at the other end by a man, whether is the hog carried to market by the rope or by the man?" Among these learned leviathans probably none is more widely remembered than Thomas Aquinas,-St. Thomas in his present state of perfect beatitude, "The Angelic Doctor," as he was called on earth. His works, in seventeen folio volumes, testify not only to his industry but also to his genius. His greatest work, the "Summa totius Theologiæ," a summary of "theology,"that is to say, of all knowledge as it was then conceived,-fills a volume in elephant folio containing nearly fifteen hundred pages of very small print in double columns. It may be worth noticing that to this work are appended nineteen folio pages, in double column, of errata, and about two hundred pages of index. The whole is thrown into Aristotelian form; the difficulties or questions are proposed first, and the answers are then appended. There are one hundred and sixty-eight articles on Love, three hundred and fifty-eight on Angels, two hundred on the Soul, eighty-five on Demons, one hundred and fifty-one on the Intellect, one hundred and thirty-four on Law, two hundred and thirtyseven on Sins, seventeen on Virginity, and others on various topics. One is inclined to suspect that the title of Angelic Doctor was earned not so much by any seraphic temper with which the good Thomas was blessed, for he was a most vehement and uncompromising polemic, as by his very minute examination into the nature of the angels. In his three hundred and fiftyeight articles on the topic, he treats of angels, their substance, orders, offices, habits, etc., as if he himself had been an angel of experience. Here are a few heads culled from his treatise : Angels were not before the world. Angels might have been before the world. Angels are incorporeal compared to us, but corporeal compared to God. An angel is composed of action and potentiality; the more superior he is, he has the less potentiality. Angels have not naturally a body united to them. They may assume bodies, but they do not want to assume bodies for themselves, but for us. The bodies assumed by angels are of thick air. The bodies they assume have not the natural virtues which they show, nor the operations of life, but those which are common to inanimate things. An angel may be the same with a body. In the same body there are the soul formally giving being and operating natural operations, and the angel operating supernatural operations. Angels administer and govern every corporeal creature. God, an angel, and the soul, are not contained in space, but contain it. Many angels cannot be in the same space. The motion of an angel in space is nothing else than different contacts of different succes. sive places. The motion of an angel is a succession of his different operations. His motion may be continuous and discontinuous as he will. The continuous motion of an angel is necessary through every medium, but may be discontinuous without a medium. The velocity of the motion of an angel is not according to the quantity of his strength, but according to his will. The motion of the illumination of an angel is threefold, or circular, straight, and oblique. All the questions are answered with a subtlety and nicety of distinction |