mouth, wherein they subsisted for months,-Gargantua riding to Paris on a great mare, who knocks down whole forests with every swish of her tail,Gargantua who, en passant, robs Notre Dame of its bells, and, after a battle, calmly combs the cannon-balls out of his hair,—is a magnificent conception, more laughable in its wild extravagance than the methodical and statistical creations of Swift.

Falstaff is a true Rabelaisian humorist, as in his description of Justice Shallow, who is "like a man made after supper with a cheese-paring," and who, "when he was naked, was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife," or when he tells red-nosed Bardolph, "I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire and Dives that lived in purple, for there he is in his robes, burning, burning. . . . Oh, thou art a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfire-light! Thou hast saved me a thousand marks in links and torches, walking with thee in the night betwixt tavern and tavern; but the sack that thou hast drunk me would have brought me lights as good cheap at the dearest chandler's in Europe." Better still is his description of his newly-levied recruits: "You would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals, lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way, and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. There's but a

shirt and a half in all my company; and the half shirt is two napkins, tacked together, and thrown over the shoulders like a herald's coat without sleeves; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from my host of St. Alban's, or the red-nosed innkeeper of Daventry. But that's all one; they'll find linen enough on every hedge."

Dr. Johnson had something Rabelaisian in his mirth, especially when he was attacking Scotchmen. When Albert Lee spoke of some Scotchmen who had taken possession of a barren part of America and wondered why they should choose it, "Why, sir," said the Doctor, "all barrenness is comparative. The Scotch would not know it to be barren;" and when Boswell stated that a beggar starving in Scotland was an impossibility, Johnson's reply was, "That does not arise from the want of beggars, but from the impossibility of starving a Scotchman." Which reminds one of Jekyll's comment on the Irish beggars, that they had helped him to solve one problem that had always vexed him,-what the beggars of London did with their cast-off clothing. Sydney Smith, another defamer of the Scotch, would often throw loose the reins of his fancy and dash into the wildest and most frolicsome metaphors, as when he told a lady the heat was so great "I found there was nothing for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones," or when, seeing a child stroking a turtle's back, thinking it would please the turtle, he exclaimed, Why, child, you might as well stroke the dome of St. Paul's to please the dean and chapter." Nothing could be more Rabelaisian than his burst of astonishment when told that a young neighbor was going to marry a very fat woman double his age:

66

Going to marry her? Going to marry her? Impossible! You mean a art of her: he could not marry her all himself. It would be a case, not of bigamy, but trigamy; the neighborhood or the magistrates should interfere. There is enough of her to furnish wives for a whole parish. One man marry her!-it is monstrous. You might people a colony with her, or give an assembly with her, or perhaps take your morning's walk round her, always provided there were frequent resting-places, and you were in rude health. I once was rash enough to try walking round her before breakfast, but only got half-way, and gave it up exhausted. Or you might read the Riot Act and disperse her. In short, you might do anything with her but marry her.

It is curious that this impromptu description, dashed off on the spur of the moment, finds its parallel in the jest-books of the past. Mr. Carew Hazlitt is our authority for the following instances culled from sources dated 1640 and 1790:

"That fellow," said Cyrano de Bergerac to a friend, "is always in one's way and always insolent. The dog is conscious that he is so fat that it would take an honest man more than a day to give him a thorough beating."

A man being rallied by Louis XIV. on his bulk, which the king told him had increased from want of exercise," Ah, Sire," said he, "what would your majesty have me do? I have already walked three times round the Duc d'Aumont this morning."

A man was asked by his friend when he last saw his jolly comrade

"Oh," said he, "I called on him yesterday at his lodgings, and there I found him sitting all round a table by himself."

Smith's jest at Lord Russell's small size is well known. "There is my friend Russell," he said, "who has not body enough to cover his mind: his intellect is indecently exposed." Foote caricatured the smallness of Garrick in another way, equally surprising, when he proposed to get up a marionette show, half the size of life, just a little above the size of Garrick.

A much earlier attempt in the same line is found in Athenæus, who tells us that Demetrius Poliorcetes said of the palace of Lysimachus that it was in no respect different from a comic theatre, for that there was no one there bigger than a dissyllable.

Is the following sublime or ridiculous? That is easily answered: It is not sublime. Is it meant to be sublime or ridiculous? One would give the same answer, yet not so glibly. Perhaps Heine himself was not quite certain. If one may hazard a guess, he started out to be very sublime, and then, fearing that he had fallen short of sublimity by a step, saved himself from ridicule by consciously going just a step beyond it :

EXPLANATION.

Adown and dimly came the evening,
Wilder tumbled the waves,

And I sat on the strand, regarding

The snow-white billows dancing,

And then my breast swelled up like the sea,

And, longing, there seized me a deep homesickness

For thee, thou lovely form,

Who everywhere art near
And everywhere dost call,
Everywhere, everywhere,

In the rustling of breezes, the roaring of ocean,

And in the sighing of this my sad heart.

With a light reed I wrote in the sand,

"Agnes, I love but thee!"

Bnt wicked waves came washing fast

Over the tender confession,

And bore it away.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue (Fr. “L'bypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu"). This famous saying is Maxim 218 in Rochefoucauld's "Reflections." Massilion extended the phrase as follows:

"Le vice rend hommage à la vertu en s'honorant de ses apparences" ("Vice pays homage to virtue in honoring itself by assuming its appearance"). And Cowper amplified it still further in verse:

I. The ninth letter and third vowel in the English alphabet, borrowed through the Latin and Greek from the Phoenician. (See ALPHABET.) The Phoenician alphabet gave to it the consonant value of y, the Greeks converted it into a vowel, and the Romans used it both as vowel and as consonant.

I.H. S. These letters are frequently translated as the initials of the sentence "In hoc salus" ("In this safety"), or "Jesus Hominum Salvator" ("Jesus Saviour of Men"). These meanings were, indeed, read into the letters at a very early day. But originally they were merely an abbreviation of the Greek name for Jesus. The chief manuscripts of the New Testament were written throughout in Greek capital letters. Well-known names and words were always abbreviated. Thus, whenever the name 'IHEOYE (Jesus) occurred, the scribes wrote only the first three letters, IHE, with a dash over the eta, or H, as a sign of abbreviation. When the Latin scribes came to make copies of the old Latin versions of the Testament or of other ecclesiastical writings, they adopted the old Greek abbreviation for Jesus, and transliterated it, as they imagined, into IH S, forgetting that the Greek H was not an H, but a long E. Later, they saw in the mark over the H the sign of the cross, and read the initials as "Jesus Hominum Salvator," an error that has been perpetuated to the present day. In the Middle Ages the I. H. S. was held to have an esoteric meaning, and was believed to exert a mysterious influence against the powers of darkness. After the plague in Florence it was put up on the walls of the church of Santa Croce. It was also stamped on the large wafer out of which the host is consecrated, on the hilts of swords, and even on the backs of playing-cards, to increase their value. When Ignatius Loyola in 1540 founded the Order of Jesus, he borrowed the I. H. S. with a new interpretation, placing it under a cross and reading it "In Hoc Salus." This is still in use by the Jesuits, frequently in the form of a monogram, made by an H with the I in the middle extending upward and ending in a cross, the whole being entwined with an S, thus forming a complete cabalistic monogram.

=

I say, or A'say, the nickname which Chinamen bestow upon Englishmen, from their frequent use of the expression. A similar sobriquet is common among the French gamins at Boulogne. So the French in Java are called by the natives "Orang-dee-dong" the "dites-donc people," and both in England and in America are locally nicknamed "ding-dongs." At Amoy the Chinese used to call out after foreigners, "Akee! akee!" a reminiscence of the Portuguese Aqui! ("Here!") And in America Germans are saluted as "Nix cum arouse" and " Wie Gehts."

Iberia's Pilot, Christopher Columbus. Spain, in poetical language, is called Iberia, much the same as England is called Britannia and America Columbia. The name is probably derived from the Iberi, a people, known to the Romans, who lived on the banks of the Iberus river, the modern Ebro.

Launched with Iberia's pilot from the steep

To worlds unknown and isles beyond the deep.
CAMPBELL: The Pleasures of Hope.

Ice, To break the. Used metaphorically in the sense of removing restraint and preparing the way for intercommunication. The metaphor is employed by Shakespeare, probably the originator of the simile:

Petruchio. Sir, understand you this of me in sooth:

The youngest daughter whom you hearken for
Her father keeps from all access of suitors,
And will not promise her to any man

Until the elder sister first be wed:
The younger then is free, and not before.
Tranio. If it be so, sir, that you are the man

Must stead us all, and me amongst the rest,
And if you break the ice, and do this feat,-
Achieve the elder, set the younger free
For our access,-etc.

Taming of the Shrew, Act i., Sc. 2.

Ici on parle Français ("French is spoken here"), a common sign in English shop-windows, seen also in America and in other non-Gallic countries. Max O'Rell, in "John Bull and his Island," says, smartly enough, "On the windows of all the fashionable shops you see Ici on parle Français. On, indefinite pronoun, here refers generally to the person who happens to be absent from the shop when you enter it: I have experienced this many times." But Max O'Rell had been anticipated by Mark Twain in "The Innocents Abroad:"

In Paris we often saw in shop-windows the sign "English Spoken Here," just as one sees in the windows at home the sign "Ici on parle Français." We always invaded these places at once, and invariably received the information, framed in faultless French, that the clerk who did the English for the establishment had just gone to dinner and would be back in an hour, would Monsieur buy something? We wondered why those parties happened to take their dinners at such erratic and extraordinary hours, for we never called at a time when an exemplary Christian would be in the least likely to be abroad on such an errand. The truth was, it was a base fraud,—a snare to trap the unwary,-chaff to catch fledglings with. They had no English-murdering clerk. They trusted to the sign to inveigle foreigners into their lairs, and trusted to their own blandishments to keep them there till they bought something.

Ignorance, Humors of. A well-known editor is authority for the statement that whenever a man or woman is thoroughly ignorant he or she takes to writing for the magazines.

No doubt an editor's waste-basket would furnish many illustrative examples of the humors of ignorance. It has been said that only an editor can rightly estimate the number of fools in the world. Perhaps the man who said that was right. The mere eccentricities of spelling are beyond number. An excellent example of what may be done in a limited space is the following: "They were very stricked on these wholy days." In one narrative a "weekly mother" has figured,-a portentous parturitive phenomenon. Another author describes the heroine's "masses of raving black hair." On a later page, by the same hand, appears "a female figure, down which flowed a beautiful set of hair." A valuable advertising agent this writer would make to the Sutherland sisters!

Here is a misquotation that has decided merits :

There is a divinity that shapes our ends,

No matter how we may rough-hew the outside.

A single instance will show what danger lurks in foreign tongues: “G— V- was a brilliant society man, and had been the idol of the décolleté of two continents." And so on and so on. Booksellers, librarians, and other people who are supposed, more or less facetiously, to come in contact with the intel

ligent classes, also have their anecdotes of curious mistakes made by patrons

and customers.

"Have you Cometh ?" said a lady to a clerk in a book-store. "Cometh, ma'am?" replied the clerk, in perplexity.

"Oh, well," said the lady, "I saw a book called 'Goeth,' and I thought there might be a companion book called ' 'Cometh.'

It was some time before the bookseller realized that Goethe was in the lady's mind. That name, indeed, has always been a phonetic stumbling-block. A Chicago newspaper, as an instance of the spread of enlightenment in the Western Athens, says that formerly his fellow-townsmen used to pronounce the name to rhyme with teeth, but now they pronounce it to rhyme with dirty.

The librarian of the Portland (Maine) public library furnishes an amusing budget of anecdotes. A small boy anxiously inquired, "Is this the Republican library?" Another asked for the first book that Rose ever wrote, Rose being interpreted to mean E. P. Roe; still another wanted a book by the same opera,-"author” and “opera” probably being equally meaningless to his youthful understanding; and a fourth wanted one of Oliver Twist's books about Little Dorrit. The following is a list of titles recently called for in this library:

But the laugh is not always on the side of the book-clerk or the library attendant. A lady went into a music-store in Philadelphia and asked for "Songs without Words.' The clerk stared at her in astonishment. 66 'But," he said, "you know, that is impossible: there cannot be songs without words.' "Can you tell me where I can find 'Rienzi's Address'?" asked a young lady of a clerk in Brooklyn. "You might look in the Directory," he suggested.

In the famous shop of Herr Spithoever, in Rome, an American damsel, asking for Max O'Rell's book on the United States, was scornfully advised that "Marcus Aurelius vas neffer in der Unided Shtades." In a large library in Philadelphia, a young lady asked for " English as She is Spoke." The assistant librarian, in a tone of indirect reproof which reached the delighted ears of the young lady, bade the boy get "English as It is Spoken."

The perversity of man is amusingly illustrated by an anecdote Max Müller told in the course of a recent lecture at Oxford: "I was lecturing at the