It has been ascribed to or appropriated by many. We have read
of two eminent comic writers in classical times dying of laughter at
seeing an ass eat figs. Here it is most probable that there was some
standing joke upon this subject, or that some instance of the kind
occurred, and so this strange death came to be attributed to several
individuals. The saying,
"On two days is a wife enjoyable,
That of her bridal and her burial,"
attributed to Palladas in the fifth century A.D., was really
due to Hipponax in the fifth century B.C.
There is a story that Lord Stair was so like Louis XIV. that, when he
went to the French Court, the King asked him whether his mother was ever
in France, and that he replied "No, your Majesty, but my father was."
This is in reality a Roman story, and the answer was made to Augustus by
a young man from the country.
Sydney Smith's reply when it was proposed to pave the approach to St.
Paul's with blocks of wood, "The canons have only to put their heads
together and it will be done," was not original; Rochester had made a
similar remark to Charles II. when he noticed a construction near
Shoreditch: and the story of the man who complained that the chicken
brought up for his dinner had only one leg, and was told to go and look
into the roost-house, is to be found in an old Turkish jest-book of the
fifteenth century.
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