Dr. Aldrich, of convivial memory, said there were five reasons for drinking:–

“Good wine, a friend, or being dry,
Or lest you should be by and by,
Or any other reason why.”

To make this condiment your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard boiled eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen-sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give;
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half-suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites too soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
And, lastly, o’er the flavored compound toss
A magic soup-spoon of anchovy sauce.
O green and glorious!–O herbaceous treat!
’Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat;
Back to the world he’d turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day!”

The copiousness of the English language perhaps was never more apparent than in the following character, by a lady, of her own husband:–

“He is,” says she, “an abhorred, barbarous, capricious, detestable, envious, fastidious, hard-hearted, illiberal, ill-natured, jealous, keen, loathsome, malevolent, nauseous, obstinate, passionate, quarrelsome, raging, saucy, tantalizing, uncomfortable, vexatious, abominable, bitter, captious, disagreeable, execrable, fierce, grating, gross, hasty, malicious, nefarious, obstreperous, peevish, restless, savage, tart, unpleasant, violent, waspish, worrying, acrimonious, blustering, careless, discontented, fretful, growling, hateful, inattentive, malignant, noisy, odious, perverse, rigid, severe, teasing, unsuitable, angry, boisterous, choleric, disgusting, gruff, hectoring, incorrigible, mischievous, negligent, offensive, pettish, roaring, sharp, sluggish, snapping, snarling, sneaking, sour, testy, tiresome, tormenting, touchy, arrogant, austere, awkward, boorish, brawling, brutal, bullying, churlish, clamorous, crabbed, cross, currish, dismal, dull, dry, drowsy, grumbling, horrid, huffish, insolent, intractable, irascible, ireful, morose, murmuring, opinionated, oppressive, outrageous, overbearing, petulant, plaguy, rough, rude, rugged, spiteful, splenetic, stern, stubborn, stupid, sulky, sullen, surly, suspicious, treacherous, troublesome, turbulent, tyrannical, virulent, wrangling, yelping dog-in-a-manger.”

The Jest Book (published 1865), by the editor of Punch Magazine Mark Lemon, contains 1,711 Punch-quality humorous stories, poems, and epigrams. Here are a few…

LXV.–A LATE EDITION.

It was with as much delicacy as satire that Porson returned, with the manuscript of a friend, the answer, “That it would be read when Homer and Virgil were forgotten, but not till then.”

LXXV.–EPIGRAM.

LXXXI.–A GRAVE DOCTOR.

Counsellor Crips being on a party at Castle-Martyr, one of the company, a physician, strolled out before dinner into the churchyard. Dinner being served, and the doctor not returned, some one expressed his surprise where he could be gone to. “Oh,” says the counsellor, “he is but just stept out to pay a visit to some of his old patients.”

CXXV.–IN SUSPENSE.

The sloth, in its wild state, spends its life in trees, and never leaves them but from force or accident. The eagle to the sky, the mole to the ground, the sloth to the tree; but what is most extraordinary, he lives not upon the branches, but under them. He moves suspended, rests suspended, sleeps suspended, and passes his life in suspense,–like a young clergyman distantly related to a bishop.

See what I mean? Punch quality.

The following extract is made from Mr. Ball’s remarkable book, “Things Chinese.”

It is very extraordinary to find an Edgar Allan Poe in Chinese literature, B.C. 200. The Chinese prototype was an eminent statesman, Kia Yi by name, who was also “no mean poet.”

A Chinese “Raven.”

The Fu-niao or Bird of Fate.

’Twas in the month of chill November,

As I can very well remember

In dismal, gloomy, crumbling halls,

Betwixt moss-covered, reeking walls,

An exiled poet lay–

On his bed of straw reclining,

Half despairing, half repining;

When athwart the window sill,

Flew in a bird of omen ill,

And seemed inclined to stay.

To my book of occult learning,

Suddenly I thought of turning,

All the mystery to know,

Of that shameless owl or crow,

That would not go away.

“Wherever such a bird shall enter,

’Tis sure some power above has sent her,

(So said the mystic book) to show

The human dweller forth must go,”–

But where it did not say.

Then anxiously the bird addressing,

And my ignorance confessing,

“Gentle bird, in mercy deign

The will of Fate to me explain,

Where is my future way?”

It raised it’s head as if ’twere seeking

To answer me by simply speaking,

Then folded up its sable wind,

Nor did it utter anything,

But breathed a “Well-a-day!”

More eloquent than any diction,

That simple sigh produced conviction,

Furnishing to me the key

Of the awful mystery

That on my spirit lay.

“Fortune’s wheel is ever turning,

To human eye there’s no discerning

Weal or woe in any state;

Wisdom is to bide your fate;”

This is what it seemed to say

By that simple “Well-a-day.”

Poe’s apparent obligation to early Chinese literature brings to mind another interesting parallel. Many persons have remarked the similarity between Poe’s tale of “The Cask of Amontillado” and Balzac’s story of “Le Grand Breteche” the motive being the same in each case–burying a living man in a tomb of masonry. But we wish somebody who is wise in dates would inform us whether Poe was indebted to Balzac for this incident, or Balzac to Poe. It seems to us that it is more likely that Poe read Balzac than that Balzac read Poe, whose fame has waxed since his death. But we should like to be assured by somebody who knows. Perhaps Mr. Stedman can tell, or Mr. Woodberry.

“Mars is signalling a dark star.”

The world to which this news was flashed from the Central Observatory on the Himalayas had long been dull and stagnant. Almost every scientific discovery had been made thousands of years before, and the inventions for their application had been so perfected that it seemed as if no real improvement could be made in them. Methods of conducting human affairs had been brought into such good shape that everything went on as by machinery. Successive Defenders of the Peace of the World had built up a code of international law so complete that every question at issue between nations was settled by its principles. The only history of great interest was that of a savage time, lying far back in the mists of antiquity, when men fought and killed each other in war. The daily newspapers chronicled little but births, marriages, deaths, and the weather reports. They would not publish what was not worth talking about, and a subscriber often found at his door a paper containing little more than the simple announcement, on an otherwise blank page–”Nothing worthy of note has happened since our last issue.” Only one language was spoken the world over, and all gentlemen dined in blue coats with gilt buttons, and wore white neckties with red borders. Even China, the most distant nation of all, had fallen into line several thousand years before, and lived like the rest of the world.

To find a time of real excitement it was necessary to go back 3,000 years, when messages had first been successfully interchanged with the inhabitants of Mars. To send a signal which they could see required a square mile of concentrated light as bright as the sun, and experiments extending through thousands of years had been necessary before this result could be brought about by any manageable apparatus. Signals from the plains of Siberia had been made nightly during two or three oppositions of the planet, without any answer being received. Then the world was electrified by hearing that return signals could be seen flashing in such a way that no doubt could exist about them. Their interpretation required more study than was ever expended by our archæologists on a Moabite inscription. When success was at last reached, it became evident by a careful comparison of the records that the people of Mars were more successful watchers of the stars than we were ourselves. It was found that a row of four lights diminishing in intensity from one end to the other, and pointing in one direction, meant that a new star was showing itself in that direction. Some object of this sort had been seen every two or three years from the earliest historical times, but in recent times a star had often been signaled from Mars before even the sensitive photographic plates and keen eyes of our Himalayan astronomers had discerned it.

Ordinary comets were plentiful enough. More than 25,000 had been recorded, and the number was still increasing every year. But dark stars were so rare that not one had appeared for three centuries, and only about twenty had been recorded in astronomical history. They differed from comets in not belonging to the solar system, but coming from far distant regions among the stars, and in being comparatively dark in color, with very short tails, or perhaps none at all. They were found to be dark bodies whose origin and destination were alike unknown, each pursuing its own way through the immeasurable abysses of space. It had been found that a certain arrangement of five lights in the form of a cross on the planet meant that one of these bodies was flying through or past our system, and the head of the cross showed the direction in which it was to be looked for.

We have not any new kind of olives, but a new way of preparing them for use, that is, slicing them before they are bottled. Instead of paying for a lot of stones and serving the olives whole, now one may buy them all cut in rings, very pretty for garnishing dishes, very handy to help oneself to instead of a cold, slippery oval object sure to roll away unless very securely prodded with an olive fork; and it is very much more easily and gracefully eaten, since a ring may be severed, whereas a whole olive had to be lifted to the lips and nibbled, and then the stone discarded as deftly as possible. It is a wonder we have not had stoned olives before, since comparatively few have a chef at hand to stone them neatly, nor a cooking school teacher to impart the information. To be sure stuffed olives, the heart of pimentoes or celery, have been fads of fashion, but not everyone likes these combinations.

The dark, purple-red, ripe olives are softer in texture and much esteemed for the table as more easy of digestion than the green; in fact, they are given freely to children, who do not always chew their food properly, and to older folk who have not the best of grinders with which to divide the firm green olives into minute particles.

A blessing, indeed, in these rushing days is the sliced olive, a very handy adjunct to the salad garnishing, and eleventh hour entertaining, whether a mid-day luncheon or a mid-night supper.

In torrid heats of late July,
In March, beneath the bitter bise,
He book-hunts while the loungers fly–
He book-hunts, though December freeze;
In breeches baggy at the knees,
And heedless of the public jeers,
For these, for these, he hoards his fees–
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!

No dismal stall escapes his eye,
He turns o’er tomes of low degrees,
There soiled romanticists may lie,
Or Restoration comedies;
Each tract that flutters in the breeze
For him is charged with hopes and fears,
In mouldy novels fancy sees
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.

With restless eyes that peer and spy,
Sad eyes that heed not skies nor trees,
In dismal nooks he loves to pry,
Whose motto ever more is Spes!
But ah! the fabled treaure flees;
Grown rarer with the fleeting years,
In rich men’s shelves they take their ease,–
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!

ENVOY

Prince, all the things that tease and please,–
Fame, hope, wealth, kisses, cheers, and tears,
What are they but such toys as these–
Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs?

Andrew Lang, in “Ballades and Verses Vain.”