From the beginning of this century, with wrath continually
growing, I have laid it down as a rule, and if the last year of it,
viz., A. D. 1900, should overhear _my_ voice amongst the babblings that
will then be troubling the atmosphere--in that case it will hear me
still reaffirming, with an indignation still gathering strength, and
therefore approaching ever nearer and nearer to a Juvenalian power of
versification, so that perhaps I shall then speak in rhymed
couplets--that all anecdotes pretending to be _smart_, but to a dead
certainty if they pretend to be _epigrammatic_, are and must be lies.
There is, in fact, no security for the truth of an anecdote, no
guarantee whatever, except its intense stupidity. If a man is searched
at a police-office, on the ground that he was caught trying the
window-shutters of silversmiths; then, if it should happen that in his
pockets is found absolutely nothing at all except one solitary
paving-stone, in that case Charity, which believeth all things (in fact,
is credulous to an anile degree), will be disposed to lock up the
paving-stone, and restore it to the man on his liberation as if it were
really his own, though philosophy mutters indignantly, being all but
certain that the fellow stole it. And really I have been too candid a
great deal in admitting that a man may appropriate an anecdote, and
establish his claim to it by pleading its awful stupidity. That might be
the case, and I believe it _was_, when anecdotes were many and writers
were few. But things are changed now. Fifty years ago, if a man were
seen running away with the pace of a lunatic, and you should sing out,
'Stop that fellow; he is running off with the shin-bone of my
great-grandmother!' all the people in the street would have cried out in
reply, 'Oh, nonsense! What should he want with your great-grandmother's
shin-bone?' and that would have seemed reasonable. But now, to see how
things are altered, any man of sense would reply, 'What should he want
with my great-grandmother's shin-bone? Why, he'll grind it, and then
he'll mix it with guano.' This is what he and the like of him have
actually done by shiploads of people far more entitled to consideration
than any one of my four great-grandmothers (for I had _four_, with eight
shin-bones amongst them). It is well known that the field of Waterloo
was made to render up all its bones, British or French, to certain
bone-mills in agricultural districts. Borodino and Leipzi