ough the several Greek dialects, when he was
pressed with it in any particular syllable. For the most apt and elegant
word in the whole language was rejected, like a diamond with a flaw in
it, if it appeared blemished with a wrong letter. I shall only observe
upon this head, that if the work I have here mentioned had been now
extant, the "Odyssey" of Tryphiodorus, in all probability, would have
been oftener quoted by our learned pedants than the "Odyssey" of Homer.
What a perpetual fund would it have been of obsolete words and phrases,
unusual barbarisms and rusticities, absurd spellings and complicated
dialects! I make no question but that it would have been looked upon as
one of the most valuable treasuries of the Greek tongue.

I find likewise among the ancients that ingenious kind of conceit which
the moderns distinguish by the name of a rebus, that does not sink a
letter, but a whole word, by substituting a picture in its place. When
Caesar was one of the masters of the Roman mint, he placed the figure of
an elephant upon the reverse of the public money; the word Caesar
signifying an elephant in the Punic language. This was artificially
contrived by Caesar, because it was not lawful for a private man to stamp
his own figure upon the coin of the commonwealth. Cicero, who was so
called from the founder of his family, that was marked on the nose with a
little wen like a vetch, which is _Cicer_ in Latin, instead of Marcus
Tullius Cicero, ordered the words Marcus Tullius, with a figure of a
vetch at the end of them, to be inscribed on a public monument. This was
done probably to show that he was neither ashamed of his name nor family,
notwithstanding the envy of his competitors had often reproached him with
both. In the same manner we read of a famous building that was marked in
several parts of it with the figures of a frog and a lizard; those words
in Greek having been the names of the architects, who by the laws of
their country were never permitted to inscribe their own names upon their
works. For the same reason it is thought that the forelock of the horse,
in the antique equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, represents at a
distance the shape of an owl, to intimate the country of the statuary,
who, in all probability, was an Athenian. This kind of wit was very much
in vogue among our own countrymen about an age or two ago, who did not
practise it for any oblique reason, as the ancients above-mentioned, but