vanity of
humble persons suddenly raised to some small dignity. 'Neebors, I am
still but a mon,' remarked the Scotchman, who became mayor.[6] Perhaps
their type is latent in the '_De rustica praefecti uxore_--the village
magistrate's wife,--which runs as follows:

'When a certain man had been made a prefect of a small village, he
bought his wife a new fur garment (_melotam_). She, proud of her
finery and full of her new honor, entered church, _capite elato et
superbo_, with her head raised, just as all the congregation rose
to their feet, when the Gospel was to be read. When she, thinking
it to be in her honor, and recollecting her former condition, said:
Sit still! I have not forgotten that I was once poor!'

A very great proportion of the shrewd retorts and witty replies
attributed to great men are very old. 'What do you think of soldiers
who can endure such wounds?' remarked Napoleon, when, showing a
frightfully scarred grenadier to an Englishman. 'What does your majesty
think of the men who gave the wounds?' was the reply. It is essentially
the remark of Louis the Bavarian, who, on enlisting four soldiers famed
for incredible bravery, and observing that they were scarred from head
to foot, said to them: 'Ye are brave fellows; but I had rather see the
men _a quibus tot vulnera accepistis_--from whom ye received so many
wounds.' The number of witty retorts and droll stories associated with
the names of Talleyrand, Piron, Voltaire--in fact, to a certain degree,
of almost all great men--is so great as to almost persuade the reader
who wanders in the neglected field of ancient humor, that no man of the
later centuries was ever capable of a single witty and original thought.
It is not long since I met with an anecdote, stating that Alexandre
Dumas, who had a very unattractive wife, one day surprised a gentleman
in the act of tenderly embracing her. In a compassionate and astonished
tone the novelist exclaimed: 'Poor man! why do you act so? I am sure
that nobody could have compelled you to it against your will.' '_Eh!
monsieur, qui est-ce qui vous y obligeait?_' The jest is 'old as the
hills'--it was old before Dumas was born. So, too, with the amusing bit
of naivete attributed to an English duchess, who, to express her
deeply-seated religious prejudices, declared that she would sooner have
a dozen Protestant husbands than one Catholic. The same point is
expressed as follows, in a very