suffer. The weeds and vines which gave a parasitic charm to the ruins of Rome hastened their decay: they were therefore removed.

A Latin poet has asserted that there was no saying which had not been already said. In later times, Henry IV. will be surprised to know that Agesilaus preceded him in that royal game of romps which both kings thought only a father could appreciate. The poet Rogers was not the first to prefer the art of forgetting to that of memory; and Talleyrand has reason to invoke the curse of Donatus, "Perish the men who said our good things before us!" No one better than Fournier, in his "Esprit dans l'Histoire," has plucked the stolen plumage from the daw. I cannot acknowledge my obligations to this iconoclast of bons mots without borrowing Madame du Deffand's judgment of Montesquieu's "Esprit des Lois," that his "Wit in History" should be called "Wit on History."

In collecting true and notable sayings, and happy thoughts flashed in the heat of controversy or the war of wit, I have taken no account of what men have written in books, save as such written words illustrate their own or others' speech; nor will all the sayings of ancient or modern times be included in five hundred pages. Such a compilation would be as impossible as to bring into one volume every historic event which has stirred man to heroic utterance, or every idea with which the sublime and the beautiful have inspired the scholar and the poet. Too liberal an intention has not been given to the title, "Great Men." Those who remember Lysander's maxim, that, "where the lion's skin fails to

reach, it must be pieced out with the fox's," may ask if it is the lion's robe which covers both Julius Cæsar and Sir Boyle Roche. If so, they have forgotten that Goethe did not confine his question to the clever things which one century borrows from another, even dulness has its place:

"Who can think wise or stupid things at all,
That were not thought already in the past?"

BOSTON, Aug. 1, 1882.