Heliogabalus was perhaps the most practical joker among the imperial jesters. We have seen at the Surrey Oval, in old days, eleven one-legged Greenwich pensioners playing cricket against eleven pensioners with only one arm. By the way, the one-legged men had the advantage, as the one-armed men often fell in stooping for the ball, wanting the missing arm to balance themselves withal. It was the humour of Heliogabalus to get together companies of individuals all marked by the same peculiarity. He would now have at dinner a dozen baldheaded men, or twelve ladies with one eye each; he would have been delighted to have got hold of triple assortments of the three famous sisters who had but one eye and one tooth between them! Failing that, the ‘lord of the sun,’ as he called himself, was content to have a score of hunchbacks, or of flat-nosed men, or squinting women. He is said on one occasion to have put into a very small chamber, where dinner was prepared, so many excessively fat and hungry men that they had no room for anything but to perspire, and not much for that. Heliogabalus was an expensive joker, but then his good people paid for the fun, and he might therefore indulge his humour without restraint at the time, or remorse after it. His supremely imperial joke lay in placing a number of guests on table-couches (guests reclined, and did not sit down to dinner) which were blown up with air instead of being stuffed with wool. At a moment when the cups were filled to the brim with the choicest wine, and the guests were lifting them to their lips with anticipations of liquid Elysium, a tap was drawn beneath the carpet, which suddenly emptied the couches of their air, and consequently tumbled all the recliners on to the floor, where they lay pell-mell, with wine spilt, goblets lost, and utter confusion prevailing, except on the face of Heliogabalus, who looked on and indulged in laughter inextinguishable. Having but indifferent appetite himself, he was fond of sauces, and he highly rewarded any inventor of a sauce that was to the imperial liking. But if it failed to tickle his very sacred majesty’s palate he had recourse to a joke of a very practical character indeed; that is to say, he condemned the unlucky candidate for his favour to live upon nothing else but the sauce in question until he had discovered another more successful in its object. Fancy having to live on anchovy, without fish, for a twelvemonth, or catsup and a little bread, from the Ides of March to the Kalends of December! Think of what your palate and liver would be had you nothing to sit down to but pickled walnuts without the chop, or mustard without the beef, from Christmas to Easter, even if your wits enabled you to make deliverance then.