There was grim but honest joking in the Emperor Carus. The frugal man was once seated, as was his wont, on the grass, supping on dry bread, grey peas, and stale bacon. He gave audience at the same time to Persian ambassadors who came to sue for peace. As the emperor was about to reply, he opened his mouth for the reception of a huge spoonful of peas, but he paused to say--at the same time taking off his skull-cap with his disengaged hand--‘Look here! If your master does not confess the superiority of Rome, I will render Persia as destitute of trees as my head is of hair.’ Having said which, he swallowed his shovelful of peas, and chuckled as the Persian legates went homeward with that significant message. After all, this joke was made up of the rudest boasting. There is something in it and its attending circumstances which remind one of the last war in Europe. Rome declared war against Persia, and the Roman cry was ‘The Tigris for a boundary!’ ‘To Susa!’ ‘To Ecbatana!’ and so forth. The later cry of the enraptured Gauls, ‘Le Rhin! le Rhin!’ ‘À Berlin! à Berlin!’ seem like Irish echoes of the old cry. What disaster came of it Gibbon tells and readers of history remember, but even among the degenerate Romans there was no one ignoble enough to set an example to the poor French _feuilletonist_, who said of the brave German officers that they would be too proud to brush French boots with their blonde moustaches. Brave Frenchmen must have shuddered at this wretched jest, and Louis Napoleon, who loved a good joke though he never made one, must have curled his lip with indignation if he read the piece of miserable wit over his coffee at Metz. In Prussia, which dates as a kingdom from the year 1702, there is not one of its seven kings who can be called a wit, though more than one had what is far better, strong, far-seeing, uncommon sense. Unclean in their vagaries the Prussian royal jokers have assuredly been, and one or two admitted of no liberty whatever being taken with them, as far as repartee went. So stern were the most of the Prussian margraves, electors, and dukes, that, to express the peril of joking with them, there arose the well-known popular proverb, ‘It is advisable not to eat cherries with princes.’ The queens of Prussia, on the other hand, brought their own wit with them into the royal family, and there was not a sharper lady among them than Queen Sophia Charlotte, the first queen of Prussia. Leibnitz, whom she delighted to honour as a man and a philosopher, once asked her if she could imagine the infinitely little? ‘Why, of course I can!’ exclaimed the hilarious queen. ‘What a question to ask the wife of Frederick the First!’