disposing what seemed fit to be said upon that subject, before he read the book; then, reading, compared his own with the author's, and noted his own defects and the author's art and fulness; whereby he drew all that ran in the author more strictly, and might better judge of his own wants to supply them." I remember to have heard Mr. Samuel Rogers, in London, relate, among other anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington, that a lady having expressed in his presence a passionate wish to witness a great victory, he replied: "Madam, there is nothing so dreadful as a great victory,--excepting a great defeat." But this speech is also D'Argenson's, and is reported by Grimm. So the sarcasm attributed to Lord Eldon upon Brougham, his predecessor on the woolsack, "What a wonderful versatile mind has Brougham! he knows politics, Greek, history, science; if he only knew a little of law, he would know a little of everything." You may find the original of this gibe in Grimm, who says that Louis XVI., going out of chapel after hearing a sermon from the Abbé Maury, said, "_Si l'Abbé nous avait parlé un peu de religion, il nous aurait parlé de tout_." A pleasantry which ran through all the newspapers a few years since, taxing the eccentricities of a gifted family connection in New England, was only a theft of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's _mot_ of a hundred years ago, that "the world was made up of men and women and Herveys." Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity. Columbus's egg is claimed for Brunelleschi. Rabelais's dying words, "I am going to see the great Perhaps" (_le grand Peut-être_), only repeats the "IF" inscribed on the portal of the temple at Delphi. Goethe's favorite phrase, "the open secret," translates Aristotle's answer to Alexander, "These books are published and not published." Madame de Staël's "Architecture is frozen music" is borrowed from Goethe's "dumb music," which is Vitruvius's rule, that "the architect must not only understand drawing, but music." Wordsworth's hero acting "on the plan which pleased his childish thought," is Schiller's "Tell him to reverence the dreams of his youth," and earlier, Bacon's "_Consilia juventutis plus divinitatis habent_." In romantic literature examples of this vamping abound. The fine verse in the old Scotch ballad of "The Drowned Lovers," "Thou art roaring ower loud, Clyde water, Thy streams are ower strang; Make me thy wrack when I come back, But spare me when I gang," is a translation of Martial's epigram on Hero and Leander, where the prayer of Leander is the same:-- "Parcite dum propero, mergite dum redeo." Hafiz furnished Burns with the song of "John Barleycorn," and furnished Moore with the original of the piece, "When in death I shall calm recline, Oh, bear my heart to my mistress dear," etc.