Irishman who carried around a brick as a specimen of the house he had to sell; take the Irishman who shut his eyes and looked into the glass to see how he would look when he was dead; take the Irishman that bought a crow, alleging that crows were reported to live two hundred years, and he meant to set out and try it; take the Irishman that met a friend who said to him, 'Why, sir, I heard you were dead.' 'Well,' says the man, 'I suppose you see I am not.' 'Oh, no,' says he, 'I would believe the man who told me a great deal quicker than I would you.' Well, these are all Greek. A score or more of them, of the parallel character, come from Athens." The critics and scholiasts would have us believe that "we have no very credible account of Rome or the Romans for more than four hundred years after the foundation of the city; and that the first book of Livy, containing the regal period, can lay claim, when severely tested, to no higher authority than Lord Macaulay's Lays. Livy states that whatever records existed prior to the burning of Rome by the Gauls--three hundred and sixty-five years after its foundation--were then burnt or lost. We are left, therefore, in the most embarrassing uncertainty whether Tarquin outraged Lucretia; or Brutus shammed idiotcy, and condemned his sons to death; or Mutius Scaevola thrust his hand into the fire; or Curtius jumped into the gulf--if there was one; or Cloelia swam the Tiber; or Cocles defended a bridge against an army. We could fill pages with skeptical doubts of scholiasts, who would fain deprive Diogenes of his lantern and his tub, AEsop of his hump, Sappho of her leap, Rhodes of its Colossus, and Dionysius the First of his ear; nay, who pretend that Cadmus did not come from Phoenicia, that Belisarius was not blind, that Portia did not swallow burning coals, and that Dionysius the Second never kept a school at Corinth. Modern chemists have been unable to discover how Hannibal could have leveled rocks, or Cleopatra dissolved pearls with vinegar. A German pedant has actually ventured to question the purity of Lucretia."