only partly succeeded; he escaped, but she was left behind. Soon
afterward, however, she contrived to elude her attendants, and after
many marvelous adventures by sea and land arrived in England, knowing
but two English words, "London" and "Gilbert." By constantly repeating
the first, she was directed to the city; and there, followed by a mob,
she walked for months from street to street, crying as she went,
"Gilbert! Gilbert!" She at last came to the street in which her lover
lived. The mob and the name attracted the attention of a servant in the
house; Gilbert recognized her; and they were married! But there remains
one to be spoken of who gained immortal reputation for his sayings, who
may be said to have never said anything at all of his own. Joe Miller,
whose name as a wit is now current wherever the English language is
spoken, was, when living, himself a jest for dullness. According to
report, Miller, who was an excellent comic actor, but taciturn and
saturnine, "was in the habit of spending his afternoons at the Black
Jack, a well-known public-house in London, which at that time was
frequented by the most respectable tradesmen in the neighborhood, who
from Joe's imperturbable gravity, whenever any risible saying was
recounted, ironically ascribed it to him. After his death, having left
his family unprovided for, advantage was taken of this badinage. A Mr.
Motley, a well-known dramatist of that day, was employed to collect all
the stray jests then current on the town. Joe Miller's name was affixed
to them, and from that day to this the man who never uttered a jest has
been the reputed author of every jest."
VIII.
MUTATIONS.
Swift left some thoughts on various subjects--acute and profound--which
it would appear were jotted down at different periods of life, and in
different humors. In his most prosperous days, when he dreamed of
becoming a bishop, he might have written hopefully, "No wise man ever
wished to be younger." At a much later time in life he might have
written, sagely and sadly, "Every man desireth to live long, but no man
would be old." We can imagine that he wrote the former just after he
received the deanery of St. Patrick, and the latter just after he
returned from the walk in the neighborhood of Dublin, referred to by the
author of Night Thoughts. "Perceiving he did not follow us," says Young,
"I went back, and found him fixed as a statue, and earnestly gazing
upward at a noble elm, which in its uppermost branches was much decayed.
Pointing at it, he said, 'I shall be like that tree; I shall die at the
top.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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