“Said the lame to the blind, ‘On your back let me rise’; So the eyes were the legs, and the legs were the eyes.” “A fool, bitten by many fleas, put out the light saying, ‘You no longer see me.’” “Why do you fruitlessly wash the body of an Indian? Forbear your art.” “The thin Diophantus, once wishing to hang himself, laid hold of a spider’s web, and strangled himself.” “Pheidon neither drenched me nor touched me; but, being ill of a fever, I remembered his name, and died.” A more pungent jest on a doctor was never uttered, perhaps, than this! Nor would it be easy to discover in our modern collections more telling and ingenious skits than the two next: “’Tis said that certain death awaits The raven’s nightly cry; But at the sound of Cymon’s voice The very ravens die.” “Lazy Mark, snug in prison, in prison to stay, Thought confessing a murder the easiest way.” Then how true to character and how permanent are such epigrammatic _jeux d’esprit_ as these! “ON A STATUE OF NIOBE. “The gods to stone transformed me; but again I from Praxiteles new life obtain.” “Though to your face that mirror lies, ’Tis just the glass for you; Demosthenes, you’d shut your eyes, If it reflected true.” “Some say, Nycilla, that you dye your hair-- Those jet black locks--you bought them at a fair;” which is exactly the modern quatrain: “The lovely hair, which Celia wears, Is hers: who would have thought it?-- She swears ’tis hers, and true she swears; For I know where she bought it.” Plato is made to say of a statue: “Diodorus put to sleep this satyr, not carved it”; and Lucian is accredited with the _mot_ that “it were easier to find white crows and winged tortoises than an orator of repute in Cappadocia.” We come to an item, where Shakespear was unconsciously forestalled by an epigrammatist who lived eleven centuries before him--Palladas the grammarian:-- “This life a theatre we well may call, Where every actor must perform with art: Or laugh it through, and make a farce of all, Or learn to bear with grace his tragic part.” The old English proverb, “Building is a sweet impoverishing,” has its prototype in the couplet:-- “The broad highway to poverty and need Is much to build and many mouths to feed.” But a second strikes the imagination as equally native and verdant, from the supreme faculty which is resident in men of first-rate genius of maintaining their proximity to each successive age:-- “The Muses to Herodotus one day Came, nine of them, and dined; And in return, their host to pay, Each left a book behind.” It cannot be predicated of what follows that the lapse of years has impaired its application:-- “A boy was crowning the monument of his stepmother, thinking that her temper had been changed. But the stone, falling, killed the child, while he leaned on the grave. Shun, ye children, even the grave of a stepmother.”