“And when you have made a little stay, You need not ask what is to pay, But kiss your hostess and go your way, And thither will we go now, now, now, And thither will we go now.” It may seem to some unkind to disturb this and other such traditions about distinguished persons; but the blame rests elsewhere--with the bookseller or author, who thought fit to propagate these fictions and _variæ lectiones_; and the restitution of literary property to its legitimate owners is among the functions and obligations of the antiquary. It was natural for the old booksellers to draw into their service, in offering a popular volume to the public, some more or less magnetic name, which might play the part of foster-parent to the jocular collections of an obscure literary adventurer; but it seems incredible that any reader or editor should have been found so wanting in perception as to set seriously down to Archibald Armstrong a jest-book and a tract, which passed current as his at the time of their original appearance. _Archy’s Jests_ and _Archy’s Dream_ were palpably the productions of two professional writers, who followed the common practice of utilising the capital resident in a departed celebrity. The rejoinder of Frederic the Great to Dr. Franklin, when he sought his aid in establishing freedom in America, to the effect that he was born a prince, had become a king, and would never do anything to ruin his own trade, is so far entitled to the priority over a somewhat similar trait preserved of Joseph II. of Germany, “Je suis par métier royaliste, Monsieur,” that Frederic preceded Joseph in order of time. The majority of our books of _facetiæ_ contain, however, a reasonable percentage of matter special to themselves; the unacknowledged recourse to other authorities is only an incidental form of transgression; and the cases of wholesale piracy, the extent of the series considered, are not numerically important. The recommittal to the press of forgotten miscellanies, with a mere change in the title or the hero, is almost countable on the fingers. Some allowance is to be made, as I have said, for the intuitive recurrence of the same idea, moreover; as where, in _Scogin’s Jests_, one of the stories--“How the Scholar said that Tom Miller of Oseney was Jacob’s father”--is the original of the joke enunciated with a probable unconsciousness of plagiarism or anticipation by the Christy Minstrels; and, again, as where the account of the gruff old gentleman and the boy Sheridan is forestalled in that highly succulent collection brought out under the auspices of Jack of Dover.