Shakespear’s witty notion of the black flea on Bardolph’s red nose, to which the modern anecdote of Sambo and the mosquito appears to be under obligations, is circumscribed by the introduction of the doctrine of eternal punishment as to date. I have thought that the same idea might have occurred to any one philosophically contemplating the dark specks in a blazing coal fire. The _fons et origo_ of witticisms is often very difficult to reach--nearly as much so as the source of the Nile. In one of his Letters, Charles Lamb quotes, as a good saying of Coleridge, the joke, “That summer has set in with its usual severity.” The curious point is that Byron had made the same facetious remark just before; but Lamb and he belonged to different sets. It matters little, however, for Walpole had anticipated them both; and the present _mot_ appears to be the Joseph Miller query, “When did you ever see such a winter?” To which a wag retorts, “Last summer.” An almost exact parallel to this is found in the comparison by Coleridge of the pure and undefilable mind of Charles Lamb to “moonshine which shines on a dunghill, and takes no pollution.” In the _Life of St. Agnes_, by Daniel Pratt, 1677, the saint is made to liken God to the _sun_, shining on a dunghill without being defiled; and in the _Lives of the Philosophers_, by Diogenes Laertius, Diogenes the Cynic is made to employ the same figure of speech. Whence did _he_ borrow it? Another singular case of affiliation presents itself to our notice in the sermon preached before thieves by Parson Hobart, to whom his uncustomary congregation, after he had done what they required to their satisfaction, returned the money whereof they had relieved him on the road, adding six shillings and eightpence as a fee for the discourse. This occurs in a tract of the time of Charles I., which bears the following quaint title:--“Forced Divinity, Or Two Sermons preached by the Compulsion of two Sorts of Sinners, viz. Drunkards & Thieves. The one by Certain Ale-Bibbers, who having heard a Minister teach much against Drinking, afterwards met with him, and compelled him to make a Sermon upon one word. The second, by a Crew of Thieves, who after they had robbed a Minister, forced him to make a Sermon in Praise of their Profession, and when he had done, Returned his Money, and Six Shillings Eightpence for his Sermon.” Now, this very tale about Parson Hobart is in an early MS. printed in _Reliquiæ Antiquæ_, and is in fact a mere resuscitation for the nonce, which is made additionally manifest from the sum named as the gratuity--six and eightpence or a noble, a species of currency which had gone out of use in the seventeenth century; so that, had we not known that the story was far older than it purports to be in the tract above quoted, there is a kind of internal clue to its superior antiquity--one considerable enough, but insignificant when we measure it against the distance between Martin Elginbrod and the Vedas.