There is a story of a Scottish minister who went South, and was invited to stay to dinner at an acquaintance’s. After they had dined, the whiskey was brought in; the minister took to it kindly, and accepted a proposal to remain till the morning. As the spare bed had to be aired, and there was not time to prepare the warming-pan, the lady of the house told Jenny the maidservant to undress, and get into the bed to warm the sheets for their guest; but Jenny unluckily (or otherwise) fell asleep, and when the visitor went up, he found her still in possession. “Well,” said he to himself, “the dinner was good; the whiskey was capital; but--this is hospitality indeed!” We will not pursue the narration further. It is obviously a parody on the conventional order of things, having by possibility some indebtedness to the simple manners of a bygone time and less fastidious sleeping arrangements. The improvised warming-pan might have suggested itself to the guidwife; but we cherish a suspicion that the _ex post facto_ improver is answerable for the pleasantry as it stands. In jocular history everybody is at angles to real life; people do precisely what they ought not to do, say what they ought not to say, are found where they ought not to be found. That is the soul of the matter; and therein lies the cunning of the wire-puller. He is for general purposes what Grobianus is for Cato and Mrs. Grundy. He seldom invents; he has a preference for ready-made material which he can employ as a groundwork or starting-point; for a familiar name goes a long way. The artist has to be wary how he deals with his puppet or lay-figure; he treads upon eggs a little; much depends on the turn given; the anecdote which he tells need not be true, God knows; it may be naughty within bounds; but it must be amusing. That is peremptory. The _Bull_, in its jocular acceptation, has been commonly viewed as a genuine Irish product; but may it not be, on the contrary, of Italian and ecclesiastical descent? The papal brief, in the first place, borrowed its name from the leaden seal which was attached to it; the odium under which Popery and its supporters fell in the time of Elizabeth next led to the passage of the _bull_ into our vocabulary as a term of ridicule or contempt; and, finally, when the strong political feeling had subsided, the expression stood for any piece of harmless extravagance or hyperbolical bravado. These side-growths of meaning are curious and instructive enough, and present many strange and unsuspected survivals. To go no farther than the word before us, the modern Italian attaches to his letter a _bolla_ without reflecting on its actual and archaic significance, just as he perpetuates bygone methods of locomotion by continuing to call the railway carriage a _poste_.