'When a certain man had been made a prefect of a small village, he bought his wife a new fur garment (_melotam_). She, proud of her finery and full of her new honor, entered church, _capite elato et superbo_, with her head raised, just as all the congregation rose to their feet, when the Gospel was to be read. When she, thinking it to be in her honor, and recollecting her former condition, said: Sit still! I have not forgotten that I was once poor!' A very great proportion of the shrewd retorts and witty replies attributed to great men are very old. 'What do you think of soldiers who can endure such wounds?' remarked Napoleon, when, showing a frightfully scarred grenadier to an Englishman. 'What does your majesty think of the men who gave the wounds?' was the reply. It is essentially the remark of Louis the Bavarian, who, on enlisting four soldiers famed for incredible bravery, and observing that they were scarred from head to foot, said to them: 'Ye are brave fellows; but I had rather see the men _a quibus tot vulnera accepistis_--from whom ye received so many wounds.' The number of witty retorts and droll stories associated with the names of Talleyrand, Piron, Voltaire--in fact, to a certain degree, of almost all great men--is so great as to almost persuade the reader who wanders in the neglected field of ancient humor, that no man of the later centuries was ever capable of a single witty and original thought. It is not long since I met with an anecdote, stating that Alexandre Dumas, who had a very unattractive wife, one day surprised a gentleman in the act of tenderly embracing her. In a compassionate and astonished tone the novelist exclaimed: 'Poor man! why do you act so? I am sure that nobody could have compelled you to it against your will.' '_Eh! monsieur, qui est-ce qui vous y obligeait?_' The jest is 'old as the hills'--it was old before Dumas was born. So, too, with the amusing bit of naivete attributed to an English duchess, who, to express her deeply-seated religious prejudices, declared that she would sooner have a dozen Protestant husbands than one Catholic. The same point is expressed as follows, in a very witty but extremely wicked collection of facetiae of the seventeenth century:[7] Displicet, insignis, mihi Clericus ordo puella Inquit et est valde gens odiosa mihi. Malo decem certe me consociare colonis, Unicum Clero quam coiisse velim.