[2] To me there is something candid, naïve, and often something noble in this personal consciousness and confidence, this moderate self-trumpeting. “_Questi sono miri!_” cried Napoleon, when, at the sack of Milan, the MS. treatises of Leonardo da Vinci were discovered; and he bore them in triumph to his hotel, suffering no meaner hand to touch them. _He_ knew—the Conquering Thinker—that he alone was worthy to possess those priceless papers. So too, Honoré de Balzac calmly remarking that there were only three men in France who could speak French correctly: himself, Victor Hugo, and “Théophile” (T. Gautier). So, too, Elliston, when the little ballet-girl complained of having been hissed: “They have hissed _me_,” said the awful manager, and the dancing girl was dumb. Who can forget the words that Milton wrote concerning things of his “that posteritie would not willingly let die?” and that Bacon left, commending his fame to “foreign nations and to the next age?” And Turner, simply directing in his will that he should be buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral? That sepulchre, the painter knew, was his of right. And innocent Gainsborough, dying: “We are all going to heaven, and Vandyke is of the company.” And Fontenelle, calmly expiring at a hundred years of age: “_Je n’ai jamais dit la moindre chose centre la plus petite vertu._” ’Tis true, that my specious little argument falls dolefully to the ground when I remember that which the wisest man who ever lived said concerning a child gathering shells and pebbles on the sea-shore, when the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him. [3] The bezant (from Byzantium) was a round knob on the scutcheon, blazoned yellow. “Golp” was purple, _the colour of an old black eye_, so defined by the heralds. “Sanguine” or “guzes” were to be congested red, like bloodshot eyes; “torteaux” were of another kind of red, like “Simnel cakes.” “Pomeis” were to be green like apples. “Tawny” was orange. There were also “hurts” to be blazoned blue, as bruises are.—_New View of London_, 1712. [4] I believe Pope’s sneer against poor Elkanah Settle (who died very comfortably in the Charterhouse, 1724, ætat. 76: he was alive in 1720, and succeeded Rowe as laureate), that he was reduced in his latter days to compass a motion of St. George and the Dragon at Bartholomew fair, and himself enacted the dragon in a peculiar suit of green leather, his own invention, to have been a purely malicious and mendacious bit of spite. Moreover, Settle died years after Pope assumed him to have expired. [5] 1720. The horrible room in Newgate Prison where in cauldrons of boiling pitch the hangman seethed the dissevered limbs of those executed for high treason, and whose quarters were to be exposed, was called “Jack Ketch’s kitchen.” [6] Compare these voluntary torments with the description of the _Dosèh_, or horse-trampling ceremonial of the Sheik El Bekree, over the bodies of the faithful, in Lane’s _Modern Egyptians_.