that change he must naturally have been proud, the Sicambri being themselves the proudest tribe of Franks: substituting the previous characteristic for the acquired virtue, we have the form in which the saying has become proverbial in France, but in which it presents the exact opposite of the original, "Bend thy neck, proud Sicambrian" (Fléchis le cou, fier Sicambre !) Ménage, one of the lights of the Hôtel Rambouillet, said to his friend Chapelain at the conclusion of the first representation of Molière's "Précieuses Ridicules," which threw contempt upon the literary society of the hôtels, and revolutionized the drama, "Henceforth we must adore what we have burned, and burn what we have adored!" SIR EDWARD COKE. [The eminent English jurist; born in Norfolk, 1552; educated at Cambridge; solicitor-general, 1592; attorney-general, 1594; speaker of the House of Commons, 1593; chief-justice of the common pleas, 1606, and of the King's Bench, 1613, from which he was removed by James I., 1616; opposed the court party from that time until 1628, when he produced his commentary upon Littleton; died 1633.] Law is the safest helmet (lex est tutissima cassis). The Latin inscription on the rings which he gave when made . serjeant. A man's house is his castle. In the "Third Institute," Coke says, "For a man's house is his castle" (et domus sua cuique tutissimum refugium); and in Semayne's case, 5 Rep. 91, "The house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose." Chatham made a splendid use of this comparison in a speech on the Excise Bill: "The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it, the storm may enter, the rain may enter; but the king of England cannot enter! All his force dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement." When an Irish attorney said of his client's house, "The rain may enter it: the king cannot," "What!" said the judge (Lord Norbury), "not the reigning king?" Grattan said of Burke, "He became at last such an enthusiastic admirer of kingly power that he could not have slept comfortably upon his pillow if he had not thought that the king had a right to carry it off from under his head." Magna Charta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign. Objecting to the words, "sovereign power," which the lords, in an amendment to the Petition of Right, desired to leave with the crown for the protection of the people. At a conference between the Lords and Commons on the Petition of Right, May 8, 1628, Coke said, "We have a maxim in the House of Commons, and written on the walls of our house, that old ways are the safest and surest ways." When the judges were asked if they ought not to stay proceedings until his Majesty had consulted them in a case where he believed his prerogative or interests concerned, and required them to attend him for their advice, all the judges except Coke answered in the affirmative: he proudly replied, "When the case happens, I shall do that which shall be fit for a judge to do." Corporations have no souls. In the case of Sutton's Hospital, 10 Rep. 39, Coke said, “They [corporations] cannot commit trespass, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicate; for they have no souls." Lord Thurlow once asked, in his characteristically rough way, "You never expected justice from a company, did you? They have neither a soul to lose, nor a body to kick." SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. [An English poet and author; born in Devonshire, Oct. 21, 1772; while a Cambridge undergraduate enlisted as a dragoon, but was discovered and discharged; printed his first volume of poems, 1796; removed to Keswick, 1800, and lived in the society of Southey and Wordsworth; published "The Friend," 1809, and other works between 1816 and 1825; removed to London, and died there, 1834.] As there is much beast and some devil in man, so there is some angel and God in him. Frederick the Great saw only the first element: "Every man has a wild beast within him," he wrote to Voltaire, in 1759. "If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel," said Coleridge, "depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil." Good and bad men are each less so than they seem. Most of these quotations are from Coleridge's "Table Talk : "“A man with a bad heart,” he said, “has been sometimes saved by a strong head; but a corrupt woman is lost forever." Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason and imagination, rarely or never. Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out. In politics what begins in fear usually ends in folly. A rogue is a roundabout fool; a fool in circumbendibus. A man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye, and that eye placed in the back of his head. Silence does not always mean wisdom. The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man. "In her first passion, woman loves her lover: BYRON: Don Juan, III. 3. Shakespeare is of no age. "He was not of an age, but for all time." BEN JONSON: To the Memory of Shakespeare. Painting is the intermediate something between a thought and a thing. Frenchmen are like grains of gunpowder, each by itself smutty and contemptible; but mass them together, they are terrible indeed! When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad. Schiller is a thousand times more hearty than Goethe. Some men are like musical glasses, to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet. What comes from the heart goes to the heart. [Of composi tion.] You abuse snuff. Perhaps it is the final cause of the human nose. To see Kean act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. The largest part of mankind are nowhere greater strangers than at home. Oh the difficulty of fixing the attention of men on the world within them! In the treatment of nervous diseases, he is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope. No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in the sense of humor. There are three classes into which all elderly women that I ever knew were to be divided: first, that dear old soul; second, that old woman; third, that old witch. If you take from Virgil his diction and metre, what do you leave him? The earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the past; the air and heaven, of futurity. You may depend upon it that a slight contrast of character is very material to happiness in marriage. Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of style. Dryden's genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion: his chariot-wheels get hot by driving fast. How strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day! I don't wonder you think Wordsworth a small man: he runs so far before us all that he dwarfs himself in the distance. To Mackintosh, who expressed his astonishment at Coleridge's estimation of one so much his inferior as Wordsworth. When asked which of Wordsworth's productions he liked best, Coleridge replied, "his daughter Dora." Coleridge, who was a bad rider, was accosted when on horseback by a wag who asked him if he knew what happened to Balaam: "The same thing as happened to me,” replied the poet, "an ass spoke to him." Southey said of him, "The moment any thing assumes the shape of a duty, Coleridge feels himself incapable of discharging it." Hookham Frere once observed, "Coleridge's waste words would have set up a dozen of your modern poets." PRINCE DE CONDÉ. [Louis I. de Bourbon, a French general; born in Vendôme, 1530; avowing himself a Calvinist, became chief of the Protestant army in the civil war, until killed in the battle of Jarnac, March 13, 1569, after he had surrendered.] Danger is sweet for Christ and my country. Before the The motto on his banner at the battle of Jarnac. action began, he received a kick in the leg from a horse; but, although the bone protruded through his boot, he spurred on his followers by charging them to remember the condition in which Louis de Bourbon entered the battle for "Christ and his country." At first, all gave way before him; but, wounded in the arm, his leg broken, and his horse killed under him, he fell to the ground; and, unable to fight or fly, surrendered to the Duc d'Anjou, afterward Henry III., by one of whose officers Condé was shot through the head. THE GREAT CONDÉ. [Louis II. de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, commonly called "the great;" born in Paris, 1621; gained a victory over the Spaniards at Rocroi, 1643; and over the Germans at Nordlingen, 1645; commanded the royalists in the Fronde, until arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille; having been sentenced to death, entered the service of Spain, until the treaty of the Pyrenees, 1659; died 1686.] Would to God it were Molière bringing me yours! (Jaimerais mieux que ce fût lui qui me présentât la vôtre !) To a versifier who brought him an epitaph he had composed for Molière. |