a cloth, and send it to the Cardinal de Richelieu, for he has told me a hundred times that I never had any." XLIX. CLASSICAL APPLICATION. A person meeting another riding, with his wife behind him, applied to him Horace's line"Post equitem sedet atra cura."* L. MALHERBE. Malherbe, at the age of seventy, wishing to revenge the death of his son, who had fallen in a duel with M. D sent a challenge to that gentleman. The friends of Malherbe hearing of it, did all they could to prevent him from fighting, to which he replied, "What have I to fear? The loss could not be so great for me as you suppose. I only hazard a shilling against a pound." LI. RABELAIS. Rabelais is not always the inventor of the tales he interweaves with his principal fable. He often borrows them from other quarters, but he embellishes and renders them his own by his manner of narrating them. That of Dodin, and the Cordelier, B. iii. ch. 23, is of this number. The original is to be found in the Latin poems of Nicholas Barthelemi. The following is the exact genealogy of the Ring of Hans Carvel.+ The invention is due to Poggio, the Florentine, who died in 1459. It is the 133d of his Facetiæ, entitled the Vision of Philelphus, for which Rabelais has merely substituted the name of Hans Carvel. It is then to be met with in the eleventh of the Cent Nouvelles, a work which Poggio certainly had not seen, for they were not collected till after the year Gloomy care sits behind the rider. + Imitated in the well-known tale of Prior. 1461, under the reign of Louis XI., in whose presence they are said to have been related while he was residing as Dauphin at Gueneppe, a castle of the Duke of Burgundy, in Brabant. Ariosto is the third who has introduced the tale, at the end of his fifth Satire, and has given it an air of novelty, by the graces which he has added to it. It is also the eleventh of an anonymous collection of novels, published at Lyons in 1555, an imitation and, in fact, a mere modernization of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. Celio Malespini has also introduced the story at page 288 of part second of his Ducento Novelle, printed in 4to, at Venice, in 1609, nearly one-half of which are borrowed, word for word, from the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. La Fontaine, in 1665, turned into elegant verse the prose of Rabelais, believing him really to have been the author of the tale. It has been also very elegantly versified in Latin Anacreontics, by La Monnoye himself. LII. ORACLES. A person who had some dangerous enemies, whom he believed capable of attempting anything, consulted the Oracle to know whether he should leave the country. The answer he obtained was, “Domine, stes securus;" a reply which led him to believe he might safely remain at home. Some days afterwards his enemies set fire to his house, and it was with difficulty that he escaped with his life. Then recollecting the answer of the Oracle, he perceived, when too late, that the word was not Domine, but Domi ne stes securus. LIII. HENRY IV. Henry IV. wishing to lower the pride of a Spanish ambassador, told him that if he had a mind to ride, he would go to hear mass at Milan, break fast at Rome, and dine at Naples. "Sire," replied the ambassador, “at this rate your Majesty might also contrive to hear vespers in Sicily." LIV. BOUTS RIMÉS. Perhaps the most difficult set of rhymes ever given for a Sonnet in Bouts Rimés, is the following. The occasion of the Sonnet was this:-In the year 1683, a lady, whom we shall call Iris, was lamenting the loss of a cat, which had been stolen from her. To console her, the following Sonnet was composed, the rhymes assigned for which consisted, entirely of the names of towns and provinces. The invention was new; but although the difficulty was sufficient to dismay an ordinary sonnetteer, the author of the following seems to have very happily surmounted or eluded it. Iris, aimable Iris, honneur de la Vous pleurez votre chat plus que nous Et fussiez vous, je pense, au fond de la On entendroit de là vos cris jusqu'à Bourgogne, Philipsbourg; Gascogne, Fribourg. Sa peau fut à vos yeux fourrure de Il feroit l'ornement d'un Couvent de Pologne; Cologne ; Mais, quoi, l'on vous l'a pris? on a bien pris Strasbourg. D'aller pour une perte, Iris, comme la Se percer sottement la gorge d'une Chez moi le plus beau chat, je vous le dis, ma LV. CARDINAL GRANVELLE. Cardinal Granvelle, minister of Philip II. King of Spain, was so exact, that he preserved every 1282. Alluding to the famous massacre of the French, in + Mademoiselle D'Orleans's dog, on whose death the Abbé Cotin composed a madrigal. letter written to him. He had left in several chests in his residence at Besançon, a prodigious quantity of these letters, in different languages, all noted, quoted, and underlined with his own hand, with copies of many of his answers. After his death, these valuable documents were placed in a gallery exposed to the rats and the rain; the servants, and the children of the neighbourhood, helped themselves to the papers as they pleased; the maître d'hotel sold six of the chests to a confectioner, and in order to get rid of the rest, they were destined at once to the water-closet. The Abbé Brisot, who had met with some of them accidentally, found means to collect the remainder; and to prevent these from sharing the fate of the rest, he had them bound in eighty volumes. This collection consists of original letters of the Emperors Charles V., Ferdinand I., Maximilian II., Philip II. of Spain, Mary, Queen of Hungary, Eleanora, Queen of France, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, Christiana of Denmark, Duchess of Lorraine, and the two Margarets of Austria, who governed in the Low Countries. The rest is composed of the letters of different ambassadors, with the answers; and lastly, of two large volumes of private letters of the Cardinal to M. de Bellefontaine, his relation, and intimate friend, where the Cardinal displays his whole heart without disguise. LVI. LATIN VERSE. GUALTIER DE LILLE. It has been long disputed who was the author of the celebrated verse which has become proverbial, "Incidit in Scyllam cupiens vitare Charybdim." It has subsequently been discovered, that it is D the production of Gualtier de Lille, as had been remarked by Galeotus Martius and Paquier in their Researches. This Gualtier, surnamed Chatillon, flourished in the 13th century. He is the author of a poem in ten books, called the Alexandriad ; and the verse in question is the 301st of the 5th Book, where the poet, apostrophising Darius, who in flying from Alexander, fell into the hands of Bessus, expresses himself thus : '' Quo flectis inertem, Rex periture, fugam? Nescis, heu, perdite, nescis, LVII. MARY DE MEDICIS. Fabro Chigi, who was afterwards Pope, under the title of Alexander VII., while Nuncio in France, was present at the death of Mary de Medicis. He asked her if she pardoned all her enemies, and particularly Cardinal Richelieu. She said she did, from her heart. "Madame," said he," as a mark of reconciliation, will you send him the bracelet you wear on your arm?" "Nay," replied she, laying her head on the pillow, " that is too much !" LVIII. LOUIS XIV. AND SPINOLA. Louis XIV., grave and dignified as he was, could not restrain the joy he felt on the birth of the Duke of Burgundy, on the 6th of August 1682. He refused the attendance of his guards, and every one was allowed to address him. As all were admitted to the honour of kissing his hand, the Marquis Spinola, in the ardour of his zeal, bit his finger in doing so, and that so sharply that the King was forced to call out. "I beg your Majesty's pardon," said the Marquis; " if I had not bit your |