The first line of the above, divorced from the context, has passed into a popular quotation. Montgomery is reported to have said that he was willing to rest his hopes of literary immortality upon that line alone. Yet it has been justly objected that at the only time in Luther's life when he can be said to have been solitary-at his so-called "Patmos," the Castle of Wartburghe had ceased to be a monk. A cognate but far greater expression is EmerAnd fired the shot heard round the world. son's Sorrow's crown of sorrow. "Locksley Hall," The following allusion in Tennyson's This is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things, is, of course, to Dante's famous passage in the "Divina Commedia” (Inferno, Canto v., 1. 121),— Nessun maggior dolore Che ricordarsi del tempo felice Nella miseria, which Longfellow thus translates: There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time Chaucer also had Dante in mind when he wrote, For, of Fortunes sharpe adversite The worste kynde of infortune is this, A man to have ben in prosperite, And it remembren, when it passed is. Troilus and Creseide, Book iii., l. 1625. The original of the sentiment is in Boethius "De Consolatione Philosophiæ," Book ii.: “In omni adversitate fortunæ infelicissimum genus infortunii est fuisse felicem et non esse" ("In every adversity of fortune the most unhappy kind of misfortune is to have been and not to be happy"). Boethius "De Consolatione" and Cicero "De Amicitia" were the first two books that engaged the attention of Dante, as he himself tells us in the "Convito." Cicero approximated very closely to the phrase when he wrote to Atticus from his exile in Thessalonica, in 58 B.C., "While all other sorrows are mellowed by age, this [exile] can only grow keener day by day, as one thinks of the present, and looks back on the days that are passed." Robert Pollok has the converse of the proposition in his well-known line,— Sorrows remembered sweeten present joy. The Course of Time, Book i., 1. 464. A diligent correspondent of the American Notes and Queries furnishes the following additional examples: Forget the dead, the past? O yet There are ghosts that may take revenge for it: Regrets which glide through the spirit's gloom, That joy, once lost, is pain. PERCY BYSSHe Shelley: The Past. Remembrance wakes, with all her busy train, GOLDSMITH: The Deserted Village. In vain does memory renew The hours once tinged in transport's dye : And turns the past to agony. MRS. DUGALD STEWART: The Tear I Shed. Queen Margaret. Having no more but thought of what thou wert, Queen Elizabeth. O thou, well skilled in curses, stay awhile, Queen Margaret. Compare dead happiness with living woe. SHAKESPEARE: Richard III., Act iv., Sc. 4. There too the memory of delights, Warm as ere yet they turned to pain, And all their music fled, and all their love was vain. CAMOENS: Paraphrase of the 137th Psalm. Misfortune, like a creditor severe, But rises in demand for her delay. She makes a scourge of past prosperity To sting the more and double thy distress. Revolted joys, like foes in civil war, Like bosom friendships to resentments scourged, With rage envenomed, rise against our peace. YOUNG: Night Thoughts, Night I. There is no greater misery than to remember joy when in grief. MARINO: Adone, Canto xiv., Stanza 100. To remember a lost joy makes the present state so much the worse. FORTIGUERRA: Ricciardetto, Canto xi., Stanza 83. Present sorrow brings back and increases the memory of the joy we have lost. ST. DAMIAN: Hymn, De Gloria Paradisi. Soul's dark cottage. A famous figure occurs in Waller : This may be numerously paralleled in contemporary and succeeding writers The incessant care and labor of his mind Henry IV., Part II., Act iv., Sc. 4. A fiery soul, which, working out its way, DRYDEN: Absalom and Achitophel, Part i., 1. 156. Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts as harbingers to heaven; and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness through the chinks of her sickness-broken body.-FULLER: Life of Monica. He was one of a lean body and visage, as if his eager soul, biting for anger at the clog of his body, desired to fret a passage through it.-FULLER: Life of the Duke of Aiva. When our earthly tabernacles are disordered and desolate, shaken and out of repair, the spirit delights to dwell within them; as houses are said to be haunted when they are forsaken and gone to decay.-SWIFT. Soup, In the, a slang phrase which first made its appearance in colloquial American-English about 1887. In meaning it is closely akin to the slang expression "to get left." In Germany, "in die Suppe fallen" (literally, "to fall in the soup"), and “Er ist in die Suppe" ("He is in the soup"), are time-honored proverbial expressions for being in a pickle or stuck in the mud. Similar German phrases are "die Suppe ausessen müssen" ("to be obliged to eat the soup or broth one has prepared for one's self,"-i.e., "to suffer disagreeable consequences of one's unwise action") and "die Suppe versalzen" (literally, "to salt one's soup,"-i.e., "to prepare a disappointment for one"). So also "eine böse Suppe einbrocken" (einbrocken denotes the act of breaking bread into the soup, and the whole phrase may be translated, "to prepare a disagreeable mess") has a meaning cognate to the English proverbialism "to put a rod in pickle" for one. It is quite possible, therefore, that the phrase is of German-American origin. The German etymon is not incompatible with the story given in the Evening Post, December 8, 1888, according to which a party of toughs went down New York Harbor on a tug to welcome a notorious prize-fighter who was expected to arrive from Europe. The captain of the steamer refused to allow the undesirable boat-load to come very close to his vessel, and one enthusiast, in his vociferous efforts to get near the object of his admiration, fell over the rail of the tug into the water. It was near dark, and naturally great excitement prevailed, which being noticed from the steamer, the boat was hailed to find out what had happened. "Oh, nothing much," replied a tough (who might have been a German-American), sententiously: "somebody's in de soup." The phrase was caught up and immediately became popular. Spade. To call a spade a spade. This phrase, meaning to indulge in plain speech, to be rudely or indelicately frank, is of very ancient date and of Grecian birth. Lucian in his dialogue "Quomodo Historia sit conscribenda" quotes from Aristophanes the saying τὰ σύκα σύκα, τὴν σκάφην δὲ σκάφην ὀνομάτ Sov ("Figs they call figs, and a spade a spade"). This finds a place among the royal apothegms collected by Plutarch as having been made use of by Philip of Macedon in answer to Lasthenes, the Olynthian ambassador, who complained that the citizens, on his way to the palace, called him a traitor. "Ay," quoth the king, "these Macedonians are a blunt people, who call figs figs, and a spade a spade." Philip, of course, was merely quoting the current locution. I drink no wine at all, which so much improves our modern wits; a loose, plain, blunt, rude writer, I call a spade a spade; I respect matter, not words.-BURTON: Anatomy of Melancholy, Preface. Spain, a sobriquet for New Jersey which originated thus. After the downfall of Napoleon, his brother Joseph, ex-king of Spain, fled to America. It took some time for him to decide where he should settle: indeed, Providence or the American legislatures (not then so long a remove from Providence as they are to-day) so disposed it that this man's proposal was repeatedly baffled. The common-law rules against the holding of property by an alien were in force in all the new States, and, after knocking vainly at various legis. lative doors, Joseph was fain to turn to New Jersey, where, on January 22, 1817, a general act was passed "to authorize aliens to purchase and hold lands in this State." It is not true, as generally supposed, that this act was framed with special reference to the Bonaparte case, although it did render unneces sary the consideration of a special act proposed for the same session of the legislature by Joseph's friends, and although there is no doubt that the final vote was influenced by the knowledge that an ex-king had already concluded arrangements for the purchase of one thousand acres at Point Breeze, near Bordentown. Here a magnificent park was laid out, entertainments were provided on a lavish scale, and something of royal state was kept up, so that the envious neighbors began to find it droll to talk of New Jersey as out of the Union and a portion of Spain. Spare the rod and spoil the child, a popular misquotation from Proverbs xiii. 24: "He that spareth his rod hateth his son.' Its first appearance in this form in literature seems to be in Ralph Venning's "Mysteries and Revelations," second edition (1649, p. 5): "They spare the rod and spoil the child." But John Skelton had already said, Butler has There is nothynge that more dyspleaseth God Love is a boy by poets styled; Hudibras, Part ii., Canto 1. In his later life Louis XIV., realizing how his youth had been misspent, pertinently asked, “Was there not birch enough in the Forest of Fontainebleau?" Diogenes, according to Burton, "struck the father when the son swore." (Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii., Sect. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 4.) Speak daggers. Hamlet's phrase à propos of his mother,- Act iii., Sc. 2, was imitated by Bismarck when he said, "Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches" ("Lieber Spitzkugeln als Spitzreden"). Bismarck made this speech in 1850, the occasion being an insurrection of the people of Hesse-Cassel. Speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts. None of Talleyrand's mots is more famous than this. It is true that even in its final form this was not Talleyrand's, for Harel, the famous fabricator of mots, has confessed that he himself put the phrase into Talleyrand's mouth in order to claim it as his own after the death of the diplomatist. Whether Talleyrand's or Harel's, it is undoubtedly clever, and has become one of the stock quotations of the world. But it is easy to trace the idea back to a remote antiquity. What may be called the primordial germ may be found in several forms in the classics. Achilles, for example, thus voices his detestation of the man whose expressed words conceal his inmost thoughts: Who dares think one thing and another tell, My mind detests him as the gates of hell. Here there is no attempt at an epigram, of course, but there is a general recognition of the fact that the speech of some men does conceal their thoughts. So Plutarch said of the Sophists that in their declamations and speeches they made use of words to veil and muffle their design. And Dionysius Cato, in his collection of moral maxims, comes a step closer to the modern saying in his sententious remark, "Sermo hominum mores celat et indicat idem" ("The same words conceal and declare the thoughts of men"). When we come down to modern times and reach Jeremy Taylor we find he had the sentiment clearly in view in the following sentence: "There is in mankind an universal contract implied in all their intercourses; and words being instituted to declare the mind, and for no other end, he that hears me speak hath a right in justice to be done him, that, as far as I can, what I speak be true; for else he, by words, does not know your mind, and then as good and better not speak at all." Still we have no epigram, no paradox. David Lloyd, in his "State Worthies," comes near to the modern phrase, but misses it through his stupidly downright honesty of statement: "Speech was made to open man to man, and not to hide him; to promote commerce, and not betray it." He comes so close that we hold our breath: just a twist of the hand, and the thing would be done. That twist is supplied by Lloyd's contemporary, the wise and witty Dr. South: "In short, this seems to be the true inward judgment of all our politick sages, that speech was given to the ordinary sort of men whereby to communicate their mind, but to wise men whereby to conceal it." Butler echoes South in his essay on "The Modern Politician.' The politician, according to Butler, thinks that "he who does not make his words rather serve to conceal than discover the sense of his heart deserves to have it pulled out like a traitor's and shown publicly to the rabble." Here we have the idea, but not the meet and quotable wording. Almost simultaneously three men, two in England and one in France, rushed to the breach. Young said, Where Nature's end of language is declined, Love of Fame, Sat. ii., I. 207: Goldsmith, "Men who know the world hold that the true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them ;" and Voltaire, “Men use thought as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts." Talleyrand's saying borrows just as much from Voltaire as is necessary to give the brevity and point that are essential to a proverb, and hence obtained instant currency. Spellbinders,-i.e., speakers who hold, or think they hold, their hearers spellbound. It was applied by William C. Goodloe, a member of the Republican National Committee, to the stump-speakers employed by them, from their invariable habit of asserting in their reports that their speaking held the audiences in that very interesting condition. Spelling, Eccentricities of. "To be a well-favored man," says Dogberry, "is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature." And what literary man was it who paraphrased Dogberry's words by saying that sense and knowledge come by experience and study, but the power to spell correctly is the direct gift of God? Many other authors have openly acknowledged their orthographical imperfections and depended upon the intelligent proof-reader to supply the missing vowels and consonants or to strike out the redundant. Goethe himself, who took all knowledge for his province, was fain to leave spelling as a terra incognita. Shakespeare, not to speak of what others did for him, changed his own mind some thirty times as to the letters and the sequence of the letters composing his patronymic. So, at least, Halliwell tells us; and it is quite certain that the two genuine signatures that have survived differ orthographically from each other. If literary men were so lax, what wonder that other great people have been hazy in their notions |