AHISTORY of the misdirected labors of the human race would form one of the most curious and instructive, as well as one of the most voluminous books that could be compiled. It would show that, while utility has been a sharp spur to human effort, difficulty and the love of praise have furnished motives equally powerful. Not to speak of the pyramids, those mountains of masonry, which, though costing the labors of thousands for many years, serve only as monuments of human folly; or of huge walls stretching along the length of an empire; or of the costly monuments reared to perpetuate the memory of things which men should be anxious to forget; or of the oceans of time wasted in the profitless researches of astrology, magic, quadrature of the circle, perpetual motion, etc; let us glance for a few moments at some of the fruits of a similar folly in the literary world. Here, after all, will be found the most prodigal waste of time and labor, as the far-stretching Saharas of useless, and worse then useless, books that greet the eye in every Bodleian library will testify. There are authors who have written hundreds of volumes, folio, quarto, and octavo, full of the veriest commonplace, and which now not only sleep quietly and undisturbed on the shelves, but which respect for the human understanding compels us to believe could never have found even yawning readers.
238Perhaps theology may claim to be the Arabia of literature, for here are far-reaching wastes or Great Deserts of books, in which, could he live as long as the antediluvians, one might travel for ages, without finding a single verdant spot to relieve the eye or cheat the painful journey. In one of the immense libraries of Continental Europe there is pointed out to the traveler one entire side of a long hall filled with nothing but treatises on a certain mystical point in divinity, all of which are now but so much old lumber, neglected even by the antiquary, and fit only for the pastry-cook or the trunk-maker. As space is limitless, and there are large chasms of it still unfilled by tangible bodies, it may seem cruel to grudge these writings the room they occupy. Yet one cannot but lament such an enormous waste of labor, nor with the utmost stretch of charity can he refrain from believing that, though Nature may have abhorred a vacuum in the days of Aristotle, her feelings must have greatly changed since mediocrity has filled it with so wretched apologies for substance and form.
The celebrated William Prynne, whose ears were cut off by Charles II, wrote over 200 books, nearly all elephantine folios, or bulky quartos, not one of which the most inveterate literary mouser of our day ever peeps into. In 1786 the Rev. William Davy, an obscure curate in Devonshire, began writing a “System of Divinity,” as he termed it, in twenty-six volumes, which, being unable to find a publisher, he resolved to print with his own hands. With a few old types and a press made by himself, he began the work of typography, printing only a page at a time. For twelve long years he pursued 239 his extraordinary labors, and at last, in 1807, brought them to a close. As each volume of the twenty-six octavo volumes of his work contained about 500 pages, he must have imposed and distributed his types, and put his press into operation 13,000 times, or considerably more than three times a day, omitting Sundays, during the long period of his task, — an amount of toil without remuneration which almost staggers belief. Only fourteen copies were printed, which he bound with his own hands, and a few of which he deposited in the public libraries of London. He died at an advanced age in 1826, hoping to the last for a favorable verdict from posterity, though even the existence of his magnum opus, — magnum in size only, — is probably not known to ten men in Great Britain.
But it is not in the literary productions of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, but in those of the sixteenth and seventeenth, that are to be found some of the most signal examples of misdirected intellectual labor. We refer to those torturing experiments upon language called anagrams, chronograms, echoes, macaronies, bouts-rimés, acrostics, palindromes, alliterative verses, etc., which were poured forth in floods, not by mere flippant idlers, or dunces who deemed themselves wits, but often by scholars of brilliant abilities and attainments. Weary of the search after ideas, disgusted with great speculations that ended in doubt, and dissatisfied with wisdom that brought no heart’s ease, and knowledge that only increased sorrow, the thinking men of those ages, like their predecessors of more ancient times, often employed their leisure moments in the composition of laborious trifles, — magno conatu magnas nugas, — which mocked the fruits of their graver studies 240 with something of a fairy quaintness. Follies of this kind date back, indeed, almost to the invention of letters. The Greeks had their lipogrammatists, who could write elaborate poems or treatises from which a particular letter was excluded. An ancient poetaster wrote a paraphrase of the “Iliad,” in which alpha or a was rejected from the first book, beta or b from the second, and so to the end. Both the Greeks and the Romans had their karkinie poems, or reciprocal verses, so written that the line was the same whether read backward or forwards, as in the following:
“Roma, tibi, subito motibus ibit amor.”
Lope de Vega wrote five novels, the first without an A, the second without a B, the third without a C, and so on. At one time, even long after the revival of learning, the grand merit of a large part of English and Scottish verse lay in the ridiculous conceit of all the words of a line beginning with the same letter; at another time, it was a favorite device to write Latin verses of which every line began with the same syllable that had concluded the preceding one, — a kind of game of shuttlecock, in which one player stationed on the left tossed a line across the page to a second, who, passing with the velocity of thought to the same side, hurled another at a third; and thus the match continued till he who began the sport put a stop to it by making his appearance on the opposite list. In this way the poor hapless poetaster was forced to hobble along an avenue, guarded on either side by a row of unrelenting monosyllables, which, if his mettlesome fancy manifested any inclination to scamper according to the freedom of her own will, brought her effectually to her senses.
241But of all the ridiculous shackles invented by the devotees of these coxcombical arts, the restrictions on the shape, form, and length of poems, were the most absurd and ludicrous. There are many poems of the sixteenth century on which a sort of Chinese ingenuity seems to have been expended; the lines being so drawn in here, and stretched out there, — so cut, twisted, and tortured in every conceivable way, — as to have a rude, general resemblance to the most fantastical objects. Of course, it was a rare triumph o ingenuity when an amatory poem could be squeezed into the shape of a heart, fan, or lady’s gown; a still greater, perhaps, when a sonnet on destiny could be put into the figure of a pair of scissors; but when an anacreontic could be coaxed into the form of a wine-glass, or a meditation on mortality into the shape of an hour-glass or tombstone, the effect was absolutely overwhelming. One Benlowes, a wit who, though now forgotten, is said to have been “excellently learned in his day,” had a wonderful facility in this kind of literary carpentry. Butler, the author of “Hudibras,” thus ironically commends him in his “Character of a Small Poet”; “There is no feat of activity, nor gambol of wit, that ever was performed by man, from him that vaults on Pegasus to him that tumbles through the hoop of an epigram, but Benlowes has got the mastery of it, whether it be high-rope wit or low-rope wit. As for altars and pyramids in poetry, he has outdone all men in that way; for he has made a gridiron and a frying-pan in verse, that, besides the likeness in shape, the very tone and sound of the words did perfectly represent the noise made by those utensils, such as Sartago loquendi.”
Another excruciating exercise of wit, which was in 242 vogue in the sixteenth century, especially with those who could not aspire to the lofty art of shaped-verse-making, was the framing of anagrams. By the ancients, anagram-making, or the transposing of the letters of certain words so as to produce new words, was classed among the cabalistic sciences; and it was often thought that the qualities of a man’s mind, and his future destiny, could be guessed at by anagrammatizing the letters of his name. When this could be done in such a way as to bring forth a word or sentence pointedly allusive to the original idea, it was deemed a marvellous feat, and the happy wit was ready to scream with joy. In France, such weight was attached to this jugglery with letters, that Louis XIII pensioned a professional transposer of words. Occasionally a name would appear to defy all attempts to torture it into meaning, and the pains and throes of the anagrammatist, while in labor, were sometimes terrible to behold. The venerable Camden speaks of the difficulty as “a whetstone of patience to them that shall try the art. For some have beene seene to bite their pen, scratch their head, bend their browes, bite their lips, beate the boord, teare their paper, when they were faire for somewhat, and caught nothing therein.” Addison gives a most ludicrous account of one of these word-torturers, who, after shutting himself up for half a year, and having taken certain liberties with the name of his mistress, discovered on presenting his anagram, that he had misspelled her surname! by which misfortune he was so thunderstruck that he shortly after lost his senses. If ever an explosion of wrath were justifiable, and one might be excused for losing all self-command, and crying out with Hamlet,
“— Ay, turn thy complexion there,
Patience, thou young and rose-lipped cherubin.”
it must be in a case like that.
Almost as unhappy was this was the experience of Daniel Dove, who, after long brooding over his own name, was able to hatch from it the ominous presage, “leaden void.” Knowing that, with a change of one letter, he might have become “Ovid,” he felt like the man whose lottery-ticket was next in number to the £20,000 prize. Sometimes from the same name may be extracted both good and evil omens, as in the case of Eleanor Davies, wife of the poet, and the Cassandra of her age, who belonged to the Court of Charles II. Having extracted the quintessence of her own name, and finding in it the impure anagram, “Reveal O, Daniel!” she began to croak prophecies by no means agreeable to the Government, when she was silenced by an arrow drawn from her own quiver. She was arraigned before the Court of High Commission, the Judges of which vainly racked their brains for arguments to disprove her claims to inspiration, when luckily it occurred to one of them to take his pen and write a letter anagram upon her name: Dame Eleanor Davies: “Never so mad a ladie! — which, hoisting the engineer with his own petard, forever silenced the prophecies. The ingenuity of the Judge is only paralleled by that of John Bunyan, whose anagram on his own name, “Nu hony in a B,” is a masterly triumph over the difficulties of orthography.
“The anagram,” say Richelet, “is one of the greatest follies of the human mind. One must be a fool to be amused by them, and worse than a fool to make them.” Drummond, of Hawthornden, denounces the anagram as 244 “the most idle study in the world of learning. Their maker must be homo miserrimæ patientiæ, and when he is done, what is it but magno conatu nugas magnas agere!” Happy, therefore, he thought was that countryman of his, whose mistress’s name, being Anna Grame, contained a ready-made and most acceptable Anagram. Considering that not a few men of high repute, — illustrious scholars and thinkers even, — have tried their hand at this “ineptie de l’esprit humain,” these must be considered as somewhat exaggerated statements. The anagram is a triumphant answer to the question, “What’s in a name?” especially when by a slight transposition a Wit is found in WIAT, Renown in VERNON, and Laurel in WALLER. Though anagrams are not the grandest productions of human genius, yet the intellectual ingenuity that is sometimes displayed in resolving a word into its elements, and from these elements compounding some new word characteristic of the person or thing designated by the original, is quite surprising. For example, what can be more curious than the coincidence between Telegraphs and its anagram, viz.: great helps? So of Astronomers, — moon-starers; Penitentiary, — Nay, I repent it; Radical Reform, — Rare mad frolic. Hardly less felicitous are the following: Presbyterian, — best in prayer; Gallantries, — all great sin; Old England, — golden land. Some years ago there was an eminent physician in London, whose name was John Abernethy, on account of his bluntness and roughness, was metamorphosed into “Johnny the Bear.” It is probable that even “Ursa Major” himself smiled and growled at the same time when he first heard this witty anagram.
Few persons will yield to the logic of political anagrams, but it is impossible not to be struck by the famous 245 Frantic Disturbers, made from Francis Burdett; and, in an ignorant age, doubtless not a few persons were confirmed in their dogged adherence to the Pretender to the British throne, while his enemies were startled and confounded, by the coincidence of Charles James Stuart with his anagram, He asserts a true claim. The two finest anagrams ever made are: Honor est a Nilo (Honor is from the Nile), from Horatio Nelson; and the reply evolved from Pilate’s question, “Quid est veritas?” (What is truth?) “Vir est qui adest” (It is the man who stands before you). The following, written by Oldys, the bibliographer, and found by his executors among his manuscripts, will be regarded by many as “quaintly good,” to use an expression of Isaak Walton’s:
“In word and WILL I AM a friend to you.
And one friend OLD IS worth a hundred new.”
The Greeks made few anagrams, and the Romans despised them. Nearly all Latin anagrams are of modern manufacture: as, from corpus (body) porcus (pig), from logica (logic) caligo (darkness). The French have invented a few very happy anagrams, of which a remarkably ingenious one is that on Frère Jacques Clement, the assassin of Henri III, “C’est l’enfer qui m’a a créé.” What can be more beautiful than the anagram on the name of Christ. In allusion to the passage in Isaiah liii, “He is brought as a sheep to the slaughter”?
“ΙΗΣΟΥΣ.
Σύὴὀῖς — Thou art that sheep.”
Rousseau, ashamed of his father, who was a cobbler, changed his name into Verniettes, — in which a wit discovered more than the author had dreamed of, namely, 246 Tu te renies. Voltaire’s name is an anagram, derived from his real name, Arouet l. j., or Arouet le jeune. As a specimen of a witty anagram, there is one on Charles Genest, a Frenchman of much note, which is, as Mrs. Partington would say, “a chief-done-over;” it is unrivaled. The gentlemen in question was distinguished by a preternaturally large organ of smell, such as would have thrown Napoleon Bonaparte or Eden Warwick into raptures of admiration, — whereupon some ingenious wag finds in his name the mirth-provoking anagram, “Eh? c’est un grand nez!” (Eh? it is a great nose!)
One of the prettiest of modern anagrams is the following:
“FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
Flit on, charming angel!”
When the eloquent George Thompson was urged to go into Parliament to serve the cause of negro emancipation more efficiently, one of his friends found a cogent reason for such a course in the letters of his name:
“GEORGE THOMPSON,
O go, — the Negro’s M. P.!”
A patriotic Englishman made Napoleon Bonaparte read in Latin, Bona rapta leno pone, or “Rascal, yield up your stolen possessions.” The last anagram we shall cite, though less brilliant than the foregoing, as a mere feat of intellectual ingenuity, is wonderfully truthful, — namely, editors, who are always so tired.
Another curious phase of literary labor is alliteration, which may be a mere trick or conceit of composition, or a positive ornament. When used too often it is suggestive of laborious efforts, and affects the reader like the feats of an acrobat, which excite at last an interest more painful 247 than pleasant. But, when used with such subtle art as to be noticed only by the peculiar charm of sound that accompanied it, it is one of the most delicate graces of language. Spenser uses alliteration often, and sometimes with the finest effect, as in the “Shepherd’s Calendar”:
“But home him hasted with furious haste,
Encrasing his wrathe with many a threate;
His harmful hatchet he hent in hand.”
In the following verse of Tennyson, there is an alliterative beauty in the pleasant interlinking of the sounds of d, and n, and l, which is peculiarly delicious to the ear, because it is so subtle as hardly to be noticed by a common reader:
“Dip down upon the Northern shore,
Oh, sweet new year, delaying long;
Thou dost expectant nature wrong,
Delaying long, — delay no more.”
Shakspeare has occasional instances of happy alliteration, as in
The churlish chiding of the winter’s wind”;
and again in the line,
“In maiden meditation, fancy free;”
and in the following passage from “Macbeth,” where the grandeur of the effect is greatly increased by the repetition of the letter s:
“That shall, to all our nights and days to come,
Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom.”
The poet ridicules, however, the excessive use of this device, as in the prologue to the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”:
“Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast.”
248Alliteration adds not a little to the force of Burns’s word-painting, as when he calls Tam O’Shanter
“A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum,”
and characterizes the plowman’s collie as
“A rhymin’, rantin’, rovin’ billie.”
Byron was a great master of alliteration. It was a favorite device of his, and his finest passages, whether grave or gay, owe much of their beauty and power to it. E. g. —
“He who hath bent him o’er the dead,
Ere the first day of death has fled,
The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress.”
In the “Corsair” he has thirty-one alliterations in twenty-three lines, yet so skilfully used that the reader is conscious of no mannerism. What an addition of pungency and comic effect is given to the epigram by this expedient, may be seen by the following lines from Byron’s “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”:
“Yet mark one caution, ere thy next review
Spreads its light wings of saffron and of blue,
Beware lest blundering Brough’m destroy the sale,
Turn beef to bannocks, caulifowers to kail!”
Coleridge was an adept in the use of this rhyming ornament, as a single example will suffice to show:
“The white breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free.”
Professor G. P. Marsh states that Milton, and the classic school of poets generally, avoid alliteration altogether; but this is too sweeping a statement, as, had we space, we might easily show. How much the alliteration adds to the expressiveness of his
“Behemoth, biggest born of earth!”
249and how greatly is the force of the following lines intensified by the same device, where he strings together his vowels and consonants in juxtaposition, so as to make the verse more harsh and grating to the ear:
“Others apart sat on a hill retired,
For thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.”
The most brilliant poets of the day abound in this device, and even the most accomplished prose-writers do not disdain what Churchill calls
“Apt alliteration’s artful aid.”
In the following lines by Austin, we have an almost excessive use of it:
“You knew Blanche Darley? Could we but once more
Behold that belle and pet of ’54!
Not e’en a whisper, vagrant up to Town
From hunt or race-ball, augur’d her renown.
Far in the wolds sequester’d life she led,
Fair and unfettered as the fawn she fed.
Caress’d the calves, coquetted with the colts,
Bestowed much tenderness on turkey polts;
Bullied the huge, ungainly, bloodhound pup,
Tiff’d with the terrier, coax’d to make it up;
The farmers quizzed about the ruin’d crops,
The fall of barley and the rise of hops.
So soft her tread, no nautilus that skims
With sail more silent than her liquid limbs.
Her presence was low music; when she went
She left behind a dreamy discontent,
As sad as silence, when a song is spent.”
In irony, satire, and all kinds of comic writing, — and even in invective, — alliteration adds a peculiar piquancy to the comic effect. Thus Grattan, denouncing the British ministry, said: “Their only means of government are the guinea and the gallows.” Sydney Smith 250 employs this feature of style with masterly skill and effect; as when he speaks of an opponent as “a poluphagous, poluposous, and pot-bellied scribbler”; and when, in contrasting the position of the poor curates with that of the high dignitaries of the English Church, he calls the two classes “the Rt. Rev. Dives in the palace, and Lazarus in orders at the gate, doctored by dogs and comforted with crumbs.” A still more striking instance is an ironical passage in the “Letters of Peter Plymley,” in which, ridiculing a measure of Mr. Perceval, the British Premier, he asks: “At what period was the plan of conquest and constipation fully developed? In whose mind was the idea of destroying the pride and plasters of France first engendered? . . . Depend upon it, the absence of the materia medica will soon bring them to their senses, and the cry of ‘Bourbon and Bolus!’ burst forth from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.”
Proverbs owe much of their piquancy and point to alliteration, and favorite passages of poetry owe their frequency of quotation not a little to this element, which greatly aids in their recollection. Two hundred years ago John Norris wrote the line
“Like angels’ visits, short and bright,”
which Blair, half a century later, improved into
“Visits, like those of angels, short and far between”;
but Campbell, unconsciously appropriating it, “contrived at one blow to destroy the beauty of the thought, and yet to make the verse immortal by giving it a form that soothes the ear and runs glibly off the tongue”;
“Like angels’ visits, few and far between,”
—a line which is palpably tautological.
251The following is probably the most remarkable specimen of alliteration extant. Any one who has written an acrostic, and who has felt the embarrassment of being confined to particular initial letters, can appreciate the ingenuity demanded by these verses, where the whole alphabet is fathomed, and each word in each line exacts its proper initial. The author must have been “homo miserrimæ patientiæ”:
“An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
Boldly, by battery, besieged Belgrade.
Cossack commanders, cannonading come,
Dealing destruction’s devastating doom:
Every endeavor engineers essay,
For fame, for fortune — fighting furious fray:
Generals ’gainst generals grapple — great God!
How honors Heaven heroic hardihood!
Infuriate — indiscriminate in ill,
Kinsmen kill kinsmen — kindred kindred kill!
Labor low levels loftiest, longest lines —
Men march ’mid mounds, ’mid moles, ’mid murderous mines.
New noisy numbers notice nought
Of outward obstacles, opposing ought:
Poor patriots, partly purchased, partly pressed,
Quite quaking, quickly quarter, quarter ’quest;
Reason returns, religion’s right redounds,
Suwarrow stops such sanguinary sounds.
Truce to the Turk — triumph to thy train!
Unjust, unwise, unmerciful Ukrane!
Vanish vain victory, vanish victory vain!
Why wish we warfare, wherefore welcome were
Xerxes, Ximenes, Xanthus, Xaviere?
Yield, ye youths! ye yeomen, yield your yell!
Zeno’s, Zarpater’s, Zoroaster’s zeal,
And all attracting — against arms appeal.”
Alliteration occurs sometimes in the writings of the ancients, but not, it is supposed, designedly, as they regarded all echoing of sound as a rhetorical blemish. Cicero, in the “Offices,” has this phrase, — “Sensim sine 252 sensu ætas senescit”; and Virgil, in the “Æneid,” has many marked alliterations.
There are several Latin poems of the Middle Ages in alliterative verse, the most famous of which, the Pugna Porcorum per Publium Porcium Poetam, or “Battle of the Pigs,” in which every word begins with p, extends to several hundred lines, thus, —
“Propterea properans proconsul, poplite prono,
Precipitem plebem pro patrum pace poposcit,
Persta paulisper pubes preciosa! precamur.”
Among the literary devices which have “fretted their brief hour upon the stage, and now are no more,” are double rhymes, in which Butler and Hood especially excelled. A still more ludicrous form of comic verse is where the rhyme is made by dividing the words, being formed by a similar sound in the middle syllables; as in Canning’s lines; —
“Thou was the daughter of my Tu-
tor, Law Professor in the U-
niversity of Göttingen;
or in Smith’s
“At first I caught hold of the wing,
And kept away; but Mr. Thing-
umbob, the prompter man,
Gave with his hand my chaise a shove,
And said, ‘Go on, my pretty love,
Speak to ’em, little Nan.’ ”
Akin to the waste of labor in anagrams, chronograms, alliterations, assonances, etc., though not strictly to be classed under literary trifles, is the waste of labor upon microscopic penmanship. Years of toil have been devoted to copying in a minute print-hand books which could have been bought for a trifle in ordinary typography. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, one Peter Bales wrote a 253 copy of the Bible, with the usual number of pages, in a hand so fine that the whole could be put into a walnut-shell. In St. John’s college, Oxford, there is shown a portrait of Charles I, done with the pen in such a way that the lines are formed by verses of the Psalms, all of which are included in the work. When Charles II visited the Colleges, he asked for it, with the promise to grant any favor in return; the request was granted, and the owners immediately asked to have the gift restored to them. In the British Museum there is a portrait of Queen Anne, on which appear a number of minute lines and scratches. These, when examined through a microscope, are found to be the entire contents of a small folio-book which belongs to the library. Some years ago a gentleman in London bought a pen-and-ink portrait of Alexander Pope, surrounded by a design in scroll-work. Upon examining it through a glass, to discover the artist’s name, he was astonished to find that the fine lines in the surrounding scroll were a biography of the poet, so minutely transcribed was to be legible only by the aid of a magnifier.
Another literary trifle upon which a vast amount of time and ingenuity has been expended, is the riddle. Riddle-making has been popular in all ages and countries, and not only the small wits, but the big-wigs of Greece, Rome, France, Germany, and England, have amused themselves with it. Schiller, the German poet, was an adept in this art, and some of his riddles are marvels of ingenuity. Here is one by fox, the great English orator:
“Formed long ago, yet made to-day,
And most employed when others sleep;
What few would wish to give away,
And none would wish to keep.”
The answer is — a bed.
254Dr. Whewell, the late Master of Trinity College, is credited with the following, which was often on his lips. It would baffle a sphinx:
“U 0 a 0, but I 0 thee,
O 0 no 0, my 0 a 0 go,
Then let not my 0 a 0 go
But give 0 0 I 0 thee so.”
“You sigh for a cypher, but I sigh for thee,
O sigh for no cypher, but O sigh for me;
Then let not my sigh for a cypher go,
But give sigh for sigh, for I sigh for thee so.”
Whew — well done! we hear a punning reader exclaim.
The following is inferior to the sighing riddle, so often repeated to his friends by the author of the “History of Inductive Sciences,” but it is not the device of a bungler:
“Stand take to takings,
I you throw my”
“I understand
You undertake
to overthrow
My undertakings.”
Prof. DeMorgan, author of the celebrated work on “The Theory of Probabilities,” is the author of a cunning punning riddle: How do you know there is no danger of starving in the desert? Because of the sand which is there. And how do you know you will get sandwiches there? Because Ham went into the desert, and his descendants bred and musterd.
The following curious epitaph was found in a foreign cathedral:
“EPITAPHIUM.
o quid tuæ
be est blæ
ra ra ra
es et in
ram ram ram
i i.”
255These puzzling lines have been explained as follows: Ra, ra, ra, is thrice ra, i. e., ter-ra — terra; ram, ram, ram is thrice ram, i. e., ter-ram — terram; i i is twice i, i. e., i-bis — ibis. The first two lines are to be read: O super be, quid super est tuæ super biæ. The epitaph will then be:
O superbe, quid superest tuæ superbæ?
Terra es et in terram ibis.”
We know not who is the author of the following curious line:
“Sator arepo tenet opera rotas.”
1. This spells backward and forward the same. 2. The first letters of all the words spell the first word. 3. The second letters of all the words spell the second word. 4. The third letters of all the words spell the third word; and so on through the fourth and fifth.
We will close with a specimen of the puzzles in letters:
“CC
SI”
“The season is backward.” (The C’s on is backward.)
Truly the human mind is like an elephant’s trunk, — capable of grasping the mightiest objects, and of adapting itself with equal facility to the meanest and most trifling. There is but one thing to which we can compare the labors of this whole tribe of triflers, — it is to the toils of those unwearying imps who were set by the magician to the task of twisting ropes out of sea-sand.