"And the fishes beginning to sweat,

Cried,Goodness, how hot we shall be.""

That not very brilliant joke, "to lie-under a mistake," is sometimes indulged in by the best writers. Witness the following. Byron says:

If, after all, there should be some so blind

To their own good this warning to despise,
Led by some tortuosity of mind

Not to believe my verse and their own eyes,
And cry that they the moral cannot find,

I tell him, if a clergyman, he lies;
Should captains the remark, or critics make,
They also lie too-under a mistake.

Don Juan, Canto I.

Shelley, in his translation of the Magico Prodigioso of Calsay to Moscon:

deron, makes Clarin

And De Quincey, Milton versus Southey and Landor,

says:

You are tempted, after walking round a line (of Milton) three score times, to exclaim at last,-Well, if the Fiend himself should rise up before me at this very moment, in this very study of mine, and say that no screw was loose in that line, then would I reply: "Sir, with due submission, you are

"What!"

suppose the Fiend suddenly to demand in thunder,

"What am I?" "Horribly wrong," you wish exceedingly to say; but, recollecting that some people are choleric in argument, you confine yourself to the polite answer—“ That, with deference to his better education, you conceive him to lie"that's a bad word to drop your voice upon in talking with a friend, and you hasten to add-"under a slight, a very slight

mistake."

Mr. Montague Mathew, who sometimes amused the House of Commons, and alarmed the Ministers, with his brusquerie, set an ingenious example to those who are at once forbidden to speak, and yet resolved to express their thoughts. There was a debate upon the treatment of Ireland, and Mathew having been called to order for taking unseasonable notice of the enormities attributed to the British Government, spoke to the following effect:-"Oh, very well; I shall say nothing then about the murders (Order, order!)-I shall make no mention of the massacres (Hear, hear! Order!)-Oh, well; I shall sink all allusion to the infamous half-hangings-(Order, order! Chair!)

Lord Chatham once began a speech on West Indian affairs, in the House of Commons, with the words: "Sugar, Mr. Speaker "and then, observing a smile to prevail in the audience, he paused, looked fiercely around, and with a loud voice, rising in its notes, and swelling into vehement anger, he is said to have pronounced again the word "Sugar!" three times; and having thus quelled the House, and extinguished every appearance of levity or laughter, turned around, and disdainfully asked, "Who will laugh at sugar now?"

Our legislative assemblies, under the most exciting circumstances, convey no notion of the phrenzied rage which sometimes agitates the French. Mirabeau interrupted once at every sentence by an insult, with "slanderer," "liar," "assassin," "rascal," rattling around him, addressed the most furious of his assailants in the softest tone he could assume, saying, "I pause, gentlemen, till these civilities are exhausted."

Mr. Marten, M. P., was a great wit. One evening he delivered a furious philippic against Sir Harry Vane, and when he had buried him beneath a load of sarcasm, he said ::- "But as for young Sir Harry Vane" and so sat down. The House was astounded. Several members exclaimed: "What have you to say against young Sir Harry?" Marten at once rose and added: "Why, if young Sir Harry lives to be old, he will be old Sir Harry."

Echo Verse.

ADDISON says, in No. 59 of the Spectator, "I find likewise in ancient times the conceit of making an Echo talk sensibly and give rational answers. If this could be excusable in any writer, it would be in Ovid, where he introduces the echo as a nymph, before she was worn away into nothing but a voice. (Met. iii. 379.) The learned Erasmus, though a man of wit and genius, has composed a dialogue upon this silly kind of device, and made use of an echo who seems to have been an extraordinary linguist, for she answers the person she talks with in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, according as she found the syllables which she was to repeat in any of those learned languages. Hudibras, in ridicule of this false kind of wit, has described Bruin bewailing the loss of his bear to a solitary echo, who is of great use to the poet in several distichs, as she does not only repeat after him, but helps out his verse and furnishes him with rhymes."

Euripides in his Andromeda a tragedy now lost-had a similar scene, which Aristophanes makes sport with in his Feast of Ceres. In the Greek Anthology (iii. 6) is an epigram of Leonidas, and in Book IV. are some lines by Guaradas, commencing

• Αχώ φίλα μοι συγκαταίνεσόν τί.—β τί;

(Echo! I love: advise me somewhat.-What?)

The French bards in the age of Marot were very fond of this conceit. Disraeli gives an ingenious specimen in his Curiosities of Literature. The lines here transcribed are by Joa

chim de Bellay:

Qui est l'auteur de ces maux avenus?-Venus.
Qu'étois-je avant d'entrer en ce passage?-Sage.
Qu'est-ce qu'aimer et se plaindre souvent?-Vent.
Dis-moi quelle est celle pour qui j'endure?—Dure.
Sent-elle bien la douleur qui me point?-Point

In The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth there is detailed a masque, which was enacted for her Majesty's pleasure, in which a dialogue was held with Echo "devised, penned, and pronounced by Master Gascoigne, and that upon a very great sudden." Here are three of the verses:

LONDON BEFORE THE RESTORATION.

What want'st thou that thou art in this sad taking?

But thou wouldst serve him with thy best endeavor?

ever.

What wouldst thou do if thou couldst here behold him?

hold him.

undone.

But if he comes not, what becomes of London?

The following song was written by Addison :

Echo, tell me, while I wander

O'er this fairy plain to prove him,
If my shepherd still grows fonder,
Ought I in return to love him?

Echo. Love him, love him.

If he loves, as is the fashion,

Should I churlishly forsake him?
Or, in pity to his passion,

Fondly to my bosom take him?

Echo.-Take him, take him.

Thy advice, then, I'll adhere to,
Since in Cupid's chains I've led him,

And with Henry shall not fear to

Marry, if you answer, "Wed him."
Echo.-Wed him, wed him.

PASQUINADE.

The following squib, cited by Mr. Motley in his Dutch Republic, from a MS. collection of pasquils, shows the prevalent opinion in the Netherlands concerning the parentage of Don John of Austria and the position of Barbara Blomberg:

-sed at Austriacum nostrum redeamus-camus
Hune Cesaris filium esse satis est notum-notum
Multi tamen de ejus patre dubitavere-vere

Cujus ergo filium eum dicunt Itali-Itali

Verum mater satis est nota in nostra republica-publica

Imo hactenus egit in Brabantiâ ter voere-hoere

Crimen est ne frui amplexu unius Cesaris tam generosi―osi

Pluribus ergo usa in vitâ est-ita est

Seu post Cesaris congressum non vere ante-ante

Tace garrula ne tale quippiam loquare-quare?

Nescis quâ poena afficiendum dixerit Belgium insigne-igne, &c.

THE GOSPEL ECHO.

Found in a pew in a church in Scotland, written in a female hand.

True faith producing love to God and man,
Say, Echo, is not this the gospel plan?
Echo. The gospel plan!

Must I my faith in Jesus constant show,
By doing good to all, both friend and foe?

Echo.-Both friend and fon'