128 UNLIMITED LIABILITY. the world, and are assigned successively to those whom it may be the fashion to celebrate." SainteBeuve writes of the bishop-count of Noyon, Clermont-Tonnerre, that "selon l'usage du monde envers ces réputations riches, une fois faites et adoptées, on lui prêtait quantité de mots." Judge Haliburton's Senator professes to be not very fond of telling stories himself, for though one may know them to be original, still they may not be new; so certain is he that the same thing has often been said in different ages, and by people in different countries, who were not aware that a similar idea had occurred to and been expressed by others.* * "I have heard repartees and smart sayings related here [in England], as having been uttered by well-known wits, that I have myself heard in America, and often long before they were perpetrated here. If you relate a story of that kind, you are met by the observation, 'Oh, that was said by Sydney Smith, or Theodore Hook, or some other wit of the day.'" —The Season Ticket, chap. ii. A reviewer of Mr. Timbs' Lives of Wits and Humorists pointed out at the time that the very same story was told by him, almost in the same words, of Foote and Sheridan: the adjuncts were certainly different, and were very circumstantial, as in most of these verbal facetiæ; but the joke was precisely the same. George Peele's memory is truly said to have suffered considerably by the Merry Conceited Fests that go under his name; his innocence of many of the scurrilous jests imputed to him being probable enough. "It was an easy step," says VIII. Trumpet Tones. Exod. xix. 16, sq.; Judges vii. 18, sq.; 1 Cor. xv. 52. HE trumpet is second to no other musical THE instrument as regards prominent mention in holy writ. The voice of the trumpet exceeding loud, was among the causes that made all the people in the camp tremble, when the mount burned with fire. And it was after the voice of the trumpet one of his critics, to saddle "George,” on the credit of some real peccadilloes, as well as witticisms, of the Sheridan sort, with many imaginary ones. Many of the apophthegms ascribed to Publius Syrus are thought to be probably due to others; yet, as Lord Lytton observes, the very imputation to him of sayings so exquisite, attests his rank as the sayer of exquisite things. Mr. Theodore Martin tells us that the reputation of Professor Aytoun, as a motive power in Blackwood, absorbed by its powerful attraction all fragments of matter similar to his own which entered the common system. We find Lord Chesterfield writing to Sir Thomas Robinson, in 1757, that "people have long thrown out their wit and 130 TRUMPET TONES. had sounded long, waxing louder and louder, that Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice, Gideon's stratagem against the host of Midian comprised a special use of the trumpet by each man of his three hundred; all, in unison, were to blow their trumpets, at the appointed signal, and to cry, "The `sword of the Lord, and of Gideon!" And the expedient was a triumph. The prophet is bidden cry aloud, spare not, "lift up thy voice like a trumpet." Homer can offer no simile so effective as that of the trumpet to indicate the vibrant, ringing, clangorous, resonant accents of the voice of Achilles : humour under my name, by way of trial: if it takes, the true father owns his child; if it does not, the foundling is mine." So Butler words it, in one of his metrical satires : "The world is full of curious wit Which those, that father, never writ," etc. So again Hudibras in his epistle to Sidrophel, remarking, "That all those stories that are laid Too truly to you, and those made, And lesser authors named no more." Fra Rupert, in Landor's dramatic trilogy, exclaims, "And this too will be laid upon my shoulders. If men are witty, all the wit of others Bespangles them." To apply the reflection of Shakspeare's cloistered, philo sophic duke : "thousand 'scapes of wit Make thee the father of their idle dream." A SUDDEN BLAST. "As the loud trumpet's brazen mouth from far 131 Hosts dropp'd their arms, and trembled as they heard." And was not the voice which John heard in Patmos, saying, “I am Alpha and Omega," and which sounded as from behind him, a great voice, as of a trumpet? With trumpets the conspirators proclaimed Jehu to be king. And when Athaliah, looking, saw the newly proclaimed king, young Jehoash, standing by a pillar, as the manner was, and heard how the people of the land rejoiced, and "blew with trumpets," then it was that the foiled and baffled dowager rent her robes, and cried "Treason, treason!" Racine makes his precautionary high-priest enjoin his agents, in taking measures for the discomfiture of cette reine, ivre d'un fol orgueil, "Prenez soin qu'à l'instant la trompette guerrière And one of his subordinates thus describes, in an after scene, the success of that sudden blast-that bray and blare of brazen trumpets: "Partout en même temps la trompette a sonné; 132 THE TRUMPET IN HOLY WRIT. Trumpets were blown by the priests before the ark. When Hezekiah commanded to offer the burnt-offering upon the altar, the priests with the trumpets stood by, and "the song of the Lord began with the trumpets." With trumpets the. psalmist would have a joyful noise made before the Lord. At the fall of Babylon, in apocalyptic vision, the voice of trumpeters should be heard no more at all in her. But the seer of Patmos has to tell of seven angels, with each his trumpet,* which he prepared to sound. And another apostle declares in one epistle that the Lord Himself shall finally descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and the trump of God; awaking the dead in Christ to rise first ;-and in another, that we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump; for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. Milton once and again makes reference to, the sounding of that last blast of all. As where, in the * An Edinburgh divine has told the world how, some time since, an "individual" calling himself the Angel Gabriel held large assemblages of the Modern Athenians in breathless attention by preaching with a trumpet in his hand, which he sounded at the end of each paragraph of his sermon. The story implies that the modern, like the ancient Athenians, love something new-anything for a sensation-rì kalvótepov. |