sable chief was sitting on a stump in the centre of a cleared half-acre, his face tattooed, trinkets dangling from his nose, ears, chin, etc., and his subjects were dancing around him. Having sold negroes, captured in war, to the slave-traders on the coast, the chief had learned to speak a little outlandish English. When the visitor approached His Majesty,—the dance suspended,—he exclaimed: "English?" "Yes," said Park, "I am an Englishman." "Way over yonder?" said the chief, pointing westward. "Yes," answered Park; "three thousand miles off." "What folks say 'bout me dar?" was the eager inquiry of his African Majesty.

The half-naked barbarians of Abyssinia claim descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and boast that all other kings are but upstarts and pretenders compared to theirs. Reminding the reader of the "most mighty emperor of Lilliput" (six inches in height), described in the famous state paper as the "delight and terror of the universe, whose dominions extend (about twelve miles in circumference) to the extremities of the globe; monarch of all monarchs, taller than the sons of men; whose feet press down to the centre, and whose head strikes against the sun; at whose nod the princes of the earth shake their knees; pleasant as the spring, comfortable as the summer, fruitful as autumn, dreadful as winter."

You remember the famous contest of an eminent wit, in Billingsgate. He was passing through the market, as the story goes, when he was rudely jostled and profanely addressed by a monstrous fish-woman. "See how I will bring her down without degrading myself," whispered he to his companion. Looking straight at the creature, he said to her, deliberately and emphatically, "You are a triangle!" which made her swear louder than ever. He then called her "a rectangle! a parallelogram!" That made her eloquent; but the great man with a big voice again broke through her volubility, screaming fiercely, "You are a miserable, wicked hypothenuse!" That dumfounded the brute. She had never heard swearing like that.

Curran used to tell of a like ludicrous encounter between himself and a fish-woman on the quay at Cork. This lady, whose tongue would have put Billingsgate to the blush, was urged one day to assail him, which she did with very little reluctance. "I thought myself a match for her," said he, "and valorously took up the gauntlet. But such a virago never skinned an eel. My whole vocabulary made not the least impression. On the contrary, she was manifestly becoming more vigorous every moment, and I had nothing for it but to beat a retreat. This, however, was to be done with dignity; so, drawing myself up disdainfully, I said, 'Madam, I scorn all further discourse with such an individual!' She did not understand the word, and thought it, no doubt, the very hyperbole of opprobrium. 'Individual, you wagabone!' she screamed, 'what do you mean by that? I'm no more an individual than your mother was?' Never was victory more complete. The whole sisterhood did homage to me, and I left the quay of Cork covered with glory."

The discomfiture of Miss Pinkerton, who attempted once to scold Becky Sharp in public, is familiar to every reader of Thackeray. Rebecca hit upon the plan of answering her in French, which quite routed the old woman.

A wise man, who lived a long life of virtue, study, travel, society, and reflection; who read the best books and conversed with the greatest and best men; the companion of philosophers and scientists; familiar with all important discoveries and experiments; after he was three-score and ten, wrote, "It is remarkable that the more there is known, the more it is perceived there is to be known. And the infinity of knowledge to be acquired runs parallel with the infinite faculty of knowing, and its development. Sometimes I feel reconciled to my extreme ignorance, by thinking, If I know nothing, the most learned know next to nothing." "Had I earlier known," said Goethe, "how many excellent things have been in existence, for hundreds and thousands of years, I should have written no line; I should have had enough else to do." Cardinal Farnese one day found Michel Angelo, when an old man, walking alone in the Coliseum, and expressed his surprise at finding him solitary amidst the ruins; to which he replied, "I go yet to school, that I may continue to learn." In his last days, he made a design of himself as a child in a go-cart, with this motto under it, "I am yet learning." Rubens complained, that just as he was beginning to understand his profession he was forced to quit it. Mozart declared on his death-bed, that he began to see what may be done in music. Buffon told a friend that, after passing fifty years at his desk, he was every day learning to write. Macaulay, the year before his death, after spending some hours over his own writings, wrote in his diary: "Alas! how short life and how long art! I feel as if I had just begun to understand how to write; and the probability is that I have very nearly done writing." Theophrastus, one hundred and seven years old, St. Jerome assures us, lamented that he was obliged to quit life at a time when he just began to be wise. Mrs. Jameson once asked Mrs. Siddons which of her great characters she preferred to play? She replied, after a moment's consideration, "Lady Macbeth is the character I have most studied." She afterward said that she had played the character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once without carefully reading over the part, and generally the whole play, in the morning; and that she never read over the play without finding something new in it; "something," she said, "which had not struck me so much as it ought to have struck me." Dugald Stewart said of Bacon's Essays that in reading them for the twentieth time he observed something which had escaped his attention in the nineteenth. "I do not know," said Newton, "what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Said Bossuet, "The term of my existence will be eighty years at most, but let us allow it an hundred. What ages have rolled before I had my being! How many will flow after I am gone! And what a small space do I occupy in this grand succession of years! I am as a blank; this diminutive interval is not sufficient to distinguish me from that nothing to which I must inevitably return. I seem only to have made my appearance for the purpose of increasing the number; and I am even useless—for the play would have been just as well performed, had I remained behind the scenes." Wrote Voltaire, "I am ignorant how I was formed, and how I was born. I was perfectly ignorant, for a quarter of my life, of the reasons of all that I saw, heard, and felt, and was a mere parrot, talking by rote in imitation of other parrots. When I looked about me and within me, I conceived that something existed from all eternity. Since there are beings actually existing, I concluded that there is some being necessary and necessarily eternal. Thus the first step which I took to extricate myself from my ignorance overpassed the limits of all ages—the boundaries of time. But when I was desirous of proceeding in this infinite career, I could neither perceive a single path, nor clearly distinguish a single object; and from the flight which I took to contemplate eternity, I have fallen back into the abyss of my original ignorance." "Heads of capacity, and such as are not full with a handful, or easy measure of knowledge, think they know nothing till they know all; which being impossible, they fall," said Sir Thomas Browne, "upon the opinion of Socrates, and only know they know not anything." Hiero, tyrant of Sicily, asked old