The Argosy — page 155: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE ARGOSY. jiu. 3, 1868. 14! OLD-NEW JOKES. By Dr. Doran, F.S.A,, Author of “ Ther Mazesties’ Servants,” “ Tabl: Traits,” &¢. “é HERE is nothing new under the sun,” and that well-used remark was, probably, itself without novelty when it became part of the chronicle from which we derive it. There ss nothing new under the sun, not even our jokes, nor our fairy stories, nor our legends. They all come to us, more or less, from the East. The story of Amphitryon, of Jupiter, and Alemena is the variation of an old Hindoo romance, which tells how a deity of the dynasties before Olympus put on mortal shape, and, assuming the outward appearance of a warrior-chief, who was engaged in battle far away from home, entered the absentee’s house- hold as its lawful lord, and passed off the mistress of the house as his lawful lady. In either legend, the true master, when he descends in his proper person within his own circle, and finds who has usurped his authority there, expresses his most grateful sense of the honour which has been conferred upon him. And then, “little children,” do not lay the flattering unction to your young imaginations that Cinderella was invented in these later days, for your especial delight. The story of the little maid and her glass slipper is, literally, as old as the Pyramids. The author who charmed our childhood with the exquisite legend beginning with “‘ Once upon a time,” had no idea that the time referred to the period when Egypt told the hour by her water-clocks. When Rossini set “Una volta ’era un Re,” and put in something more exquisite still to the text ‘‘Non pifi mesta,” for Madame Colbran, just half a century ago, he had little idea that the real scene of the story lay, not in the old castle of Don Magnifico and the country seat of Don Ramiro, but on the banks of the Nile, before the first Rameses was King. The whole romance belongs to a lady called Rhodope, and she, the undoubtedly original Cinderella, lies buried, it is said, beneath the oldest of the Pyramids ! This fact should be suggestive to summer tourists in search of an object. It is singular to find how soon stories became old, even in early times. Even the exclamation of “Joe Miller!” to indicate a venerable joke, is as old in sense, if not in sound, as the days of the father of Alexander the Great. When Philip was the Macedonian king, there was a club of wits in Athens which met once a week, not in the tavern, comicaooks GO)