The Argosy — page 157: what you’re looking at

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

THe ARGosy. Old-New Fokes. 143 cessor, who may, probably, turn and ‘ Chin, chin /” to the original inventor of the story in Pekin! Although most of the ancient Greek traits of simplicity have been ‘transferred in modem times to Irishmen, the Scots have come in for a share, not only taking the joke, but naming a Scottish individual as the hero of it. One of the ancient stories in Hierocles is thus appropriated in the north :—‘‘ Duncan M‘Girder wanted to use his mare, by degrees, to live without meat, and just as he had put her on a straw a day, the poor thing died.” - This is the Hherocles story which was appropriated and made a fable of by the writer who 1s known to us as A‘sop, and which has been transplanted into every country in the world. There would really seem to be nothing new; tramways are found in Thebes and Memphis ; the balloon flies in idea through many a classical story; the telegraph, under another form, flashed intelligence from one district to another of the ancient world; and even our choicest classical traditions have various homes. When Europeans first arrived among the New Zealanders, they found Hero and Leander a local legend, with the slight difference that it was the lady who dashed through the flood to meet the dusky lover, who quietly held the lamp to guide her to the trysting-place. There 1s something very singular in the way in which errors still spring up, like weeds, on the spot where the onginal seed was sown. Not many months ago, the Zimes’ correspondent in Paris communicated to that paper the translation of a letter which had just appeared in a French provincial journal, as an illustration of the simplicity of the modern Gaul. The sample was afforded by a letter, allegedly written by a soldier in hospital to his colonel, who had sent to the invalid the news of his father’s death. The soldier’s epistle was to this effect :— “Colonel: I thank you for the death of my father. It’s an accident, like any other; let us hope, however, that it will have no bad conse- quences. . . . I have just broken my leg, with which I have the honour to be, your very obedient servant!” Now, this sample of modern French simplicity and humour is as old as the oldest French jest-book, and that will give it an age of several centuries. But authors, journalists, and critics at home occasionally err, even like their brethren abroad. The Examiner recently reviewed a book called “The Campaigner at Home,” by SHer/ey. In that book the author states that a clergyman—a friend of his—had assured him that he had recently met with a sample of ignorance which had sorely distressed him. Encountering a stranger girl in his parish, the clergyman asked her whose child she was; to which she answered that she was “the child of wrath ;” and on being asked where she was born, she as readily rephied, “born in sin.” Now, what a respectable clergyman relates, to an equally respectable author, as a trait of his recent experiences, must be true; but the singularity is, that the Z.xaminer, whose critics are not ECOMicoOolkxs.cO©