second of the Stuart kings are more self-consciously coarse, and therefore more offensive than they were under the second of the Tudors. The author himself appears to have been aware of this, and a flagrantly $0 filthy story of his collection is defiantly headed: This tale I writ on purpose to stick in the teeth of my proud, squeamish nice criticall reader.' Despite this aspect of 'Wit and Mirth,' it is one of the best of our jest-books, and much superior to that collection of about a century later which has strangely taken its place as by far the best known work in this branch of literature. The author says in effect that the collection is a poor thing, but his own, and he is unaware that any of these my poor and beggarly wardrobe of witty jests' have been in print before. Though some of the stories are found in early collections it must on the whole have been unusually fresh at the time, though a goodly number of the items have since taken their place among the foundation materials of the majority of jest-books. Two or three of the stories will indicate this:

'Twelve scholars riding together, one of them said, My masters, let us ride faster. Why, quoth another, methinks we ride a good pace, I'll warrant it is four mile an hour. Alas, said the first, what is four mile an hour amongst all us?'

'A man was very angry with his maid because his eggs were boiled too hard. Truly, said she, I have made them boil a long hour; but the next you have shall boil two hours, but they shall be tender enough.'

'A reverend preacher once reproved his auditors for sleeping at his sermons, but yet (said he) I pray you do not refrain from coming to church, though you do sleep; for God Almighty may chance to take some of you napping.'

'One said that he had travelled so far that he had laid his hand upon the hole where the wind came forth; a second said that he had been at the furthest edge of the world, and driven a nail quite through it; the third replied that he had been further, for he was then on the other side of the world and clenched that nail.'

Taylor includes several of his own mild jestings and certain stories evidently of his own devising, in some of which (as in one concerning Bias the philosopher as the inventor of the game of bowls) he goes on in a

sustained punning strain that was much imitated and developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, until it may be said to have died in the odour of pantomime and burlesque, to be resuscitated from time to time in the service of advertising commercialism.

For the period between 1630 and 1739 there are about sixty jest-book titles old and new-showing the second century of this literary manifestation as but little more productive than the previous one, which might suggest a merely stabilised popularity if we did not recall that the period covers the disturbed years of the Civil War, and of the Commonwealth. The most notable of the books which I thus pass over was the 'Banquet of Jests' associated with the name of Archie Armstrong, jester to the first two Stuart kings. The earliest edition of that book belongs indeed to the same year as Taylor's 'Wit and Mirth,' and might equally well serve as marking an epoch in the growth of the jest-book.

In the year 1739 there was published a slim shilling book of seventy pages with the title Joe Miller's Jests: or, the Wits Vade-Mecum '-a small book that has won great fame on surprisingly slender merits. The compiler, doing as many men had done before, utilised the name of a lately deceased popular comedian as title to his somewhat mediocre collection of jests. This proved so promptly popular that, it is said, eleven editions were published within nine years; and the name of Joe Miller became so valuable a trade-label among the booksellers 3 that for well over a century it was used on the title page of a great diversity of jest-books in which all connexion with the original, other than nominal, had been lost. The original 'Joe Miller' consisted of 247 jests,* in the main no better and no worse than in dozens of volumes that had preceded it, and many of them still marked by such coarseness of theme and language as characterised in varying degree most of the collections up to the close of the 18th century. The contemporary popularity of the book was perhaps partly a reflexion of the popularity of the Drury Lane actor whose name it bore, and partly in consequence of the popular price at which it was published.

1

* In Bohn's edition of Joe Miller's Jest-Book' (1859), the numbe of jests had grown to 1546.

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The jest-book bearing the name of Joe Miller marks a notable stage in the history of the English jest-book rather from the position accorded it by tradition than from the possession of any outstanding qualities justifying that position. Its success seems to have had the effect of extraordinarily increasing the popularity of the jest-book generally, for between 1739 and 1864, the year of the next landmark jest-book that I have chosen, my tentative bibliographical list has upwards of 320 titles. By the time that Mark Lemon compiled The Jest-Book,' first published in 1864, popular taste had so improved that the publication of coarse and salacious jests was no longer tolerated, and though such are absent he made his collection include 1711 items-thei pick of the good things that had appeared in earlier jest-books along with many uttered by or fathered on the wits of the 19th century. His collection illustrated an increased appreciation of the witty saying as against t the merely droll or mildly humorous; he, however, followed an example set by other compilers and unduly bombasted out his collection of jests with epigrams, the artistry of which ill accords with the naturalness, the naïveté it may be, the seeming spontaneity, the casual anecdotal character of the ordinary run of jest-book material. The success of Mark Lemon's work may be gauged not only from the fact that it has been reprinted many times, but also because since the year of its first issue there does not appear to have been any new issue of Joe Miller.

Since 1864 there have probably been published upwards of a hundred more jest-books, and to take up one of the latest, 'Bubble and Squeak,' is to be struck by the similarity of the appeal to the sense of humour that runs through this class of literature from its earliest to its latest manifestations; though new conditions, new fashions, new inventions, may vary the setting. If, however, the earlier jest-books are to be taken as throwing light on the social history of their time, this aspect has been lost or much modified by the habit compilers have of taking an old story and redressing it to suit their own day, or attributing to a contemporary something said or done in an earlier time. The first story of our latest jest-book is a case in point.

'A certain well-known professor on the medical side of one of our universities in the north was honoured by a royal appointment. With a touch of pride he wrote on a blackifboard in his laboratory, "Professor informs his students the that he has this day been appointed honorary physician to the King." After the class had assembled, he had occasion th to leave the room for a short time, and on his return found that some one had added the words, "God Save the King."

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The implication is, of course, that this is a story of a present-day professor and King George; some of us, however, can recall that it was recorded many years ago of Prof. Wilson of Edinburgh and Queen Victoria.

In essentials it may be said that the British jest-book arrived at maturity from the first. Such differences as we find between the first ones published in the 16th century and the latest published in the 20th are differences of detail, differences of omission owing to change of taste rather than anything else, with perhaps evidence of a growing appreciation of wit as an added spice to the simpler fare of humour; the incidents in which fun is found are curiously constant through the centuries. Man's circumstances change, but man remains much the same.

Though the past hundred years produced considerably fewer jest-books than the century before, the change that might seem to be indicated is merely one of appearance. The growth of the popular periodical press with its constant succession of journals which might almost be regarded as serialised jest-books, may have had the effect of diminishing the output of jestbooks themselves; but the output of jest-book material is probably greater in the present generation than at any time before. The popular appetite for anecdote for which John Rastell first catered with a few horsd'œuvres in 1526 appears to have grown to a veritable bulimy when we our see bookstalls with their weeklyrenewed piles of the productions of the comic press.

WALTER JERROLD.

Art. 8.-HUNGARY OF TO-DAY.

WHEN one contracts the habit of spending a month or more out of each year on the Orient Express the glamour of a transcontinental voyage begins to wear off. In the inevitable battle for a waggon-lit seul'-that is to say, for a compartment where you can snore from Calais to Constantinople without intimate competition-the exultation over victory or the indignation at defeat, so keen in the earlier days, dwindle into mild reflexions upon the rapacity of one's fellow-man. Once on that polyglot train the babble of tongues that seven years ago were mostly unintelligible and always mysterious no longer excites curiosity or even interest. Such are the uses of familiarity. But though the Orient Express has lost its glamour, I confess that whenever it bears me across four or five frontiers to Hungary the prospect of again seeing Budapest, even after a short absence, never ceases to give me a thrill of anticipation. For me, Budapest has a charm and an appeal to the æsthetic possessed by no other city of Europe. Most of my friends from England and America seeing for the first time, black and sharp against a setting sun, the silhouette of medieval Citadel, royal Palace, and Coronation Church that crown with tower, spire, dome, and rampart the ancient hill of Buda-'for centuries the prize in the struggle between East and West'-or who watch at night the Danube flashing back a thousand lights, have said: 'How is it we did not know it was so beautiful?'

And then, of course, as in every other country, come the disillusionments and the irritations, less or greater according to the provincialism of the foreign visitor. When you desire something done and when two Hungarians are there to do it, there will almost certainly ensue a torrent of conversation worthy of an Eastern bazaar. They love to talk. To the foreigner this loquacity is all the more annoying because, with rare exceptions, he is unable to understand a word that is said. The Magyar language is unlike any other known language, and no one knows exactly from which part of Asia it originated. The Hungarians are very