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'Hang it, Johnnie, cried Scott, 'I believe I can make a motto sooner than you will find one. He did so accordingly; and from that hour, whenever memory failed to suggest an appropriate epigraph, he had recourse to the inexhaustible mines of "old play" or "old ballad," to which we owe some of the most exquisite verses that ever flowed from his pen." J. G. Lockhart.
Of the lamps-festoons, astonishing transparencies, and glad symbolic devices, I could say a great deal; but will mention only two, both of comfortably edible or quasi-edible tendency: 1. That of David Schulze, Flesher by profession; who had a Transparency large as life, representing his own fat Person in the act of felling a fat Ox; to which was appended this epigraph:
They wanted to read the originals Gregory of Tours, Monstrelet, Commines, all those whose names were odd or agreeable. But the events got confused through want of knowledge of the dates. Fortunately they possessed Dumouchel's work on mnemonics, a duodecimo in boards with this epigraph: "To instruct while amusing." It combined the three systems of Allevy, of Pâris, and of Fenaigle.
My brother is my enemy; he has given me sure indications of it and it appears that his hate will not cease until I no longer exist. I hope that he may long survive me and be happy. This desire is my only apology." "The epigraph of the little work which I would give to the public," Casanova wrote the 23rd August 1793, "is 'In pondere et mensura'. It is concerned with gravity and measure.
He brought back from Greece the mortal remains of the philosopher Gemistos Plethon, buried them in a sarcophagus outside his church, and wrote upon the tomb this epigraph: 'These remains of Gemistus of Byzantium, chief of the sages of his day, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, son of Pandolfo, commander in the war against the king of the Turks in the Morea, induced by the mighty love with which he burns for men of learning, brought hither and placed within this chest. 1466. He, the most fretful and turbulent of men, read books with patient care, and bore the contradictions of pedants in the course of long discussions on philosophy and arts and letters.
The epigraph on one of his unsuccessful pieces with which he committed it to the press, is highly amusing: "As it was never acted, but most negligently played by some, the King's servants, and more squeamishly beheld and censured by others, the King's subjects." Jonson was a critical poet in the good and the bad sense of the word.
From such a title and such an epigraph one might expect the most incendiary sentiments in the pages which follow, and that Sophia had nothing less in view than to overthrow the usurper; but this she disclaims: she has no intention, she avers, "to stir up any of my own sex to revolt against the men, or to invert the present order of things with regard to government and authority" Her sole object appears to be to bring men to a proper sense of their deficiencies and the emptiness of their pretensions.
The bad taste and impertinence of this epigraph are often enhanced by the slightness of the work or the gift which it commemorates.
In the council of state, the statesman is in his robe, on the battlefield the warrior is beneath his armor, but in his bedchamber, in his undress, we find the man. It has been said that no man is, a hero to his valet. It would give wide latitude to a witty remark, which has become proverbial, to make it the epigraph of these memoirs.
The head is well cut; the features have individuality and expression; the epigraph is sufficiently legible. Still more is his sculpture calculated to surprise us.