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Updated: June 9, 2025
The reader will recognise many old acquaintances, but he need not touch his hat, lest, his politeness weary him. These old stories are but "pick'd to be new vann'd." Hierocles' Facetiae. An irritable man went to visit a sick friend, and asked him concerning his health.
The second room, announced by the word "Counting-Room" on its door, harmonized with the grim facetiae of its neighbor. In one corner was a large space screened off by an oak balustrade, trellised with copper wire and furnished with a sliding cat-hole, within which was an enormous iron chest.
Black letter, early printed, first editions Elizabethan and Victorian, every poor fly ambered in large paper, etc. etc.; in short, he ran through the gamut of that craze which takes its turn in due time with marbles, peg-tops, beetles, and foreign stamps with probably the two exceptions of Bewick, for whom he could never batter up an enthusiasm, and 'facetiae. These latter needed too much camphor, he used to say.
At the head of the "Facetiae" in the morning's paper, Lousteau inserted the following note: "M. Dauriat is bringing out a second edition of M. Nathan's book. Evidently he does not know the legal maxim, Non bis in idem. All honor to rash courage." Lousteau's words had been like a torch for burning; Lucien's hot desire to be revenged on Dauriat took the place of conscience and inspiration.
Some there were, no doubt, who perceived the influence of Rabelais in the incessant digressions and the burlesque of philosophy; others, it may be, found a reminder of Burton in the parade of learning; and yet a few others, the scattered students of French facetiae of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, may have read the broad jests with a feeling that they had "seen something like it before."
Mr Moffat, grieved in his soul, was becoming inextricably bewildered by such facetiae as these, when an egg, and it may be feared not a fresh egg, flung with unerring precision, struck him on the open part of his well-plaited shirt, and reduced him to speechless despair.
Not the daily papers they were far too much for her; but the weekly paper from her own town, which lasted her till a new one came, as she spelled it through, and communicated the facts and facetiae as she thought them suited to our capacity. She was a better walker than I, and would seldom come out in the carriage, for she always caught cold when she did so.
His motive in this was very obvious. The crammer argued, not only wisely, but well, that a certain proportion of these questions were pretty safe to be again propounded in subsequent contests, just as one sees antique Joe Millers appear again and again, at regular recurring intervals, in the excruciating "Facetiae" columns of those penny serials, of limited merit and "unlimited circulation," that delight the eyes and ears of below-stairs readers, the staple of whose mental pabulum they principally form.
The story of the Baron's horse being cut in two by the descending portcullis of a besieged town, and the horseman's innocence of the fact until, upon reaching a fountain in the midst of the city, the insatiate thirst of the animal betrayed his deficiency in hind quarters, was probably derived by Raspe from the Facetiae Bebelianae of Heinrich Bebel, first published at Strassburgh in 1508.
How savage the satire was how fierce the assault what garbage hurled at opponents what foul blows were hit what language of Billingsgate flung! Fancy a party in a country-house now looking over Woodward's facetiae or some of the Gilray comicalities, or the slatternly Saturnalia of Rowlandson! Whilst we live we must laugh, and have folks to make us laugh.
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