A curious bet was made in one of the London clubs, some years ago, that will doubtless point a moral. It was that a certain member could not, within two hours, on London-bridge, sell one hundred new guineas at a penny apiece.
The man took his place on the bridge with a little tray on which he had the coins. He informed the passers-by that they were genuine gold coins from the Bank of England, and that they were to be had for a penny each.
The cartmen and policemen laughed at him. When the time had expired, such is human incredulity, that he had sold but two, which a maid-servant bought to amuse her two little charges.
“An upstart crow beautified with our feathers.” — Robert Greene
“The most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.” — Samuel Pepys, on A Midsummer Night’s Dream
“His rude unpolished style and antiquated phrase and wit.” — Lord Shaftesbury
“A disproportioned and misshapen giant.” — David Hume
“Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.” — Samuel Johnson
“I cannot read him, he is such a bombast fellow.” — George II
“Was there ever such stuff as the greater part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so.” — George III
“Shakespeare — what trash are his works in the gross.” — Edward Young
“One of the greatest geniuses that ever existed, Shakespeare, undoubtedly wanted taste.” — Horace Walpole
“I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.” — Darwin, Autobiography
“The undisputed fame enjoyed by Shakespeare as a writer is, like every other lie, a great evil.” — Tolstoy
“If all the work of Shakespeare could be gathered up and burned in one pile, the world would witness the most beneficial action for the sake of literature since the invention of alcohol.” — Waterloo, Iowa, Times-Tribune, 1920
After seeing Henry Irving’s production of Cymbeline, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.”
Donald E. Knuth composed this poem in honor of Martin Gardner. When the right-hand portions of the eight-line verse are interchanged, it becomes a seven-line verse. Which line disappears?
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born — a hundred million years — and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
In January 1797 London tea broker James Tilly Matthews was committed to the Bethlem psychiatric hospital after increasingly erratic outbursts in which he claimed he was being persecuted by political enemies. In 1809 Matthews’ friends petitioned for his release, arguing that he was no longer insane, and Bethlem apothecary John Haslam published a book-length study showing how bad his case had become.
Matthews believed that a gang of spies were occupying a Roman wall near the asylum and torturing him with a device called an air loom. The loom was operated by “the Middle Man,” while “Sir Archy” and the “Glove Woman” focused its rays on Matthews and “Jack the Schoolmaster” recorded their effects. Similar gangs, Matthews said, were operating looms all over London to influence the thinking of the nation’s leaders. The tortures included “fluid locking,” “cutting soul from sense,” “stone making,” “thigh talking,” and “lobster-cracking,” which Matthews also described as “sudden death-squeezing”:
In short, I do not know any better way for a person to comprehend the general nature of such lobster-cracking operation, than by supposing himself in a sufficiently large pair of nut-crackers or lobster-crackers, with teeth which should pierce as well as press him through every particle within and without; he experiencing the whole stress, torture, driving, oppressing, and crush all together.
Matthews remained an asylum inpatient until his death in 1815. His is now considered to be the first documented case of paranoid schizophrenia.
The Waterford Chronicle requests that persons supplying the Journal with obituaries will attend to the following scale of prices (the idea is droll); for a simple death two shillings and sixpence. For the death of a person deeply regretted, five shillings. For the death of a person who lived a perfect pattern of all the Christian virtues, and died regretted by the whole country, ten shillings. For the death of a person who possessed extensive literature and profound erudition, superadded to which, his whole life was remarkable for piety, humility, charity, and self-denial, one pound. For the death of a lady, whose husband is inconsolable for her loss, and who was the delight of the circle in which she moved, one pound ten shillings. For the death of a gentleman, who had only been six months married, who was an example of every conjugal and domestic virtue, and whose widow is in a state of anguish bordering on distraction, two pounds. For the death of an aristocrat, who was a pattern of meekness, a model of humility, a patron of distressed genius, a genuine philanthropist, an exemplary Christian, an extensive alms-giver, profoundly learned, unremitting to the duties of his station, kind, hospitable, and affectionate to his tenantry, and whose name will be remembered and his loss deplored to the latest posterity, five pounds. For every additional good quality, whether domestic, moral, or religious, there will be an additional charge.
Georgia slaves Ellen and William Craft made a daring bid for freedom in 1848: Ellen dressed as a white man and, attended by William as her servant, undertook a perilous 1,000-mile journey by carriage, train, and steamship to the free state of Pennsylvania in the North. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the couple’s harrowing five-day adventure through the slave-owning South.
We’ll also discover the best place in the United States to commit a crime and sample the aphoristic poetry of Danish mathematician Piet Hein.
In October 1780, a month after Benedict Arnold defected to the British, this acrostic appeared in American newspapers:
B orn for a curse to virtue and mankind,
E arth’s broadest realm ne’er knew so black a mind.
N ight’s sable veil your crimes can never hide,
E ach one so great, ‘twould glut historic tide.
D efunct, your cursed memory will live
I n all the glare that infamy can give.
C urses of ages will attend your name,
T raitors alone will glory in your shame.
A lmighty vengeance sternly waits to roll
R ivers of sulphur on your treacherous soul:
N ature looks shuddering back with conscious dread
O n such a tarnished blot as she has made.
L et hell receive you, riveted in chains,
D oomed to the hottest focus of its flames.
Arnold’s perfidy so blackened his name that he’s strangely absent even from his own memorials. A monument (above) at the site of the Battle of Saratoga depicts only a boot, to reflect the leg wound that ended Arnold’s fighting career. His name appears nowhere in the inscription:
In memory of
the “most brilliant soldier” of the
Continental Army
who was desperately wounded
on this spot the sally port of
BORGOYNES GREAT WESTERN REDOUBT
7th October, 1777
winning for his countrymen
the decisive battle of the
American Revolution
and for himself the rank of
Major General.
A second monument at Saratoga includes four niches: Three contain statues of Horatio Gates, Philip Schuyler, and Daniel Morgan, but the fourth niche is empty.
And West Point displays a commemorative plaque for every general who served in the revolution. One plaque bears a rank and a date (“Major General / Born 1740”), but no name.
