FOUNDLING QUOTATIONS.

Quotations play no small part in conversation and general literature. There are some which we know must inevitably be made under certain circumstances. It is almost impossible, for instance, for the conventional novelist, when he wants to convey to his readers the fact that his heroine’s nose is of a particular order—which, formerly, through our lack of invention, we could only describe by a somewhat ungraceful term—to avoid quoting Lord Tennyson’s description of the feature as it graced Lynette’s fair face—‘Tip-tilted like the petal of a flower.’ We feel sure that it must come; and there is now, happily, no occasion for a young lady in the position of one of Miss Braddon’s earlier heroines, when listening to a detailed description of her appearance, to interrupt the speaker, as he is about to mention the characteristics of her nose, with a beseeching, ‘Please, don’t say pug!’

And then, does anybody ever expect to read a description of a certain celebrated Scotch ruin, without being told that

or to get through an account of the ancient gladiatorial games at Rome without coming across the line,

You know, perhaps, what praise Mark Twain took to himself because he did not quote this line. ‘If any man has a right,’ he says, ‘to feel proud of himself and satisfied, surely it is I; for I have written about the Coliseum, and the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lions, and yet have never used the phrase, “Butchered to make a Roman holiday.” I am the only free white man of mature age who has accomplished this since Byron originated the expression.’ This little piece of self-congratulation rather reminds one of the lady who was accused of never being able to write a letter without adding a P.S. At last, she managed to write one without the usual addition; but when she saw what she had succeeded in doing, she wrote: ‘P.S.—At last, you see, I have written a letter without a P.S.’ And so, though Mark Twain managed to steer clear of the hackneyed quotation in the body of his account, he could not help running against it in a P.S.

Then we have all the multitude of Shaksperean quotations which are sure to be heard in their accustomed places, many of which, indeed, have become—to quote again—such ‘household words,’ that to very many people they do not appear to be quotations at all, but merely every-day expressions, of the same order as ‘A fine day’ or ‘A biting wind.’

Again, when we read of some cheerful fireside scene, when the curtains are drawn closely against the winter wind that is roaring round the house, and the logs are crackling and spitting in the grate, and the urn is hissing and steaming upon the table, don’t we know that a reference to the ‘cup which cheers but not inebriates’ is certainly coming? This, by the way, is a line that is almost invariably incorrectly quoted, and it is the usual and incorrect form that we have given. We shall leave our readers to turn up the line for themselves, and see what the correct form is, and then, perhaps, the trouble they will thereby have had will serve to impress it upon their minds, and prevent them again quoting it incorrectly.

But it was not with the intention of talking about these well-known and every-day quotations from Tennyson, Scott, Byron, Shakspeare, and Cowper that we thought of writing this paper. We want to talk about a few quotations, quite as well known as those to which we have already alluded, which have been so bandied about that all trace, or nearly all trace, of their original parish and paternity has been lost; and, though they are as familiar to us as the most hackneyed phrases from our best known poets, no one can say with certainty by whom they were first spoken or written.

A good many wagers have been made as to the source of the well-known and much-quoted couplet:

The popular belief is that they are to be found in Butler’s Hudibras. But the pages of that poem may be turned over and over again, and the lines will not be found in them. We may as well say at once that they cannot be found anywhere in the exact form in which they are usually quoted. The late Mr James Yeowell, formerly sub-editor of Notes and Queries, once thought that he had discovered their author in Oliver Goldsmith, as a couplet, varying very slightly from the form we have given, occurs in The Art of Poetry on a New Plan, which was compiled by Newbery—the children’s publisher—more than a century ago, and revised and enlarged by Goldsmith. But the lines are to be found in a book that was published some thirteen years before The Art of Poetry, namely, Ray’s History of the Rebellion. There they appear as a quotation, and no hint is given as to the source from which they are taken. Ray gives them as follows (first edition, 1749, page 54):

Though this is the earliest appearance in print of the exact words, or almost the exact words, in which the quotation is now usually given, it is by no means the earliest appearance of a similar thought. Even as far back as Demosthenes we find it. It appears, too, in Scarron, in his Virgile Travesti, if we remember rightly. And now we must confess that the still prevailing belief that the lines occur in Hudibras is not entirely without a raison d’être, and it is not impossible that Ray may have thought he was quoting Butler, preserving some hazy and indistinct recollection of lines read long ago, and putting their meaning, perhaps quite unwittingly and unconsciously, into a new and unauthorised form. This, however, is mere conjecture. The lines, as they appear in Hudibras (part iii. canto iii., lines 243, 244), are as follows:

We may just add that Collet, in his Relics of Literature, says that the couplet occurs in a small volume of miscellaneous poems by Sir John Mennis, written in the reign of Charles II. With this book, however, we are unacquainted, and cannot, therefore, discuss the appearance of the foundling lines in it, or what claims its author may have to be their legitimate parent.

All readers of Tennyson—and who that reads at all is not numbered amongst them?—know well the opening stanza of In Memoriam:

These lines contain another quotation of the order we have designated as ‘Foundling Quotations.’ Who is the singer, ‘to one clear harp in divers tones,’ to whom Lord Tennyson refers? Passages from Seneca and from St Augustine (Bishop of Hippo) have been suggested as inspiring the poet when he penned the lines; but neither Seneca nor St Augustine can be said to sing ‘to one clear harp in divers tones.’ Perhaps the most reasonable hypothesis is that Lord Tennyson had in his mind Longfellow’s beautiful poem of St Augustine’s Ladder, the opening lines of which are:

and the closing ones:

The question, however, though Lord Tennyson is still alive, is one that is not likely ever to be clearly solved; for we have very good authority for saying that he has himself quite forgotten of what poet or verses he was thinking when he composed the first stanza of In Memoriam.

The equally well-known

in Locksley Hall, refers, of course, to the line in Dante’s Inferno.

The trite ‘Not lost, but gone before,’ might alone provide subject-matter for a fairly long essay. Like the other quotations which we are discussing, it can be definitely assigned to no author. The thought can be traced back as far as the time of Antiphanes, a portion of whose eleventh ‘fragment,’ Cumberland has translated, fairly literally, as follows:

Seneca, in his ninety-ninth Epistle, says: ‘Quem putas periisse, præmissus est’ (He whom you think dead has been sent on before); and he also has: ‘Non amittuntur, sed præmittuntur’ (They are not lost, but are sent on before), which corresponds very closely with the popular form of the quotation. Cicero has the remark that ‘Friends, though absent, are still present;’ and it is very probable that it is to this phrase of Cicero that we are really indebted for the modern, ‘Not lost, but gone before.’ We may note that Rogers, in his Human Life, has, ‘Not dead, but gone before.’

Then there is the somewhat similar, ‘Though lost to sight, to memory dear,’ which no one has succeeded in satisfactorily tracing to its original source. It was said, some years ago, that the line was to be found in a poem published in a journal whose name was given as The Greenwich Magazine, in 1701, and written by one Ruthven Jenkyns. The words formed the refrain of each stanza of the poem. We give one of them as a sample:

Mr Bartlett, however, in the last edition of his Dictionary of Quotations, has demolished this story of Mr Ruthven Jenkyns; and the line is still unclaimed and fatherless. Probably, as in the case of the last mentioned, ‘Not lost, but gone before,’ its germ is to be found in an expression of Cicero.

There is a Latin line familiar to all of us, ‘Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis’ (The times change, and we change with them), which we are frequently hearing and seeing. This is a much-abused line; probably there is none more so; and we do not think we shall be guilty of exaggeration if we say that it is misquoted ten times for every time it is correctly cited. The positions of the nos and the et are usually interchanged; the result being, of course, a false quantity; for the line is a hexameter. Now, who first wrote this line? The answer must be, as in the cases of all our other ‘Foundling Quotations,’ that we do not know. But in this particular instance we may venture to be a little more certain and definite in our remarks concerning its pedigree than we have dared to be in previous ones. There can be little doubt that the line is a corruption of one to be found in the Delitiæ Poetarum Germanorum (vol. i. page 685), amongst the poems of Matthias Borbonius, who considers it a saying of Lotharius I., who flourished, as the phrase goes, about 830 A.D. We give the correct form of the line in question, and the one which follows it:

There is another foundling Latin line, almost as frequently quoted as the one we have just been discussing, namely, ‘Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat’ (Whom the gods would destroy, they first madden). Concerning this there is a note in the fifth chapter of the eighth volume of Mr Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, in which it is said to be a translation from a Greek iambic of Euripides, which is quoted; but no such line is to be found amongst the writings of Euripides. Words, however, expressing the same sentiment are to be found in a fragment of Athenagoras; and it is most likely that the Latin phrase now so commonly quoted is merely a translation from this writer’s Greek, though by whom it was first made we cannot say. The same sentiment has been expressed more than once in English poetry.

Dryden, in the third part of The Hind and the Panther, has:

And Butler writes in Hudibras (part iii. canto ii., lines 565, 566):

Further consideration will probably bring to the reader’s mind other examples of these ‘Foundling Quotations’ which have won for themselves an imperishable existence; though their authors, whose names these few-syllabled sentences might have kept alive for ever, if they were only linked the one with the other, are now utterly unknown and forgotten. Any one who can succeed in discovering the real authorship of the quotations we have been considering will win for himself the credit of having solved problems which have long and persistently baffled the most curious and diligent research.