THE CAP OF LIBERTY.

The cap of liberty, which still adorned the milestones near the French capital, in 1813, and which were to have been effaced, in order to make way for Napoleon’s eagle, were supplanted at the restoration by the fleur de lis. This is the history of the French revolution in a single sentence.

Among the Romans, the presentation of a cap was part of the ceremony observed in the manumission of slaves, and, therefore, perhaps, it was adopted as an emblem of freedom. The custom is still preserved at the investiture of a doctor in the university graduations. The circumstance gives a strong meaning to a whimsical speech of Sir R. St. G., who, at the celebrated Catholic dinner at the Black Abbey, at Kilkenny, got very tipsy. During the process he had made several efforts to be as eloquent as his neighbours, but was coughed down as often as he got on his legs. In all the sulkiness of a fuddled man, he resolved to go away; but he discovered that his hat had gone before him, and suddenly finding a pause and a subject for his oratory, he exclaimed, “Gentlemen, I came here to emancipate you, and, d—n you, you have stolen my hat.”

À propos to university graduations: when the present Duke of Gloucester took his degree, his father, who was at Cambridge to witness the ceremony, was also complimented with an honorary doctorate. The opportunity was seized upon by the professors to bring into the speeches (in which they introduce their children, the new graduates) an appropriate compliment to their illustrious guest. Of this the royal visitor was duly warned; and as it was supposed that he might not have recently “rubbed up his Latin,” as Queen Elizabeth phrased it, he was directed to be upon the alert, and whenever he caught the word “principes,” to infer a compliment and bow accordingly. With the professors of divinity and of law, things passed as had been pre-arranged, but Sir I. P., the Professor of Physic, was “ill at these numbers,” and too indolent to compose a speech especially for the occasion; so away he went with the old humdrum string of common-places, touching the rise, progress, dignity, and importance of the art of honestly committing manslaughter: he had not, however, travelled far, before he arrived at a sentence beginning with “Hippocrates et Galen, principes medicinæ,” and down went the head of the old duke, as if Galen and Hippocrates had belonged to the House of Hanover.