after hearing a sermon from the Abbé Maury, said, "Si l' Abbé nous avait parlé un peu de religion, il nous aurait parlé de tout." A pleasantry which ran through all the newspapers a few years since, taxing the eccentricities of a gifted family connection in New England, was only a theft of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's mot of a hundred years ago, that "the world was made up of men and women and Herveys."
Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity. Columbus's egg is claimed for Brunelleschi. Rabelais's dying words, "I am going to see the great Perhaps" (le grand Peutêtre), only repeats the "IF" inscribed on the portal of the temple at Delphi.1Open page Goethe's favorite phrase, "the open secret," translates Aristotle's answer to Alexander, "These books are published and not published." Madame de Staël's "Architecture is frozen music" is borrowed from Goethe's "dumb music," which is Vitruvius's rule, that "the architect must not only understand drawing, but music." Wordsworth's hero acting "on the plan which pleased his childish thought," is Schiller's "Tell him to reverence the dreams of his youth," and earlier, Bacon's "Consilia juventutis plus divinitatis habent."
