introduce a correct portraiture of Somers, jester to Henry VIII., as a very fair representative of his class. It will be admitted that he is a perfectly well-arranged and respectable-looking person. It is a curious illustration of the natural need that seems to exist in a certain state of society for the services of a fun-maker, that

Montezuma, Emperor of Mexico, was found by Cortez to have such an officer about his court. A pleasant volume, by Dr. John Doran, entitled The History of Court Fools, was published in 1858, and seemed a tolerably exhaustive treatise on the subject. Nevertheless, the ingenious author has since found some additional

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When the author of the last History of Court Fools wrote Finis' to his volume, he had not fully satisfied himself on two points,-first, the date of the existence of the earliest jester; and, secondly, whether such an individual as an official fool, or fool by right of office, was still maintained in any public court or private household. On those two points he has since arrived at a more satisfactory conclusion; and the result of his researches, on those and other points referring to the same subject, he submits to the consideration of the readers of these pages.

It can scarcely be doubted that the female official fool had precedence of the male court and household jester. When Ceres went in search of Proserpine, the Queen of Eleusis sent with her one of the merriest of her maids, named Iambe. This maid, renowned at court for her wit, frolicsome humour, power of repartee, and skill in saying smart things generally, was expressly sent with the bereaved mother to divert her sorrow by her quips and cranks, her jokes, gambols, and her laughter-compelling stories. This commission was, to the very letter, that which especially belonged to the official jester; and there is no reason to hesitate in assigning to Iambe the distinction of having been the founder of a race which is not yet extinct, and the godmother, so to speak, of satires in sharp measure which bear the name of Iambic.

With regard to existing jesters officially ap pointed, there are several who presume so to describe themselves, but of the genuineness or authenticity of whose pretensions much might be said, particularly in an adverse sense. It has become the fashion of clowns to travelling circuses to style themselves 'Queen's Jesters;' and there is one of these, named Wallet, whose portrait has been engraved among those of the Eminent Men of the Age, and who writes himself down as Court Jester to Queen Victoria, by her Majesty's appointment! We can only say that we should feel grateful for a sight of the Lord Chamberlain's warrant confirming this authority.

renowned Italian jester, of several centuries back, ever thought that among the future possessors of his name would be found a Monsignore, exercising the office, not of court fool, but of papal nuncio, at Brussels.

From Italy, as from England, the professional Merry Andrew in households has passed away. There is a relic of some of them at Mantua,-the apartments assigned to the old, comic ducal dwarfs. These rooms, six in number, and little more than as many feet square, are mere whitewashed cells, long since stripped of all furniture. At the end of one of them, said to have been their kitchen, there is a raised platform, on which the jocular little men used to dine.

It is a singular fact that as the female jester had precedence, in point of date of origin, of her brother in the vocation, so has she survived that brother, and still holds her own in the court of the Sultan and the households of his great pashas. When Mrs Edmund Hornby was 'In and about Stamboul,' in 1858, she, in company with other ladies, visited the hareem of Kiza Pasha. The visitors accepted an invitation to a banquet, at which warm rye bread, covered with seeds, pleasant soups, smoking pilaufs, and pancakes swimming in honey, were among the chief dishes. The native ladies gave loose and unseemly rein to their appetites, stimulated by official female buffoons who served the dishes with accompanying jokes, the utterance of which excited the most uproarious laughter, not only from the ladies their mistresses, but also from their less witty, yet wit-appreciating, slaves. Mrs Hornby describes the chief jester as 'a wild and most extraordinary-looking woman, with an immensity of broad humour and drollery in her face.' The quality of the fun seems to have been of the coarsest; and the English ladies congratulated themselves on their lack of apprehension of jokes at which the lovely Circassian, the second wife of the Pasha, between the intervals of licking her fingers and spoon, and popping tit-bits on our plates, laughed so complacently, which sometimes obliged the Arabs and eunuchs at the door to dive under the arras, to conceal their uncontrollable fits of mirth.' Whether the modern female Turkish jester be the descendant or not of a long line of predecessors, we are not informed. We do know, however, that when Lady Wortley Montague paid a similar visit, at the beginning of the last century, she was only amused by indifferent dancing, and by another exhibition, of which she speaks in the free and easy style of the fine ladies of her day.

the estate.

as to provoke a reply by a galliard jest. The youngest of these pretty and carefully trained fools was never unequal to the task of meeting the heaviest fire of broad wit from a whole room full of revellers. These they stimulated and provoked by showers of humorous epithets and a world of pretty ways. They followed the guests to their chamber doors, laughing, jesting, and sporting; nor did they take leave of them till they had performed offices which young princesses in the Odyssey render to the guests of their royal sires, carrying off the linen of the | travellers, dropping their foolery, and then seriously addressing themselves to the office of laundresses.

In the East, beyond the Bosphorus, there is still to be found in one and the same individual, in some families, a mixture of the domestic and the buffoon. These, however, probably resemble rather the impudent French or Spanish, and even some English valets of the drama, than the official jester; men whose impudent wit was tolerated, rather than solicited or expected. The | male fool, by right of office, is now to be met with only in Russia. In St Petersburg,' says an English lady, in her Six Years' Travels in Russia, they are by no means rare.' The old Russian joke of serving up dwarfs in a pie, still pleases imperial Grand Dukes. The professional Russian fools, this lady tells us, wear a ridiculous dress, but dwarfs usually appear in plain clothes.'

In the recently-published Life of Bishop Doyle, of Kildare and Leighlin, by Mr Fitzpatrick, the author fixes on that Roman Catholic prelate as being the last person within these realms who kept a fool in his household. Dr Doyle, however, who has been dead about a score of years, was, in the case cited, simply giving shelter to a village idiot, for sufferers of which class there was no public asylum in Ireland. The poor idiot did not fill, in Dr Doyle's household, such an office as was executed in that of the late Pope Gregory XVI., by Cardinal Soglia. In the gardens of the Vatican, the illustrious men there used to pass away the long summer evening hours, by playing at blindman's buff, Soglia being always hoodwinked, and armed with a stick. It was his object to strike at those whose aim was, of course, to evade him. On one of these occasions, the holy father stooped to remove a flower-vase which stood in peril of being shattered by the Cardinal's upraised stick, which, however, descended so rapidly as to put the papal skull in danger, but that some officials present unceremoniously pulled his holiness backward. Soglia, as concoctor of fun to the Roman court, was succeeded by Monsignore Aopi, who was also the Pope's confessor. It is, moreover, added, that Gregory took great delight in the jokes of certain Capuchins, particularly when they were tipsy. So, at least, says Della Galtina, according to whom the old court-foolery was sustained with great spirit at Rome to the very last.

It must be allowed, that the legendary saints themselves afforded the Popes good authority for this sort of buffoonery. St Kened, for instance, though a weak, decrepit, and sickly little fellow, was an inveterate joker. When

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the Welsh St David succeeded, by his prayers, in getting him strong and straight, it was the other saint's most favourite joke, by dint of his own prayers, to get himself bent double again! And this course went on alternately, till St David, unable to see any fun in it, gave up his task, and left the wit to his double crookedness of mind and body. The act, however, was just one which might have entered into a fool's head. In a better sort of wit, remarkable for its boldness, the religious men who hung about courts enjoyed the admiration and impunity awarded to the jesters. For example: What is the difference between a Scot and a sot?' asked Charles of Burgundy of Duns Scotus, as the two sat opposite each other at or after dinner. There is only a table between them!' answered the holy clerk, whose reply was received with unbounded applause, either for its finely small wit, or its incontrovertible truth.

Some potentates have been satisfied with less than wit; of such was the Grand Duchess Catherine of Russia, who maintained a Finnish girl on her establishment, in whose incomparable mimicry of all the great people at court her highness experienced a never-failing delight. A similar pleasure is still enjoyed by the negro king of Dahomey, concerning whom Duncan, the Life-guardsman, who travelled in Africa in 1849, states a curious circumstance. In that uncivilized monarch's dominions, it is considered highly disgraceful for a man to be guilty of drunkenness. Immunity, in this respect, is the privilege of the king's mimics and jesters only. Of these the black sovereign possesses many, and in their degradation and jollity he finds occasion for much mirth and laughter.

He

In England, those merry serving-men whose success was sometimes rewarded by making them lords of landed estates, were occasionally employed rather for sedative than stimulating purposes. Strutt records that it was not unusual to engage them as story-tellers to kings and princes who required to be gently talked into sleep. This office has expired, but well-qualified candidates for it survive. In our own courts, however, it was the more rattling fool who enjoyed the greater share of admiration. spoke so boldly, when there was need for it, that honest and merry men of note, desirous to serve their royal master, borrowed the liberty, as it were, and told valuable truth under the form of an idle joke. When Richard II. was pressed by all classes of his people for reform in a government under which they were sorely oppressed, his plumed and dainty flatterers advised him to place himself at the head of his army, and destroy nobles and commons alike, who were thus unreasonable. The King was perplexed; but,' says John Trussell, the historian, there was present old Sir John Linne, a good soldier, but a shuttlebrain, of whom the King in merriment demanded, in this case, what was, as he thought, the fittest to be done. Sir Hugh swore, " Blood and wounds! let us charge home and kill every mother's son, and so we shall make quick despatch of the best friends you have in the kingdom." This giddy answer,' adds Trussell, more weighed with the King than if it had been spoken in

grave and sober sort: and thus it often happens, that wise counsel is more sweetly followed when it is tempered with folly; and earnest is the less offensive, if it be delivered in jest.'

Indeed, it may be said, that on such principle was founded the very institution of court fools. Even the grave Queen Elizabeth of York could thus listen to her Greenwich jester, William. It was otherwise with her husband, Henry VII., who neither kept fools himself, nor admired those maintained by the English nobility. This is little to be wondered at, if all the jesters of lords resembled him who was kept by Thomas Lord Derby. Henry VII. was the guest of the latter, soon after his Majesty had so ungratefully executed Sir William Stanley, Lord Derby's own brother! Host and guest were standing on the leads of Latham House, viewing the country. Lord Derby was close against the parapet, the King immediately behind him. The house fool observed this propinquity, and chose to suspect the King of present, or was eager to remind him of past, treachery. Drawing near to his master, he exclaimed gruffly, 'Tom, remember Will!' This fool's bolt, so swiftly shot, reached the King's conscience, and his Majesty withdrew, in undignified hurry, into the house.

6

Henry's son, the eighth of the name, restored the banished official to court. Of his own Sir Merrymans, none is better known to us than Will Somers, whose effigy is at Hampton Court. This good fellow's memory was perpetuated by the establishment of the Will Somers Tavern,' in Old Fish-street. When tavern-tokens were allowed to be issued-a permission in existence as late as the reign of Charles II.-the landlord of the above hostelry issued one, with a figure of Will Somers on it, by way of distinction.

It is to be remembered, that a time ensued when a distinction was made between a jester and a fool. A dramatist like Heywood did not disdain to be the former, mingling with gentlemen and scholars; but we see that the fool, in the days of Mary and Philip, was of a lower degree. When the illustrious two, just mentioned, visited Faversham, the Chamberlain kept a book, in which he entered moneys given to the members of the royal retinue. The entry of To the King's and Queen's jester-2s.," indicates the position of the fool; two shillings was the lowest sum awarded to the lowest menial in the royal train. The keeper of the bears seems to have been a more important personage than the baser fool at Queen Elizabeth's court, where her jester, Tarleton the actor, was held in some honour. When fool and bearward followed her Majesty to Canterbury, the corporation gave liberally to her retinue; but while the bearward received an angel, or ten shillings, the fool, Walter, was put off with the odd money, which, added to the angel, just made an English mark. Three and fourpence' was the sum that fell to the fool.

Let it not be considered irreverent if the words Shakspeare' and 'jester' be combined. They naturally occur here. There are four years, 1585-89, during which nothing certain is known of Shakspeare's whereabouts. In a letter addressed by Sir Philip Sidney, from

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Utrecht, 1586, to his father-in-law, Walsingham, there is a passage to this effect: 'I wrote to you a letter, by Will, my Lord of Leicester's jesting player.' In the first volume of the Shakspeare Society papers, Mr John Bruce asks, Who was this Will, my Lord of Leicester's jesting player?' He may have been Will Johnson, Will Sly, Will Kimpe, or, as some have thought, even the immortal William himself! This knotty point cannot be unravelled here. The circumstance serves, however, to shew that jesting players' followed their patrons even to the tented field.

Under our first Stuart kings, the court fools revived in dignity. They were allowed servingmen to wait upon them, and some of these were pensioned for their good services. The author of Letters from the Mountains states that in some Scottish families of the olden time, down to the present century, was often to be found an individual who united in himself the offices of gamekeeper and warlock or wizard, and that in the latter capacity he in some degree resembled the court or household jester. There was a stranger combination than this in the person of the famous Archie Armstrong, official fool to James I. and his son Charles. Archie was a sort of gentleman groom of the chambers to the first King, preceding him when in progress, and looking after the royal quarters. In this capacity,

ARCHIE ARMSTRONG.

Armstrong was made a free citizen of Aberdeen, and held that freedom till his death. James must have loved him, at one period; for despite his hatred of tobacco, he granted a patent to Archie for the manufacture of tobacco pipes. The fool, moreover, gained no trifling addition to his salary, in bribes administered to him for presenting petitions, even those of recusants; at

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which last, however, James was not so well pleased as he was with Archie's jokes. The position of Armstrong, who was on most familiar terms with his second master, Charles, is significantly indicated by his demand, when appointed to accompany that Prince to Spain. He claimed to have the service of an attendant, the same as was awarded to the gentlemen of the royal suite. The claim caused a tumult among the gentlemen in question, and Archie was fain to go abroad in less state than he thought became him. In the gloomy days that succeeded, the fool raised laughter at court, but not such an honest laughter as used to shake the house of Charles's brother, Prince Henry, where sweetmeats and Coryat,' that prince of non-official jesters and coxcombs, used to finish and gladden every repast. Although the jester was not to be found on the household list of Oliver Cromwell, there were occasions when buffoons, hired for sport, appeared at Whitehall. One of these was the marriage of the Protector's daughter, Frances, with Mr. Rich. At the festival which followed the ceremony, some of the buffoons attempted to blacken with a burnt cork the face of Sir Thomas Hillingsby, as he was dancing. The solemn old gentleman-usher to the Queen of Bohemia was so enraged at this liberty, that he drew his dagger and would have made short work with the jester's life, had not others present interfered. There was, however, very wide licence at this feast. was there that Oliver descended to practical foolery, snatched off his son Richard's wig, and, pretending to fling it into the fire, contrived to slip it under him, and, sitting on it, affected to deplore its loss.

It

When Wharton, in the True Briton, compared two of the Chancellors of Charles II. (Nottingham and Shaftesbury), he reckoned among the superior characteristics of the former, the absence of buffoons from his household. The last man of the next reign whom one might expect to see with a fool in his suite, was the infamous Judge Jeffries. His official jester, however, attended him on his bloody circuit. The judge loved and laughed at the fool's power of wit and mimicry; and at Taunton he tossed to the buffoon the 'pardon of a convicted victim, leaving the victim's friends to purchase it of him, if such was desired, and lay within the compass of their

means!

After this, the official jester disappeared, or his calling was modified. Thus, in the early part of the last century, there was a well-known Cheshire dancing-master, named Johnson, who was hired out at parties given by the northern nobility, at which he had licence to utter or enact anything that was likely to move the guests to laughter. Johnson was familiarly known as Lord Flame,' the name of a character played by him, in his own extravaganza, entitled Hurlothrumbo, a piece acted at the Haymarket in 1729. Johnson was among the last of the paid English jesters. The genuine ultimus scurrarum in this country is said to have been a retainer in the house of Mr. Bartlett, of Castlemorton, Worcestershire. The date of his death is not precisely known, but it would seem to have been in the last half of the last century. He is still spoken

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of; and 'as big a fool as Jack Hafod,' at once preserves his name and indicates his quality. Since Hafod's days, we have only had fools for the nonce, in England. Such is he who struts in anniversary processions, or who is only reproduced as a memorial of the past, like the dramatic jester who figures in the gay doings at Sudeley Castle, where Mr and Mrs Dent, the occupiers of that old residence of Katherine Parr, preside at fancy balls, in the ancient mansion, in the gallant costume of Henry and his Queen.

There is not much to be added to the history of the Court Fools of France. Of one of the most renowned of these, Triboulet, the present writer saw a capital portrait, the property of Walter Savage Landor, sold at Christie's, in 1859. It is the work of Licinio, the great rival of Titian, and is worthy of either hand. Triboulet appears to have been a man of stronglymarked but jolly' features; just such a man, in short, as history, but not the dramatic historians, have made him.

The most extraordinary combination of two offices that ever occurred, existed at the court of Louis XVIII., in the person of Coulon, a medical man of great skill, who ultimately abandoned all practice except with respect to the King, to whom he was at once doctor and jester. When a medical student, Coulon was wont, by his powers of mimicry, to keep a whole hospital-ward in roars of laughter. On one occasion, when officiating as assistant to the great Alibert, as the latter was bandaging the swollen legs of the suffering sovereign, Coulon so exquisitely mimicked his master behind his back, that the delighted Louis retained him thenceforward near his person. For the amusement of his royal patron, Coulon gave daily imitations. If the King asked him whom he had met, the medical jester would at once assume the bearing, voice, and the features of the person he desired to represent. It mattered not at all what the sex or the quality might be, or whether the mimicked individuals were the King's friends or relations, or otherwise. In either case, the monarch was in an ecstasy of hilarity as he promptly recognised each personage thus presented to him.- Coulon,' said the Duke of Orleans to him, one day, I happened to see and hear your imitation of me, yesterday. It was capital, but not quite perfect. You did not wear, as I do, a diamond pin in your cravat. Allow me to present you with mine; it will make the resemblance more striking.' 'Ah! your highness,' replied Coulon, fixing the pin in his own cravat, and putting on such a look of the prince that the latter might have thought he was standing before a mirror, as a poor imitator, I ought, properly, to wear only paste!'

His imitations, however, were so approximate to reality that he sat for portraits of Thiers and Molé; but Coulon's greatest triumph, in this way, was through a harder task. There was no efficient portrait extant of the deceased minister, Villéle. Gros was regretting this. Aye,' said Coulon, no likeness of him represents the profound subtlety of his character, and his evanescent expression.' As he said this, a living Villéle seemed to stand before the artist, who then and there took from this singular personage, the well