[Thomas Chaloner] had a trick sometimes to goe into Westminster hall in a morning in Terme time, and tell some strange story (sham), and would come thither again about 11 or 12 to have the pleasure to heare how it spred; and sometimes it would be altered, with additions, he could scarce knowe it to be his owne.
— John Aubrey, Brief Lives, 1697
George Washington’s teenage journal contains this love acrostic:
From your bright sparkling Eyes, I was undone;
Rays, you have, more transparent than the sun,
Amidst its glory in the rising Day,
None can you equal in your bright arrays;
Constant in your calm and unspotted Mind;
Equal to all, but will to none Prove kind,
So knowing, seldom one so Young, you’l Find.
Ah! woe’s me, that I should Love and conceal,
Long have I wish’d, but never dare reveal,
Even though severely Loves Pains I feel;
Xerxes that great, was’t free from Cupids Dart,
And all the greatest Heroes, felt the smart.
Reading the first letter of each line spells FRANCES ALEXA. Who was this? Possibly the subject’s full name was Frances Alexander and Washington hadn’t finished the poem.
From Lee Sallows, a crossword grid that describes its own contents:
(Thanks, Lee!)
“When Dr. Barton Warren was informed that Dr. Vowel was dead, he exclaimed, ‘What! Vowel dead? Well, thank heaven it was neither you nor I.'”
— William S. Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed, not by mourning coaches, but by herds of oxen, sheep, swine, flocks of poultry, and a small travelling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honour to the man who perished rather than eat his fellow-creatures. It will be, with the single exception of Noah’s Ark, the most remarkable thing of the kind yet seen.
— George Bernard Shaw, letter to The Academy, Oct. 15, 1898
From Howard Dinesman’s Superior Mathematical Puzzles (2003):
How can you measure 9 minutes using two hourglass-style timers, one that measures 4 minutes and the other 7 minutes?
Very high and very low temperature extinguishes all human sympathy and relations. It is impossible to feel affection beyond 78° or below 20° of Fahrenheit; human nature is too solid or too liquid beyond these limits. Man only lives to shiver or to perspire. God send that the glass may fall, and restore me to my regard for you, which in the temperate zone is invariable.
— Sydney Smith, letter to Sarah Austin, July 1836
Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation.
— Edward Gibbon, on the Roman emperor Gordian II
In 1691, on learning that her missing husband was serving in the British Army in Holland, Irish publican Christian Cavanagh disguised herself as a man to go after him. Wounded and captured at the Battle of Landen, she was exchanged back into service, killed another soldier in a duel, was discharged, re-enlisted as a dragoon, and fought with the Scots Greys in the War of the Spanish Succession, all while persuading her fellow soldiers that she was a man.
Author Marian Broderick writes, “[S]he ate with them, drank with them, slept with them, played cards with them, even urinated alongside them by using what she describes as a ‘silver tube with leather straps’. No one was ever the wiser.”
After the Battle of Blenheim she discovered her husband with another woman and decided to remain a dragoon rather than rejoin him. A surgeon finally discovered her secret in 1706, when her skull was fractured in the Battle of Ramillies. Discharged, she served the unit as a sutler until 1712. Hearing the remarkable tale, Queen Anne granted her a bounty of £50 and a shilling a day for the rest of her life.
Lucian, why dost thou lament my death, or call me miserable that am much more happy than thyself? what misfortune is befallen me? Is it because I am not so bald, crooked, old, rotten, as thou art? What have I lost, some of your good cheer, gay clothes, music, singing, dancing, kissing, merry-meetings, thalami lubentias, &c., is that it? Is it not much better not to hunger at all than to eat: not to thirst than to drink to satisfy thirst: not to be cold than to put on clothes to drive away cold? You had more need rejoice that I am freed from diseases, agues, cares, anxieties, livor, love, covetousness, hatred, envy, malice, that I fear no more thieves, tyrants, enemies, as you do.
— Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621