And when one speaks of a jest as being "a Joe Miller," he
should only mean that it is "familiar as household words," not that it
is of contemptible antiquity, albeit many of the jokes in "Joe Miller"
are, at least, "as old as Hierokles," such, for instance, as that of the
man who trained his horse to live on a straw _per diem_, when it
suddenly died, or that of him who had a house to sell and carried about
a brick as a specimen of it.
The collection of facetiae ascribed to Hierokles, by whomsoever it was
made, is composed of very short anecdotes of the sayings and doings of
pedants, who are represented as noodles, or simpletons. In their
existing form they may not perhaps be of much earlier date than the
ninth century. They seem to have come into the popular facetiae of Europe
through the churchmen of the Middle Ages, and, after having circulated
long orally, passed into literature, whence, like other kinds of tales,
they once more returned to the people. We find in them the indirect
originals of some of the bulls and blunders which have in modern times
been credited to Irishmen and Scotch Highlanders, and the germs also,
perhaps, of some stories of the Gothamite type: as brave men lived
before Agamemnon, so, too, the race of Gothamites can boast of a very
ancient pedigree! By far the greater number of them, however, seem now
pithless and pointless, whatever they may have been considered in
ancient days, when, perhaps, folk found food for mirth in things which
utterly fail to tickle our "sense of humour" in these double-distilled
days.
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