Vespasian held out his hand to a deputation offering to erect a statue to him of the value of a million sesterces, saying, "Set up the statue without delay: the basis is ready." He acquired a reputation for avarice, which the liberality of his later years did not efface; so that, at his funeral, "Favo, the principal mimic, personating him, and imitating, as actors do, both his manner of speaking and his gestures, asked aloud of the procurators how much his funeral and procession would cost; and, being answered ten million sesterces, he cried out, that if they would give him but a hundred thousand ($5,000) they might throw his body into the Tiber if they would." — Ibid. It is related, that, when asking an Egyptian philosopher to make him emperor, Vespasian said, "O Jupiter! may I govern wise men, and may wise men govern me!" When urged to move some columns into the Capitol, at a small expense, by a mechanical contrivance, he liberally paid the inventor, but declined the offer, saying, "I must be suffered to feed my people." — Ibid. He refused to prosecute those who opposed his government; saying, "I will not kill a dog that barks at me." He remarked of a comet that appeared not long before his death, "This hairy star can have nothing to do with me. It menaces rather the king of the Parthians, as he has much hair, and I am bald."— Ibid. Methinks I am becoming a god. He was "one of the great men who died jesting;" for, alluding sarcastically to the apotheosis of the emperors, he said when near his end, "Methinks I am becoming a god" (Væ, puto deus fio). — Ibid. VICTOR EMMANUEL II. [Vittorio Emanuele II., king of Sardinia, and first king of Italy; born at Turin, March 14, 1820; succeeded his father, 1849; sent a contingent to the Crimean war, and was represented at the Treaty of Paris; defeated the Austrians by an alliance with France, 1859; proclaimed king of Italy, March, 1861; transferred the capital to Florence, 1865; obtained Venetia, 1866, and Rome, Sept. 20, 1870, which then became the capital of Italy; died Jan. 9, 1878.] Italy shall be ! When, after the crushing defeat of Novara, March 23, 1849, Charles Albert resigned his crown and the cause of Italian independence to his son Victor Emmanuel, the young king is said to have pointed his sword in the direction of the Austrian camp, exclaiming, “Per Dio, Italy shall be!” (l'Italia sarà !) His purpose at this time, and throughout the long struggle, is summed up in one sentence, to the thought of which he remained true: "My only ambition is to be the first soldier of Italian independence." His ambition was declared in a remark, a part of which, as applied to himself, became proverbial: "I do not aspire to any other glory than that history should say of me, 'He was an honest king"" (rè galantuomo). It was one of Washington's maxims, "I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain, what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an 'honest man.'" The title of rè galantuomo was first applied to Victor Emmanuel by Massimo d'Azeglio, a statesman, author, and artist, who was prime minister of Sardinia before Cavour commenced the great task of Italian unification, and eclipsed the renown of the earlier patriots. Azeglio, however, saw the magnitude of the struggle before them; and when the first Italian Parliament met at Turin, in 1860, had the courage to say, amid the general congratulations, Italy is made, but who will now make the Italians?" (L'Italia è fatta, ma chi farà ora gl'Italiani ?) intimating that the freedman was yet to become a freeman. Another mot of his is worth recording: "An honest man (galantuomo) has the secret of true eloquence." 66 My house knows the road of exile, but not of dishonor. Victor Emmanuel's reply to Marshal Rádetzky, who endeavored to bribe him, during the early years of his reign, to desert the cause of his country's liberation. When the Neapolitan ambassador warned him of conspiracies against the Austrians in a time of peace, Victor Emmanuel proudly declared, "Behind my throne there is neither treason nor perjury." As Gen. La Marmora was setting out with the Italian contingent for the Crimean war, in 1855, the king alluded to another side of the conflict in which he was engaged, by saying, half sadly, "Happy man! you go to fight soldiers, I stay to fight monks and nuns." At the battle of Palestro, fought against the Austrians, May 30, 1859, when his soldiers remonstrated at his rash valor, the king good-naturedly replied, "Do not fear: there is glory enough for all!" He had announced the coming war, before its declaration, in one of those speeches that thrill a nation, at the opening of Parliament, Jan. 10, 1859, when he said, "While we respect treaties, we are not insensible to the cry of anguish that comes up to us from many parts of Italy." When he came to the words, "the cry of anguish" (il grido del dolore), the entire assembly, senators, deputies, and spectators, sprang to their feet, and broke out into the most passionate acclamations. Twelve years later the scene was repeated, when, on the 27th of November, 1871, the first king of united Italy opened the first parliament to sit in Rome, with words which reviewed the entire struggle: "The work to which we have consecrated our life is accomplished." "There is one anecdote of Victor Emmanuel which is very likely apocryphal," says a writer in a recent number of "The Saturday Review," "but which has always struck us as particularly characteristic. The story has it, that the king, when on a visit to Paris, went into a shop to buy a pair of braces, and was addressed with the inevitable 'Et avec ça, monsieur?' (What is the next article, sir?) of the Paris tradesman. Avec ça, monsieur,' he replied, 'je suspends mon pantalon."" MARSHAL VILLARS. [Claude Louis, Duc de Villars, a French general; born 1653; served in Flanders; employed in diplomatic missions at Vienna and Munich; made several campaigns on the Rhine; Marshal of France, 1702; subdued the Protestants of the Cevennes, 1704; lost the battle of Malplaquet, 1709; died at Turin, 1734.] Save me from my friends! The words, "I pray God to deliver me from my friends: I will defend myself from my enemies," were used by Voltaire of his visitors at Ferney, and are given by Duvernet ("Vie de Vol 66 taire," 1798). The French Ana, however, attribute them to Marshal Villars, on taking leave of Louis XIV. at the beginning of a new campaign, when he said, Sire, je vais combattre les ennemis de votre majesté, et je vous laisse au milieu des miens" (I am going to fight your enemies, I leave you in the midst of my own). During his embassy to Vienna, the public was astonished at the attentions shown him by Prince Eugene, who was soon to oppose him in the field. To all such Villars said, "Do you want to know where Prince Eugene's real enemies are? They are in Vienna, while mine are in Versailles." (Voulez-vous que je vous dise où sont les vrais ennemis du Prince Eugène? Ils sont à Vienne, et les miens à Versailles.) The expression, "Save me from my friends," has a much greater antiquity than the time of Louis XIV. Antigonus, one of the generals and successors of Alexander the Great, commanded a sacrifice to be offered, that God might protect him from his friends: when asked why not from his enemies, he replied, "From my enemies I can defend myself, but not from my friends." The mot is proverbial in Italy; and an inscription set into a wall on the road from Nice to Villa Franca is quoted by Büchmann: : "Da chi mi fido Guardi mi Dio Da chi non mi fido (From him whom I trust, may God defend me; from him whom I trust not, I will defend myself.) The same verse was found by a German traveller scratched on the wall of the Pozzi dungeons under the Doge's palace in Venice; and Kant ("Allgemeine Literaturzeitung," 1799, No. 109) claims an Italian origin for the proverb: it is, however, found (in the form "I can defend myself from my enemies, but not from my friends ") in a volume of Arabian moral maxims by Honein ben Isaak, who died A.D. 873, and whose works were translated into Hebrew in the thirteenth century. Ovid applies a Latin form of the proverb to the fears of a lover: "Heu facinus! non est hostis metuendus amanti; Wallenstein, who declared of Stralsund, "I will have the city, though it were bound with chains of adamant to heaven," says it is the friend's zeal, not the foeman's hate, which overthrows him: "Der Freunde Eifer ist's, der mich Zu Grunde richtet, nicht der Hass der Feinde." WALLENSTEIN'S Tod, III. 16. An English poet applies it to the flatterers : "Greatly his foes he dreads, but most his friends: CHURCHILL: The Apology, 19. Sir Robert Peel quoted Canning's lines in reply to an attack by Mr. Disraeli : "Give me the avowed, erect, and manly foe; Firm I can meet, perhaps can turn, the blow: But of all plagues, good Heaven, thy wrath can send, Disraeli turned the quotation against his antagonist by alluding to the political relations which had existed between Canning and Peel: "We all admire his [Canning's] genius; we all, at least most of us, deplore his untimely end; and we all sympathize with him in his fierce struggle with supreme prejudice and sublime mediocrity—with inveterate foes and with 'candid friends."" Sidonia," wrote Disraeli in "Coningsby," "has no friends. No wise man has. What are friends? Traitors." 66 Vendôme was inimitable. When the deputies of Provence brought Villars a present of twenty thousand livres in a handsome purse, and said, "The Duc de Vendôme, your predecessor, contented himself with the purse," the marshal took both, saying, "I believe you, but Vendôme was inimitable" (Je le crois, mais Vendôme était un homme inimitable). The marshal used to say in his old age, "My greatest delights were to win prizes in school, and battles in the field." Mme. de Villars did not like her appointment as dame d'honneur to the wife of Philip V., the grandson of Louis XIV., who was made king of Spain (v. Louis XIV., p. 348). She accordingly said, "It is only in France that one builds châteaux en Espagne.” The Duchess of Newcastle, who wrote novels and plays in the |