The propensity with which Irishmen are credited of making ludicrous bulls is said to have its origin, not from any lack of intelligence, but rather in the fancy of that lively race, which often does not wait for expression until the ideas have taken proper verbal form.  Be this as it may, a considerable portion of the bulls popularly ascribed to Irishmen are certainly “old as the jests of Hierokles,” and are, moreover, current throughout Europe.  Thus in Hierokles we read that one of twin-brothers having recently died, a pedant, meeting the survivor, asked him whether it was he or his brother who had deceased.—­Taylor has this in his Wit and Mirth, and he probably heard it from some one who had read the facetious tales of the Sieur Gaulard:  “A nobleman of France (as he was riding) met with a yeoman of the Country, to whom he said, My friend, I should know thee.  I doe remember I haue often seene thee.  My good Lord, said the countriman, I am one of your Honers poore tenants, and my name is T.J.  I remember better now (said my Lord); there were two brothers of you, but one is dead; I pray, which of you doth remaine alive?”—­Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, in the notes to his edition of Taylor’s collection (Shakespeare Jest Books, Third Series), cites a Scotch parallel from The Laird of Logan:  “As the Paisley steamer came alongside the quay[3] at the city of the Seestus,[4] a denizen of St. Mirren’s hailed one of the passengers:  ’Jock!  Jock! distu hear, man?  Is that you or your brother?’” And to the same point is the old nursery rhyme,—­

  “Ho, Master Teague, what is your story? 
  I went to the wood, and killed a tory;[5]
  I went to the wood, and killed another: 
  Was it the same, or was it his brother?"[6]

We meet with a very old acquaintance in the pedant who lost a book and sought for it many days in vain, till one day he chanced to be eating lettuces, when, turning a corner, he saw it on the ground.  Afterwards meeting a friend who was lamenting the loss of his girdle, he said to him, “Don’t grieve; buy some lettuces; eat them at a corner; turn round it, go a little way on, and you will find your girdle.”  But is there anything like this in “Joe Miller"?—­Two lazy fellows were sleeping together, when a thief came, and drawing down the coverlet made off with it.  One of them was aware of the theft, and said to the other, “Get up, and run after the man that has stolen our coverlet.”  “You blockhead,” replied his companion, “wait till he comes back to steal the bolster, and we two will master him.”  And has “Joe” got this one?—­A pedant’s little boy having died, many friends came to the funeral, on seeing whom he said, “I am ashamed to bring out so small a boy to so great a crowd.”

An epigram in the Anthologia may find a place among noodle stories: 

  “A blockhead, bit by fleas, put out the light,
  And, chuckling, cried, ‘Now you can’t see to bite!’”