Page:Royal riddle book.pdf/2



The art of making riddles is so antique, that it bears date almost with our earliest accounts of time, and is a diversion with which Sampson, the strongest of all mankind, amused himself. Nor has it been confined to common people, as a certain author supposes; for kings, and even some of the wisest of them, are said to have been adepts in the science; for such was the ever-to-be-remembered king Solomon, and such was his friend, Hiran king of Tyre.

Riddling, if I am not mistaken, is the art of both dissembling and undissembling. It is a kind of natural logic, which I should be glad to see adopted by our universities, in the room of that jargon they at present make use of; for as it consists in discovering truth under borrowed appearances, may prove of wonderful advantage to the scholarly mind in the pursuit of his studies, by habituating his mental faculties, and to separate all foreign ideal and consequently preserving it from that grand source of error, the being deceived by false connection. And in common life how necessary is it for a man to carry this sort of knowledge about him? -Every knave is an enigma that you must unriddle before you can safely deal with him, and every fool made so fathomed. What is making love but making riddles? And what else are some of our laws? Even our gravestones can't tell the naked truth tombs you see are a sort of riddle; a politician is a walking riddle; and so is a physician and his prescription a professed enigma, intended only to be solved by the apothecary.-—.This being the truth