The brilliant society thus addressed could neither drink nor speak, for laughing. “Dear master,” said Hebe, as she took her place behind the monarch of divinities, who looked at her inquiringly, “they laugh, because you did not say fools, _such as he_, should henceforward furnish kings with funny counsel and comic sermons.”
“Let their majesties look to it,” answered Jove, “here’s a health to the first of fools!”
In the legend of the original jester, we cannot well pass over, without some brief illustration, the old, yet ever-young and especial mirth-maker of the court of Olympus itself, where Momus reigned, the joker of the gods. Perhaps I should rather say there he was tolerated, than that there he reigned. For there was this difference between the sublime immortals and weaker mortals,--that the former could never take a joke from their court fool without wincing, while the latter laughed the louder as the wit was sharper; for they wisely chose to applaud in such jesting,
“the sportive wit, Which healed the folly that it deigned to hit.”
Not so, the irritable gods, with regard to Momus, who was, significantly enough, the Son of Night. Momus however cared nothing for the irritability of his august masters and mistresses. His ready wit pierced them all in turn; and the shafts of his ridicule excited many an absurd roar of anguish. When Minerva had built the house of which she was so proud, the Olympian fool at once detected the error made by the Goddess of Wisdom, and remarked, “Had _I_ turned house-builder, I would have had a movable mansion.”
“Why so, you intellectual ass?” asked the lady, who was somewhat rough-tongued, and loved antithesis.
“Because,” answered the son of Nox, “I could then get away from bad neighbourhoods, and the vicinity of foolish women who consort with owls!”
Venus, clad in her usual attire, and proud in the conviction of her faultlessness, passed by Sir Momus, and turning gracefully in his presence, like Mademoiselle Rosati before a box-full of her admirers, defied him to detect a flaw in her unequalled and dazzling form.
Momus clapped his hands to his eyes, half-blinded by the lustre, and said, “It is true enough, Ourania,--you are not to be looked at without blinking; but before you executed that charming pirouette, I heard your foot-fall on the clouds. Now, a heavy-heeled beauty is not a vessel without a flaw.”