g, the two
bloodiest of modern battlefields, are supposed between them--what by the
harvest of battle, what by the harvest of neighbouring hospitals--to be
seized or possessed of four hundred thousand shin-bones, and other
interesting specimens to match. Negotiations have been proceeding at
various times between the leading bone-mills in England and the Jews in
Dresden or in Moscow. Hitherto these negotiations have broken down,
because the Jews stood out for 37 per shent., calculated upon the costs
of exhumation. But of late they show a disposition to do business at 33
per shent.: the contract will therefore move forwards again; it will go
ahead; and the dust of the faithful armies, together with the dust of
their enemies, will very soon be found, not in the stopper of a bunghole
(as Prince Hamlet conceived too prematurely), but in an unprecedented
crop of Swedish turnips.

Bones change their value, it seems thus clearly; and anecdotes change
their value; and in that proportion honesty, as regards one or the
other, changes the value of its chances. But what has all this to do
with 'Old Nick'? Stop: let me consider. That title was placed at the
head of this article, and I admit that it was placed there by myself.
Else, whilst I was wandering from my text, and vainly endeavouring to
recollect what it was that I had meant by this text, a random thought
came over me (immoral, but natural), that I would charge the heading of
_Old Nick_ upon the compositor, asserting that he had placed it there in
obstinate defiance of all the orders to the contrary, and supplications
to the contrary, that I had addressed to him for a month; by which means
I should throw upon _him_ the responsibility of accounting for so
portentous an ensign.

* * * * *

EDITOR'S NOTE.--It is evident that De Quincey meditated a much
longer essay on anecdotes as false, in which Niccolo Machiavelli
would have come in for notice--hence the playful references in the
close.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] '_The passion which made Juvenal a poet_.' The scholar needs no
explanation; but the reader whose scholarship is yet amongst his
futurities (which I conceive to be the civilest way of describing an
_ignoramus_) must understand that Juvenal, the Roman satirist, who was
in fact a predestined poet in virtue of his ebullient heart, that boiled
over once or twice a day in anger that could not be expressed upon
witnessing the