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Show STUMPY GREAT MEN. They Had Brain and Intelligence, bat Not Inches. Gentleman's Magazine. Confucius was a man of middle height. We should have preferred him short. But one must not rob a man of his inches to fit a theory. Socrates was stumpy, also 8t. Paul, and Alexander the Great, great only as a warrior. In stature both he and his far more intellectual father, Phillip of Macedon, scarce reached middle height. In this regard re-gard we may rank them with the famous Spartan general, Agesilaus; with Attila, the "Scourge of God" broad-shouldered, thick-set, 6inewy, short; with Theodoric II., King of the Goths, of whom Cassi-odorus Cassi-odorus writes: "He is rather short than tall, somewhat stout, with shapely limbs alike lithe and strong." Aetius, too, commander-in-chief of the Roman troops, and prop of the tottering Roman empire in the days of Vanentinian, was a man of low stature, therein resembling Timour the Tartar, Tar-tar, self-described as a "puny, lame, decrepit little wight, though lord of Apia and terror to the world;" also the great Conde, and his pygmy contemporary Marshal Luxembourg, nicknamed "The Little" by those who admired ad-mired him for making Louis XIV. Louis the Great, who, by the by, less his high-heeled 6hoes and towerinjf wig, dwindles to about 5 feet 6. But even thus T ared down to the inches nature eave him, he was a giant compared with Sir Francis Drake and with Admiral Keppel "little Keppel" as every sailor in the fleet fondly dubbed him from pure love and admiration. Whereby a tale, if but to break the jog-trot of this catalogue. When, then, Keppel a commodore at 2-4 was sent to demand an apology from the dey of Algiers for an insult in-sult to the British flag, he took so high a tone that the dey exclaimed against the insolence in-solence of the British king for charging a "beardless boy" with such a message to him. Replied the beardless boy: "Were my master wont to take length of beard for a test of wisdom, he'd have sent your dey-ship dey-ship a he goat." Oliver Cromwell, Claverhouse, and Me-hemet Me-hemet all must be content to take it out in brains, for they all lacked inches. Two of these great names naturally suggest that of another famous soldier and usurper, Napoleon Napol-eon Bonaparte. Le petit Corporal, as his men lovingly called him, Stood about five feet (French) in his stockings, say 5 feet English. In stature the Iron Duke beat him by about six inches, while the 5 feet 4 of Nelson place him midway or thereabout between be-tween the victor and the victim of Waterloo. |