The Age Herald

SOME STUMPY GREAT MEN
From the London Spare Moments.

Socrates was stumpy, also St. 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 we may rank them with the famous Spartan general, Agesilaus; with Attila, the "scourge of God"—broad-shouldered thick-set, sinewy, short; with Theodore II., king of the Goths, of whom Cassiodorus writes: "He is rather short than tall, somewhat stout, with shapely limbs alike lithe and strong."

Actius, too, commander-in-chief of the Roman troops and prop of the tottering Roman empire in the days of Valentinian, was a man of low stature, therein resembling Timour the Tartar, self-described as a "puny, lame, decrepit little weight, though lord of Asia and terror of the world;" also the great Conde and his pygmy contemporary, Marshal Luxembourg, nicknamed "The Little" by those who admired him for making Louis XIV. Louis the Great, who, by the by, less his high-heeled shoes and towering wig, dwindles to about 5 feet 6 inches.

But even thus pared down to the inches nature gave 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.

When Keppel—a commodore at 24—was sent to demand an apology from the Dey of Aigiers for an insult to the British flag, he took so high a tone that the dey exclaimed against the insolence 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 deyship a he-goat."

Oliver Cromwell, Claverhouse and Mehemet Ali 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 Bonaparte. "Le Petit Caporal," as his men lovingly called him, stood about 5 feet (French) in his stockings, say 5 feet 1 1/2 inches (English). In stature the iron duke beat him about six inches, while the 5 feet 4 inches of Nelson places him midway or thereabouts between the victor and the victim of Waterloo.