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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 7 (November 1, 1933)

Great Men Who Grated

Great Men Who Grated.

And if Napoleon were happy, why did he continually look like a plate of pale pie with its hat on? Even when he won battles he felt, with the discontent of the true artist, that his still-life work might have been strewn about a bit better. And after his retreat from Moscow he had the trouble of convincing the public that he had just popped off to tell Josephine that everything was O.K. and that he was going Nap on himself.

Alfred the Great, too, was so unhappy that he went about his kingdom burning buns so that he could get himself into the history books as Alfred the Bun-burner, and claim association with the chemistry classes by having the Bunsen burner named after him.

And Bonny Prince Charlie only made history when he was being pursued from crag to crag, dressed like the Laird's Lament or the Fair Maid of Haggis. When, finally, he gave up “legging” for laughing, his history lacked Pepys, and the fruitiest fact is that he picked an orange girl who was no lemon.

Robert the Bruce apparently was another martyr to misery. He spied a spider and trained it to run up and down its own whiskers, so that one day everyone might say to the faint-hearted, “remember Bruce and the spider, and give it a fly.”