Crossword-Solution: FACETIAE 8 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 13

The second room, announced by the word “Counting-Room” on its door, harmonized with the grim _facetiae_ of its neighbor.

Poggio, who wrote the ‘Facetiae,’ was a clergyman; Francesco Berni, the satirist, held a canonry; Teofilo Folengo, the author of the ‘Orlandino,’ was a Benedictine, certainly by no means a faithful one; Matteo Bandello, who held up his own order to ridicule, was a Dominican, and nephew of a general of this order.

How many of them there were in the wild, coarse, reckless, ribald, generous book of old English humor! How savage the satire was--how fierce the assault--what garbage hurled at opponents--what foul blows were hit--what language of Billingsgate flung! Fancy a party in a country-house now looking over Woodward's facetiae or some of the Gilray comicalities, or the slatternly Saturnalia of Rowlandson! Whilst we live we must laugh, and have folks to make us laugh.

Taylor's facetiae--upon which our host, who had till now supposed that all was going on swimmingly, thought it time to interfere and give a turn to the conversation by saying, 'Why, yes, gentlemen, what we have hitherto heard fall from the lips of our friend has been no doubt entertaining and highly agreeable in its way; but perhaps we have had enough of what is altogether delightful and pleasant and light and laughable in conduct.

What could I do? It is true that I had been called to the Bar in my tentative youth, while I drafted documents for my betters to pull to pieces and rewrite at the Foreign Office; but I had never seen a brief, and my memories of Gaius, Justinian, Williams's “Real Property,” and Austin's “Jurisprudence,” were as nebulous as those of the Differential Calculus over whose facetiae I had pondered during my schooldays.