RIDDLES, or QUESTION PUZZLES. They were widely popular in dim an tiquity, as today they are popular among many half-civilized races—not absolute savages, for to perceive an analogy de mands some measure of culture. They may be broadly divided into two classes —riddles admitting of more or less easy solution, and riddles whose solution is beyond any wit of man, unless indeed, as is very often the, case, the answer is known already. To the former class be long the enigma propounded by the Sphinx to CEdipus, and that which, according to Plutarch, Homer died of chagrin at not being able to answer. It seems to us easy now, for it was the one about the two boys who went hunting: all they caught they flung away, and all they could not catch they carried home. Propound ing of riddles for wagers meets us fre quently. Josephus relates how Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre, once had a contest, in which Solomon first won a large sum of money from Hiram, but presently lost it all back to Hiram's sub ject Abdemon.
The riddle is found in the Koran, and several collections of riddles exist in Ara bic and Persian. They were, it seems, also known to the ancient Egyptians, while among the Greeks they were allied in the earliest times with the oracular responses. But in Greece they first came into vogue about the time of the "Seven Sages," one of whom, Cleobulus, was cele brated for the composition of metrical griphoi. Apuleius wrote a "Bock of Jokes and Riddles," but it is lost.
The riddle was much cultivated during the Middle Ages. Many French, Eng
lish, and German riddle-books exist in MS., and some were printed at an early period. Wynkyn de Worde's "Joyous Questions" (1511) contains several riddles that are simply coarse jests; but others, again, well illustrate the simple faith of medival Christendom—e. g., "Demand: What bare the best burden that ever was borne? Response: The ass that carried our Lady when she fled with our Lord into Egypt." The Reformation checked, if it did not wholly stop, the merry pas time of riddle-making; but in France, in the 17th century, it began to creep back into favor, till at last riddles rivaled in popularity the madrigals and sonnets of the period. Le Pere Menestrier, in 1694, wrote a grave treatise on the subject. The taste for riddle-making grew and grew, and many brilliant French writers, such as Boileau, Voltaire, Madame du Deffand, and Rousseau, did a little in this line. In Germany we have Schiller's de lightful extravaganza "Turandot," and in England Cowper, Fox, Canning, and Praed are a few of the makers of poetical riddles or charades. Today with us the riddle is a mere jeu d'esprit, a conundrum or pun couched question-wise; but among the Irish, German, and Russian peasantry, the gipsies, the Zulus, the Samoans, and many more races, the old-fashioned sense riddles, often enshrining a mythological germ, still hold their own.