all the by-standers, who have gone away clearly convinced that Titubus must have been in the wrong, because he was in a passion; and that Mr. -, meaning his opponent, is one of the fairest and at the same time one of the most dispassionate arguers breathing. Who has not at one time or other been at a party of professors (himself perhaps an old offender in that line), where, after ringing a round of the most ingenious conceits, every man contributing his shot, and some there the most expert shooters of the day; after making a poor word run the gauntlet till it is ready to drop; after hunting and winding it through all the possible ambages of similar VIII.—THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, sounds; after squeezing, and hauling, and BECAUSE THEY WILL NOT BEAR A TRANS- THE same might be said of the wittiest local allusions. A custom is sometimes as difficult to explain to a foreigner as a pun. What would become of a great part of the wit of the last age, if it were tried by this test? How would certain topics, as aldermanity, cuckoldry, have sounded to a Terentian auditory, though Terence himself had been alive to translate them? Senator urbanus with Curruca to boot for a synonyme, would but faintly have done the business. Words, involving notions, are hard enough to render; it is too much to expect us to translate a sound, and give an elegant version to a jingle. The Virgilian harmony is not translatable, but by substituting harmonious sounds in another language for it. To Latinise a pun, we must seek a pun in Latin, that will answer to it; as, to give an idea of the double endings in Hudibras, we must have recourse to a similar practice in the old monkish doggrel. Dennis, the fiercest oppugner of puns in ancient or modern times, professes himself highly tickled with the "a stick," chiming to "ecclesiastic." Yet what is this but a species of pun, a verbal consonance? IX. THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST. tugging at it, till the very milk of it will not yield a drop further,—suddenly some obscure, unthought-of fellow in a corner, who was never 'prentice to the trade, whom the company for very pity passed over, as we do by a known poor man when a money-subscription is going round, no one calling upon him for his quota-has all at once come out with something so whimsical, yet so pertinent; so brazen in its pretensions, yet so impossible to be denied; so exquisitely good, and so deplorably bad, at the same time, that it has proved a Robin Hood's shot; anything ulterior to that is despaired of; and the party breaks up, unanimously voting it to be the very worst (that is, best) pun of the evening. This species of wit is the better for not being perfect in all its parts. What it gains in completeness, it loses in naturalness. The more exactly it satisfies the critical, the less hold it has upon some other faculties. The puns which are most entertaining are those which will least bear an analysis. Of this kind is the following, recorded with a sort of stigma, in one of Swift's Miscellanies. An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question: "Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare, or a wig?" There is no excusing this, and no resisting IF by worst be only meant the most far-it. A man might blur ten sides of paper fetched and startling, we agree to it. A pun in attempting a defence of it against a critic is not bound by the laws which limit nicer who should be laughter-proof. The quibble wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a in itself is not considerable. It is only a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic new turn given by a little false pronunciation, which does not stand upon manners, but to a very common, though not very courteous comes bounding into the presence, and does inquiry. Put by one gentleman to another at not show the less comic for being dragged a dinner-party, it would have been vapid; to in sometimes by the head and shoulders. the mistress of the house it would have What though it limp a little, or prove de-shown much less wit than rudeness. We fective in one leg ?-all the better. A pun must take in the totality of time, place, and may easily be too curious and artificial. person; the pert look of the inquiring X-THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES. THOSE who use this proverb can never have seen Mrs. Conrady. scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled impression, to be forcible, must be simultaporter: the one stopping at leisure, the other neous and undivided. hurrying on with his burden; the innocent though rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, with the utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second; the place a public street, not favourable to frivolous investigations; the affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire; namely, that few of that tribe are expected to eat of the good things which they carry, they being in most countries considered rather as the temporary trustees than owners of such dainties, which the fellow was beginning to understand; but then the wig again comes in, and he can make nothing of it; all put together constitute a picture: Hogarth could have made it intelligible on canvass. The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from the celestial beauty. As she partakes more or less of this heavenly light, she informs, with corresponding characters, the fleshly tenement which she chooses, and frames to herself a suitable mansion. All which only proves that the soul of Mrs. Conrady, in her pre-existent state, was no great judge of architecture. To the same effect, in a Hymn in honour of Beauty, divine Spenser platonising, sings: Every spirit as it is more pure, And hath in it the more of heavenly light, Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very bad pun, because of the defectiveness in the concluding member, which is its very beauty, and constitutes the surprise. The same person shall cry up for admirable the cold quibble from Virgil about the broken Cremona ;* because it is made out in all its parts, and leaves nothing to the These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philosophy; for here, in his very next stanza imagination. We venture to call it cold; but one, is a saving clause, which throws us because, of thousands who have admired it, it would be difficult to find one who has all out again, and leaves us as much to seek heartily chuckled at it. As appealing to the judgment merely (setting the risible faculty aside), we must pronounce it a monument of curious felicity. But as some stories are said to be too good to be true, it may with equal truth be asserted of this biverbal allusion, that it is too good to be natural. One cannot help suspecting that the incident was invented to fit the line. It would have been better had it been less perfect. Like some Virgilian hemistichs, it has suffered by filling up. The nimium Vicina was enough in conscience; the Cremona afterwards loads it. It is, in fact, a double pun; and we have always observed that a superfotation in this sort of wit is dangerous. When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic to follow it up. We do not care to be cheated a second time; or, perhaps the mind of man (with reverence be it spoken) is not capacious enough to lodge two puns at a time. The • Swift. But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. as ever: Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind From which it would follow, that Spenser had seen somebody like Mrs. Conrady. The spirit of this good lady-her previous anima-must have stumbled upon one of these untoward tabernacles which he speaks of. A more rebellious commodity of clay for a ground, as the poet calls it, no gentle mind and sure hers is one of the gentlest-ever had to deal with. Pondering upon her inexplicable visageinexplicable, we mean, but by this modification of the theory-we have come to a conclusion that, if one must be plain, it is better to be plain all over, than amidst a tolerable residue of features to hang out one that shall Mrs. Conrady has done you a service, her XI. THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT HORSE be exceptionable. No one can say of Mrs. Conrady's countenance that it would be better if she had but a nose. It is impossible to pull her to pieces in this manner. We have seen the most malicious beauties of her own sex baffled in the attempt at a selection. The tout-ensemble defies particularising. It is too complete-too consistent, as we may say to admit of these invidious reservations. It is not as if some Apelles had picked out here a lip and there a chin-out of the collected ugliness of Greece, to frame a model by. It is a symmetrical whole. We challenge the minutest connoisseur to cavil at any part or parcel of the countenance in question; to say that this, or that, is improperly placed. We are convinced that true ugliness, no less than is affirmed of true beauty, is the result NOR a lady's age in the parish register. of harmony. Like that, too, it reigns without We hope we have more delicacy than to do a competitor. No one ever saw Mrs. Con- either; but some faces spare us the trouble rady, without pronouncing her to be the of these dental inquiries. And what if the plainest woman that he ever met with in the beast, which my friend would force upon course of his life. The first time that you my acceptance, prove, upon the face of it, a are indulged with a sight of her face, is an sorry Rosinante, a lean, ill-favoured jade, era in your existence ever after. You are whom no gentleman could think of setting glad to have seen it-like Stonehenge. No up in his stables? Must I, rather than not one can pretend to forget it. No one ever be obliged to my friend, make her a comapologised to her for meeting her in the panion to Eclipse or Lightfoot! A horsestreet on such a day and not knowing her: giver, no more than a horse-seller, has a the pretext would be too bare. Nobody can right to palm his spavined article upon us mistake her for another. Nobody can say of for good ware. An equivalent is expected her, "I think I have seen that face some- in either case; and, with my own good will, where, but I cannot call to mind where." I would no more be cheated out of my You must remember that in such a parlour thanks than out of my money. Some people it first struck you-like a bust. You won- have a knack of putting upon you gifts of dered where the owner of the house had no real value, to engage you to substantial picked it up. You wondered more when it gratitude. We thank them for nothing. began to move its lips-so mildly too! No Our friend Mitis carries this humour of one ever thought of asking her to sit for her never refusing a present, to the very point picture. Lockets are for remembrance; and of absurdity-if it were possible to couple it would be clearly superfluous to hang an the ridiculous with so much mistaken deliimage at your heart, which, once seen, can cacy, and real good-nature. Not an apartnever be out of it. It is not a mean face ment in his fine house (and he has a true either; its entire originality precludes that. taste in household decorations), but is stuffed Neither is it of that order of plain faces up with some preposterous print or mirror | which improve upon acquaintance. Some the worst adapted to his panels that may very good but ordinary people, by an un-be-the presents of his friends that know wearied perseverance in good offices, put a his weakness; while his noble Vandykes cheat upon our eyes; juggle our senses out of their natural impressions; and set us upon discovering good indications in a countenance, which at first sight promised nothing less. We detect gentleness, which had escaped us, lurking about an under lip. But when are displaced, to make room for a set of daubs, the work of some wretched artist of his acquaintance, who, having had them returned upon his hands for bad likenesses, finds his account in bestowing them here gratis. The good creature has not the heart to mortify the painter at the expense of an honest refusal. It is pleasant (if it did not vex one at the same time) to see him sitting in his dining parlour, surrounded with obscure aunts and cousins to God knows whom, while the true Lady Marys and Lady Bettys of his own honourable family, in favour to these adopted frights, are consigned to the stair-case and the lumber-room. In like manner his goodly shelves are one by one stripped of his favourite old authors, to give place to a collection of presentation copies the flour and bran of modern poetry. A presentation copy, reader-if haply you are yet innocent of such favours-is a copy of a book which does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does sell, in return. We can speak to experience, having by us a tolerable assortment of these gift-horses. Not to ride a metaphor to death-we are willing to acknowledge, that in some gifts there is sense. A duplicate out of a friend's library (where he has more than one copy of a rare author) is intelligible. There are favours, short of the pecuniary-a thing not fit to be hinted at among gentlemen-which confer as much grace upon the acceptor as the offerer; the kind, we confess, which is most to our palate, is of those little conciliatory missives, which for their vehicle generally choose a hamper -little odd presents of game, fruit, perhaps wine-though it is essential to the delicacy of the latter, that it be home-made. We love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our table by proxy; to apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles may be between us) by a turkey, whose goodly aspect reflects to us his "plump corpusculum;" to taste him in grouse or woodcock; to feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar to the latter; to concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is indeed to have him within ourselves; to know him intimately such participation is methinks unitive, as the old theologians phrase it. For these considerations we should be sorry if certain restrictive regulations, which are thought to bear hard upon the peasantry of this country, were entirely done away with. A hare, as the law now stands, makes many friends. Caius conciliates Titius (knowing his goût) with a leash of partridges. Titius (suspecting his partiality for them) passes them to Lucius; who, in his turn, preferring his friend's relish to his own, makes them over to Marcius; till in their ever-widening progress, and round of unconscious circummigration, they distribute the seeds of harmony over half a parish. We are well-disposed to this kind of sensible remembrances; and are the less apt to be taken by those little airy tokens-impalpable to the palate-which, under the names of rings, lockets, keep-sakes, amuse some people's fancy mightily. We could never away with these indigestible trifles. They are the very kickshaws and foppery of friendship. XII.-THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO HOMELY. HOMES there are, we are sure, that are no homes; the home of the very poor man, and another which we shall speak to presently. Crowded places of cheap entertainment, and the benches of alehouses, if they could speak, might bear mournful testimony to the first. To them the very poor man resorts for an image of the home, which he cannot find at home. For a starved grate, and a scanty firing, that is not enough to keep alive the natural heat in the fingers of so many shivering children with their mother, he finds in the depths of winter always a blazing hearth, and a hob to warm his pittance of beer by. Instead of the clamours of a wife, made gaunt by famishing, he meets with a cheerful attendance beyond the merits of the trifle which he can afford to spend. He has companions which his home denies him, for the very poor man has no visitors. He can look into the goings on of the world, and speak a little to politics. At home there are no politics stirring, but the domestic. All interests, real or imaginary, all topics that should expand the mind of man, and connect him to a sympathy with general existence, are crushed in the absorbing consideration of food to be obtained for the family. Beyond the price of bread, news is senseless and impertinent. At home there is no larder. Here there is at least a show of plenty; and while he cooks his lean scrap of butcher's meat before the common bars, or munches his humbler cold viands, his relishing bread nurses, it was a stranger to the patient co-operator, for food with the parent. It is |