came up to town last winter, and is one of the great- but a woman is too sincere to mitigate the fury of est fox-hunters in the country. She talks of hounds her principles with temper and discretion, and to and horses, and makes nothing of leaping over a act with that caution and reservedness which six-bar gate. If a man tells her a waggish story, are requisite in our sex. When this unnatural zeal she gives him a push with her hand in jest, and gets into them, it throws them into ten thousand calls him an impudent dog; and if her servant neg-heats and extravagancies; their generous souls set lects his business, threatens to kick him out of the no bounds to their love or to their hatred; and house. I have heard her in her wrath call a sub- whether a whig or a tory, a lap-dog or a gallant, an stantial tradesman a lousy cur; and remember one opera or a puppet-show, be the object of it, the day, when she could not think of the name of a passion, while it reigns, engrosses the whole person, she described him in a large company of woman. inen and ladies by the fellow with the broad shoulders. If those speeches and actions, which in their own nature are indifierent, appear ridiculous when they proceed from a wrong sex, the faults and imperfec tions of one sex transplanted into another appear black and monstrous. As for the men, I shall not in this paper any farther concern myself about them; but as I would fain contribute to make womankind, which is the most beautiful part of creation, entirely amiable, and wear out all those little spots and blemishes that are apt to rise among the charms which nature has poured out upon them, I shall dedicate this paper to their service. The spot which I would here endeavour to clear them of, is that party rage which of late years is very much crept into their conversation. This is, in its nature, a male vice, and made up of many angry and cruel passions that are altogether repugnant to the softness, the modesty, and those other endearing qualities which are natural to the fair sex. Women were formed to temper mankind, and soothe them into tenderness and compassion; not to set an edge upon their minds, and blow up in them those passions which are too apt to rise of their own accord. When I have seen a pretty mouth uttering calumnies and invectives, what would I not have given to have stopt it? How I have been troubled to see some of the finest features in the world grow pale, and tremble with party rage! Camilla is one of the greatest beauties in the British nation, and yet values herself more upon being the virago of one party, than upon being the toast of both. The dear creature, about a week ago, encountered the fierce and beautiful Penthesilea across a tea-table, but in the height of her anger, as her hand chanced to shake with the earnestness of the dispute, she scalded her fingers, and spilt a dish of tea upon her petticoat. Had not this accident broke off the debate, nobody knows where it would have ended. There is one consideration which I would earnestly recommend to all my female readers, and which, I hope, will have some weight with them. In short, it is this, that there is nothing so bad for the face as party zeal. It gives an ill-natured cast to the eye, and a disagreeable sourness to the look: besides that it makes the lines too strong, and flushes them worse than brandy. I have seen a woman's face break out in heats, as she had been talking against a great lord, whom she had never seen in her life; and indeed I never knew a party-woman that kept her beauty for a twelvemonth. I would therefore advise all my female readers, as they value their complexions, to let alone all disputes of this nature; though, at the same time, I would give free liberty to all superannuated motherly partisans to be as violent as they please, since there will be no danger either of their spoiling their faces, or of their gaining converts. For my own part, I think a man makes an odious and despicable figure, that is violent in a party, I remember, when Dr. Titus Oates* was in all his glory, I accompanied my friend Will Honeycomb in a visit to a lady of his acquaintance. We were no sooner sat down, but upon casting my eyes about the room, I found in almost every corner of it a print that represented the doctor in all magnitudes and dimensions. A little after, as the lady was discoursing with my friend, and held her snuffbox in her hand, who should I see in the lid of it but the doctor? It was not long after this when she had occasion for her handkerchief, which, upon first opening, discovered among the plaits of it the figure of the doctor. Upon this my friend Will, who loves raillery, told her, that if he was in Mr. Truelove's place (for that was the name of her husband), he should be made as uneasy by a handkerchief as ever Othello was. "I am afraid," said she, Mr. Honeycomb, you are a tory: tell me truly, are you a friend to the doctor, or not?" Will, instead of making her a reply, smiled in her face (for indeed she was very pretty) and told her, that one of her patches was dropping off. She immidiately adjusted it, and looking a little seriously, Well," says she, "I will be hanged if you and your silent friend there are not against the doctor in your hearts; I suspected as much by his saying nothing." Upon this she took her fan in her han.., and upon the opening of it, again displayed to us the figure of the doctor, who was placed with great gravity among the sticks of it. In a word, I found that the doctor had taken possession of her thoughts, her discourse, and most of her furniture; but nuding myself pressed too close by her question, I winked upon my friend to take his leave, which he did accordingly.-C. 46 No. 58.] MONDAY, MAY 7, 1711. NOTHING is so much admired, and so little understood, as wit. No author that I know of has written professedly upon it, and as for those who make any mention of it, they only treat on the subject as it has accidentally fallen in their way, and that too in little short reflections, or in general exclamatory flourishes, without entering into the bottom of the matter. I hope, therefore, shall perform an acceptable work to my countrymen, if I treat at large upon this subject; which I shall endeavour to do .n a manner suitable to it, that I may not incur the censure which a famous critic bestows upon one who had written a treatise on "the sublime," in a low grovelling style. I intend to lay aside a whole week for this undertaking, that the scheme of my thoughts may not be broken and interrupted; and I dare promise myself, if my readers will give me a week's attention, that this great city will be very Though the name of Dr. T. Oates is made use of here, Dr. Sacheverel is the person alluded to. much changed for the better by next Saturday night. | I shall endeavour to make what I say intelligible to ordinary capacities; but if my realers meet with any paper that in some parts of it may be a little out of their reach, I would not have them discouraged, for they may assure themselves the next shall be much clearer. As the great and only end of these my speculations is to banish vice and ignorance out of the territories of Great Britain, I shall endeavour as much as possible to establish among us a taste of polite writing. It is with this view that I have endeavoured to set my readers right in several points relating to operas and tragedies; and shall from time to time impart my notions of comedy, as I think they may tend to its refinement and perfection. I find by my bookseller, that these papers of criticism, with that upon humour, have met with a more kind reception than indeed I could have hoped for from such subjects; for which reason I shall enter upon my present undertaking with greater cheerfulness. In this, and one or two following papers, I shall trace out the history of false wit, and distinguish the several kinds of it as they have prevailed in different ages of the world. This I think the more necessary at present, because I observed there were attempts on foot last winter to revive some of those antiquated modes of wit that have been long exploded out of the commonwealth of letters. There were several satires and panegyrics handed about in acrostic, by which means some of the most arrant undisputed blockheads about the town began to entertain ambitious thoughts, and to set up for polite authors. I shall therefore describe at length those many arts of false wit, in which a writer does not show himself a man of a beautiful genius, but of great industry. The first species of false wit which I have met with is venerable for its antiquity, and has produced several pieces which have lived very near as long as the Iliad itself: I mean those short poems printed among the minor Greek poets, which resemble the fgure of an egg, a pair of wings, an axe, a shepherd's pipe, and an altar. As for the first, it is a little oval poem, and may not improperly be called a scholar's egg. I would endeavour to hatch it, or, in more intelligible language, to translate it into English, did not I find the interpretation of it very difficult; for the author seems to have been more intent upon the figure of his poem than upon the sense of it. The pair of wings consists of twelve verses, or rather feathers, every verse decreasing gradually in its measure according to its situation in the wing. The subject of it (as in the rest of the poems which follow) bears some remote affinity with the figure, for it describes a god of love, who is always painted with wings. The axe, methinks, would have been a good figure for a lampoon, had the edge of it consisted of the most satirical parts of the work; but as it is in the original, I take it to have been nothing else but the posy of an axe which was consecrated to Minerva, and was thought to have been the same that Epeus made use of in the building of the Trojan horse; which is a hint I shall leave to the consideration of the critics. I am apt to think that the posy was written originally upon the axe, like those which our modern cutlers inscribe upon their knives; and that therefore the posy still remains in its original shape, though the axe itself is lost. The shepherd's pipe may be said to be full of music, for it is composed of nine different kinds of verses, which by their several lengths resemble the nine stops of the old musical instrument, that is likewise the subject of the poem. The altar is inscribed with the epitaph of Tros, the son of Hecuba; which, by the way, makes me believe that these false pieces of wit are much more ancient than the authors to whom they are generally ascribed: at least I will never be persuaded that so fine a writer as Theocritus could have been the author of any such simple works. It was impossible for a man to succeed in these performances who was not a kind of painter, or at least a designer. He was first of all to draw the outline of the subject which he intended to write upon, and afterward conform the description to the figure of his subject. The poetry was to contract or dilate itself according to the mould in which it was cast. In a word, the verses were to be cramped or extended to the dimensions of the frame that was prepared for them, and to undergo the fate of those persons whom the tyrant Procrustes used to lodge in his iron bed-if they were too short, he stretched them on a rack; and if they were too long, chopped off a part of their legs, till they fitted the couch which he had prepared for them. Mr. Dryden hints at this obsolete kind of wit in one of the following verses in his Mac Flecno; which an English reader cannot understand, who does not know that there are those little poems above-mentioned in the shape of wings and altars: Choose for thy command Some peaceful province in acrostic land; There may st thou wings display, and altars raise, And torture one poor word a thousand ways. This fashion of false wit was revived by several pocts of the last age, and in particular may be met with among Mr. Herbert's poems; and, if I am not mistaken, in the translation of Du Bartas. I do not remember any other kind of work among the moderns which more resembles the performances I have mentioned, than that famous picture of King Charles the First, which has the whole book of psalms written in the lines of the face and the hair of the head. When I was last at Oxford I perused one of the whiskers, and was reading the other, but could not go so far in it as I would have done by reason of the impatience of my friends and fellowtravellers, who all of them pressed to see such a piece of curiosity. I have since heard that there is now an eminent writing-master in town who has transcribed all the whole Testament in a full-bottomed periwig: and if the fashion would introduce the thick kind of wigs which were in vogue some few years ago, he promises to add two or three supernumerary locks that should contain all the Apocrypha. He designed this wig originally for king William, having disposed of the two books of Kings in the two forks of the foretop; but that glorious monarch dying before the wig was finished, there is a space left in it for the face of any one that has a mind to purchase it. But to return to our ancient poems in picture. I would humbly propose, for the benefit of our modern smatterers in poetry, that they would imitate their brethren among the ancients in those ingenious devices. I have communicated this thought to a young poetical lover of my acquaintance, who intends to present his mistress with a copy of verses made in the shape of her fan; and, if he tells me true, has already finished the three first sticks of it. He has likewise promised me to get the measure of his mistress's marriage finger, with a design to make a posy in the fashion of a ring, which shall exactly fit it. It is so very easy to enlarge upon a good hint, that I do not question but my ingenious readers will apply what I have said to many other particulars: and that we shall see the town filled in a very little time with poetical tippets, handkerchiefs, snuff-boxes, and the like female ornaments. I shall therefore conclude with a word of advice to those admirable English authors who call themselves Pindaric writers, that they would apply themselves to this kind of wit without loss of time, as being provided better than any other poets with verses of all sizes and dimensions.-C. No. 59., TUESDAY, MAY 8, 1711. Operose nihil agunt.-SENECA. Busy about nothing. THERE is nothing more certain, than that every man would be a wit if he could; and notwithstanding pedants of a pretended depth and solidity are apt to decry the writings of a polite author as flash and froth, they all of them shew, upon occasion, that they would spare no pains to arrive at the character of those whom they seem to despise. For this reason we often find them endeavouring at works of fancy, which cost them infinite pangs in the production. The truth of it is, a man had better be a galley-slave than a wit, were one to gain that title by those elaborate trifles which have been the inventions of such authors as were often masters of great learning, but no genius. In my last paper I mentioned some of these false wits among the ancients, and in this shall give the reader two or three other species of them, that flourished in the same early ages of the world. The first I shall produce are the lipogrammatists or letterdroppers of antiquity, that would take an exception, without any reason, against some particular letter in the alphabet, so as not to admit it once into a whole poem. One Tryphiodorus was a great master in this kind of writing. He composed an Odyssey or epic poem on the adventures of Ulysses, consisting of four and twenty books, having entirely banished the letter A from the first book, which was called Alpha (as lucus non lucendo) because there was not an alpha in it. His second book was inscribed Beta for the same reason. In short, the poet excluded the whole four and twenty letters in their turns, and shewed them, one after another, that he could do his business without them. a whole word, by substituting a picture in its place, When Cæsar was one of the masters of the Roman mint, he placed the figure of an elephant upon the reverse of the public money; the word Cæsar signifying an elephant in the Punic language. This was artificially contrived by Cæsar, because it was not lawful for a private man to stamp his own figure upon the coin of the commonwealth. Cicero, who was so called from the founder of his family, that was marked on the nose with a little wen like a vetch (which is Cicer in Latin,) instead of Marcus Tullius Cicero, ordered the words Marcus Tullius with a figure of a vetch at the end of them, to be inscribed on a public monument. This was done probably to shew that he was neither ashamed of his name or his family, notwithstanding the envy of his competitors had often reproached him with both. In the same manner, we read of a famous building that was marked in several parts of it with the figures of a frog and a lizard; those words in Greek having been the names of the architects, who by the laws of their country were never permitted to inscribe their own names upon their works. For the same reason it is thought that the forelock of the horse, in the antique equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, represents at a distance the shape of an owl, to intimate the country of the statuary who, in all probability was an Athenian. This kind of wit was very much in vogue among our own countrymen about an age or two ago, who did not practise it for any oblique reason, as the aucients above-mentioned, but purely for the sake of being witty. Among innumerable instances that may be given of this nature, I shall produce the device of one Mr. Newberry, as I find it mentioned by our learned Camden in his remains. Mr. Newberry, to represent his name by a picture, hung up at his door the sign of a yew-tree, that had several berries upon it, and in the midst of them a great golden N hung upon the bough of the tree, which by the help of a little false spelling made up the word N-ew-berry. I shall conclude this topic with a rebus, which has been lately hewn out in freestone, and erected over two of the portals of Blenheim House, being the figure of a monstrous lion tearing to pieces a little cock. For the better understanding of which device, I must acquaint my English reader, that a cock has the misfortune to be called in Latin by the same word that signifies a Frenchman, as a lion is the em. blem of the English nation. Such a device, in so noble a pile of building, looks like a pun in an heroic poem; and I am very sorry the truly ingenious ar cellent plan with so poor a conceit. But I hope what I have said will gain quarter for the cock, and deliver him out of the lion's paw. It must have been very pleasant to have seen this poet avoiding the reprobate letter, as much as an-chitect would suffer the statuary to blemish his exother would a false quantity, and making his escape from it through the several Greek dialects, when he was pressed with it in any particular syllable. For the most apt and elegant word in the whole language was rejected, like a diamond with a flaw in it, if it appeared blemished with a wrong letter. I shall only observe upon this head, that if the work I have here mentioned had been now extant, the Odyssey of Tryphiodorus, in all probability, would have been oftener quoted by our learned pedants, than the Odyssey of Homer. What a perpetual fund would it have been of obsolete words and phrases, unusual barbarisms and rusticities, absurd spellings, and complicated dialects? I make no question but it would have been looked upon as one of the most valuable treasuries of the Greek tongue. I find likewise among the ancients that ingenious ind of conceit, which the moderns distinguish by the name of a rebus, that does not sink a letter, but I find likewise in ancient times the conceit of making an echo talk sensibly, and give rational answers. If this could be excusable in any writer, it would be in Ovid, where he introduces the Echo as a nymph, before she was worn away into nothing but a voice. The learned Erasmus, though a man of wit and genius, has composed a dialogue upon this silly kind of device, and made use of an echo who seems to have been a very extraordinary lin guist, for she answers the person she talks with in Latin, Greck, and Hebrew, according as she found the syllables which she was to repeat in any of these learned languages. Hudibras, in ridicule of this false kind of wit, has described Bruin bewailing the loss of his bear to a solitary Echo, who is of great use to the pot in several distichs, as she does not only repeat after him, but helps out his verse, and of one word into another, or the turning of the furnishes him with rhymes: He rag'd, and kept as heavy a coil as Than in small poet's splay-foot rhymes, Then what has quell'd thy stubborn heart? Nor did I ever wince or grudge it, From me too as thine enemy? Or if thou hast no thought of me, Nor what I have endur'd for thee; Yet shame and honour might prevail To keep thee thus from turning tail: For who would grudge to spend his blood in No. 60.] WEDNESDAY, MAY 9, 1711. Is it for this you gain those meagre looks, ge same set of letters into different words; which change night into day, or black into white, if Chance, who is the goddess that presides over these sorts of composition, shall so direct. I remember a witty author, in allusion to this kind of writing, calls his rival, who (it seems) was distorted, and had his limbs set in places that did not properly belong to them, "the anagram of a man." She When the anagrammatist takes a name to work upon, he considers it at first as a mine not broken up, which will not shew the treasure it contains, till he shall have spent many hours in the search of it; for it is his business to find out one word that conceals itself in another, and to examine the letters in all the variety of stations in which they can possibly be ranged. I have heard of a gentleman, who, when this kind of wit was in fashion, endeavoured to gain his mistress's heart by it. was one of the finest women of her age, and known by the name of the Lady Mary Boon. The lover not being able to make any thing of Mary, by certain liberties indulged to this kind of writing converted it into Moll; and after having shut himself up for half a year, with indefatigable industry produced an anagram. Upon the presenting it to his mistress, who was a little vexed in her heart to see herself degraded into Moll Boon, she told him, to his infinite surprise, that he had mistaken her sirname, for that it was not Boon, but Bohun. -Ibid omnis The lover was thunderstruck with his misfortune, insomuch that in a little time after he lost his senses, which indeed had been very much impaired by that continual application he had given to his anagram. The acrostic was probably invented about the same time with the anagram, though it is impossible to decide whether the inventor of the one or the other were the greater blockhead. The simple acrostic is nothing but the name or title of a person, or thing, made out of the initial letters of seveAs the monks were the masters of all that little ral verses, and by that means written, after the learning which was then extant, and had their manner of the Chinese, in a perpendicular line. whole lives entirely disengaged from business, it is But besides these there are compound acrostics, no wonder that several of them, who wanted when the principal letters stand two or three deep. I have seen some of them where the verses have nius for higher performances, employed many hours in the composition of such tricks in writing as re-but have had the same name running down like a not only been edged by a name at each extremity, quired much time and little capacity. I have seen half the Eneid turned into Latin rhymes by one of the beaux esprits of that dark age; who says in his preface to it, that the Eneid wanted nothing but the sweets of rhyme to make it the most perfect work in its kind. I have likewise seen a hymn in hexameters to the Virgin Mary, which filled whole book, though it consisted but of the eight following words : a Tot, tibi, sunt, Virgo, dotes, quot, sidera, cœlo. heaven. seam through the middle of the poem. There is another near relation of the anagrams and acrostics, which is commonly called a chronogram. This kind of wit appears very often on any modern medals, especially those of Germany, when they represent in the inscription the year in which they were coined. Thus we see on a medal of Gustavus Adolphus the following words, CHRISTVS DUX ERGO TRIVMPHVS. If you take the pains to pick the figures out of the several words, and range them in their proper order, you will find they amount to MDCXVVVII, or 1627, the year in which The poet rung the changes upon these eight seve- the medal was stamped; for as some of the letters ral words, and by that means made his verses al-distinguish themselves from the rest, and overtop most as numerous as the virtues and the stars which their fellows, they are to be considered in a double they celebrated. It is no wonder that men who capacity, both as letters and as figures. Your labohad so much time upon their hands did not only re-rious German wits will turn over a whole dictionary store all the antiquated piecesof false wit, but en- for one of these ingenious devices. A man would rich the world with inventions of their own. It think they were searching after an apt classical was to this age that we owe the production of ana-term, but instead of that they are looking out a grams, which is nothing else but a transmutation word that has an L, an M, or a D, in it. When therefore we meet with any of these inscriptions, we are not so much to look in them for the thought, as for the year of the Lord. poem entitled, La Defaite des Bouts-Rimés, The Rout of the Bouts-Rimés. I must subjoin to this last kind of wit the double rhymes, which are used in doggerel poetry, and ge nerally applauded by ignorant readers. If the thought of the couplet in such compositions is good, the rhyme adds little to it; and if bad, it will not be in the power of the rhyme to recommend it. I am afraid that great numbers of those who admire the incomparable Hudibras, do it more on account of those doggerel rhymes than of the parts that really deserve admiration. I am sure I have heard the Pulpit, drum ecclesiastic, The bouts-rimés were the favorites of the French nation for a whole age together, and that at a time when it abounded in wit and learning. They were a list of words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who was to make a poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the list: the more uncommon the rhymes were, the more extraordinary was the genius of the poet that could accommodate his verses to them. I do not know any greater instance of the decay of wit and learning among the French (which generally follows the declension of and empire) than the endeavouring to restore this foolish kind of wit. If the reader will be at the trouble to see examples of it, let him look into the new Mercure Gallant; where the author every month gives a list of rhymes to be filled up by the ingenious, in order to be communicated to the public in the Mercure for the succeeding month. That for the month of November last, which now lies before me, is as follows: One would be amazed to see so learned a man as Menage talking seriously on this kind of trifle in the following passage: "Monsieur de la Chambre has told me that he never knew what he was going to write when he took his pen into his hand; but that one sentence always produced another. For my own part, I never knew what I should write next when I was making verses. In the first place I got all my rhymes together, and was afterward perhaps three or four months in filling them up. I one day shewed Monsieur Gombaud a composition of this nature, in which, among others, I had made use of the four following rhymes, Amaryllis, Phyllis, Marne, Arne; desiring him to give me his opinion of it. He told me immediately, that my verses were good for nothing. And upon my asking his reason, he said, because the rhymes are too common; and for that reason easy to be put into verse. Marry,' says I, if it be so, I am very well rewarded for all the pains I have been at.' But by Monsieur Gom baud's leave, notwithstanding the severity of the criticism, the verses were good."' Vid Menagi* Thus far the learned Menage, whom I have translated word for word. ana. The first occasion of these bouts-rimés made them in some manner excusable, as they were tasks which the French ladies used to impose on their lovers. But when a grave author, like him abovementioned, tasked himself, could there be any thing more ridiculous? Or would not one be apt to believe that the author played booty, and did not make his list of rhymes till he had finished his poem ? I shall only add, that this piece of false wit has been finely ridiculed by Monsieur Sarasin, in a Tom. i. p. 174, &c. ed. Amst. 1713 Was beat with fist, instead of a stick; There was an ancient sage philosopher more frequently quoted, than the finest pieces of wit in the whole poem.-C. No. 61.] THURSDAY, MAY 10, 1711. 'Tis not indeed my talent to engage THERE is no kind of false wit which has been so recommended by the practice of all ages, as that which consists in a jingle of words, and is comprehended under the general name of punning. It is indeed impossible to kill a weed which the soi! has a natural disposition to produce. The seeds of punning are in the minds of all men; and though they may be subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest genius that is not broken and cultivated by the rules of art. Imitation is uatural to us, and when it does not raise the mind to poetry, painting, music, or other more noble arts, it often breaks out in puns and quibbles. Aristotle, in the eleventh chapter of his book of rhetoric, describes two or three kinds of puns, which he calls paragrams, among the beauties of good writing, and produces instances of them out of some of the greatest authors in the Greek tongue. Cicero has sprinkled several of his works with puns, and in his book where he lays down the rules of oratory, quotes abundance of sayings as pieces of wit, which also upon examination prove arrant puns. But the age in which the pun chicily flourished was in the reign of King James the First. That learned monarch was himself a tolerable punster, and made very few bishops or privy-counsellors that had not some time or other signalised themselves by a clinch or a conundrum. It was therefore in this age that the pun appeared with pomp and dignity. It had been before admitted into merry speeches and ludicrous compositions, but was now delivered with great gravity from the pulpit, or pronounced in the most solemn manner at the council-table. greatest authors, in their most serious works, made frequent use of puns. The sermons of Bishop Andrews, and the tragedies of Shakspeare, are full of them. The sinner was runned into repentance by the former, as in the latter nothing is more usual than to see a hero weeping and quibbling for a dozen lines together. The I must add to these great authorities, which seem to have given a kind of sauction to this piece of false |