dictum of an illustrious quibbler—“ Sir, no man ever condemned a good pun who was able to make one." I know not a more aggrieved and unjustly proscribed character in the present day than the poor painstaking punster. He is the Paria of the dining-table; it is the fashion to run him down: and as every dull ass thinks that he may have a kick at the prostrate witling, may I be condemned to pass a whole week without punning, (a fearful adjuration !) if I do not show that the greatest sages, poets, and philosophers of all ages, have been enrolled upon this proscribed list! Even in Holy Writ, whatever might have been the intention of the speaker, there is authority for a play upon words equivalent to a pun. When Simon BarJona, for his superior faith, received the name of Peter, (which in Greek signifies a stone or rock,) the divine bestower of that appellation exclaimed, " I say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church," &c. Homer has made the wily Ulysses save his life by means of a pun. In the ninth book of the Odyssey, that hero informs the Cyclops that his name is Noman; and when the monster, after having had his eye put out in his sleep, awakes in agony, he thus roars to his companions for assist ance: "Friends! No-man kills me. No-man in the hour 66 a joke upon which Euripides dilates with huge delight in the drama of the Cyclops.* It will be observed that Pope has preserved the equivoque in his translation, which attests his respect for this most ancient jeu-de-mots; while Ulysses is described as hurrying away in high glee, pleased with the effect of conduct and of art," which is an evidence that Homer felicitated himself upon the happiness of the thought. This passage exhibits a very rude and primitive state of the art; for had any modern Cyclopes been invoked to aid their comrade under similar circumstances, they would have seen through so flimsy a trick only with one eye. Later Greek writers were by no means slow in following so notable an example. Plutarch has preserved several of these Pteroenta, or flying words, particularly King Philip's celebrated pun to the physician who attended him when his collar-bone was broken; and Diogenes the Cynic made so happy an equivoque upon a damsel's eye, which the profligate Didymus undertook to cure, that Scaliger said he would rather have been author of it than King of Navarre.— From the comic authors a whole galaxy of similar jokes might be collected; but I reserve the specification for a new edition of Hierocles, the Joe Miller of * Cibber, in translating the Italian Opera of Polifemo, makes Ulysses answer" I take no name;" whereby all that followed became unintelligible, and the Greek pun was most ingeniously spoilt. Alexandria, which I am preparing for the press in ten volumes quarto. The Romans, who imitated the Greeks in every thing, were not likely to forget their puns, verbaque apta joco. Cicero informs us that Cæsar was a celebrated performer in this way. Horace, in his seventh Satire, giving an account of the quarrel between Persius and Rupilius Rex, before Brutus the Prætor, makes the former exclaim, "Per magnos, Brute, Deos te oro, qui reges consuêris tollere, cur non hunc Regem jugulas?" thus playing upon the names of both parties. Martial was an accomplished punster; and Ovid not only quibbled upon words, but metamorphosed them into a thousand phantasies and vagaries. The same valuable privilege formed the staple commodity of the ancient Oracles; for if the presiding deities had not been shrewd punsters, or able to inspire the Pythoness with ready equivoques, the whole establishment must speedily have been declared bankrupt. Sometimes, indeed, they only dabbled in accentuation, and accomplished their prophecies by the transposition of a stop, as in the well-known answer to a soldier inquiring his fate in the war for which he was about to embark. Ibis, redibis. Nunquam in bello peribis." The warrior set off in high spirits upon the faith of this prediction, and fell in the first engagement, when his widow had the satisfaction of being informed that he should have put the full stop after the word "nunquam," which would probably have put a full stop to his enterprise and saved 66 his life. More commonly, however, they betook themselves to a positive pun, the double construction of which enabled them to be always right: sometimes playing upon a single word, and sometimes upon the whole clause of a sentence. When Croesus, about to make war upon Cyrus, consulted the Delphian priestess, he was told that in crossing the river Halys he would overturn a great empire-which could hardly fail to be true; for, if he succeeded, he would subvert the Assyrian kingdom; if he failed, his own would be overwhelmed. Pyrrhus received a similar response as to the fate of his expedition against the Romans. "Credo equidem Æacidas Romanos vincere posse;" which might import either that the acides, from whom Pyrrhus was descended, would conquer the Romans, or precisely the reverse: such are the advantages of a double accusative. Christianity, by superseding these Oracles, did not, most fortunately, extinguish quibbling, for which we have the authority of one of the earliest Popes. Some Pagan English youths of extraordinary beauty being presented to him, he exclaimed, “ Non Angli, sed Angeli forent, si essent Christiani." Heraldic bearings are supposed to have been invented to distinguish the different nations, armies, and clans, that were congregated together in the Crusades; and the mottoes assumed upon this occasion, if we may judge by those of England, bore almost universally some punning allusion to the name or device of the chief. The similar epigraphs still retained by the Vernon, Fortescue, and Cavendish families, as well as by numerous others, may be viewed as so many venerable testimonies to the antiquity of punning in this our happy island. There is not one of our sterling old English writers from whom we might not glean some specimen of this noble art; which seems to have attained its golden age in that Augustan æra of our literature-the reign of our renowned Queen Elizabeth, when clergymen punned in the pulpit, judges upon the bench, and criminals in their last dying speeches. Then was it that the deer-stealing attorney's clerk fled from Stratford, and introducing whole scenes of punning into his immortal plays, eliciting quibbles not less affluently from the mouths of fools and porters, than from the dread lips of the weird sisters, " who palter with us in a double sense," established upon an imperishable basis the glory of his favourite science of Paronomasia;-a glory irradiating and reflected by the whole galaxy of dramatic talent with which he was surrounded. Succeeding writers, though they have never equalled this splendour of quibble, have not failed to deposit occasional offerings upon the altar of Janus, the god of puns. Dryden pretended to be angry, when, being in a coffee-house with his back towards Rowe, one of his friends said to him, "You are like a waterman; you look one way, and Rowe another;" but, though unwilling to be the object of a pun, he had no compunction in being the author of many, for the support of which assertion the reader may consult his dramatic works. Addison's opinion of this laugh |