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 deerstealing 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-provoking practice may be collected from the 440th Number of the Spectator, wherein he describes a society, who had established among themselves an infirmary for the cure of all defects of temper and infractions of good manners. "After dinner a very honest fellow chancing to let a pun fall from him, his neighbour cried out, To the infirmary! at the same time pretending to be sick at it, as having the same natural antipathy to a pun which some have to a cat. This produced a long debate. Upon the

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whole, the punster was acquitted and his neighbour sent off."-Pope's authority we have already cited. Gay was probably the author of the play upon his own name, when he observed that the great success of his Beggar's Opera, whilst Rich was proprietor of the theatre, had made Gay rich, and Rich gay. But what shall we say of Swift, the punster's Vademecum, the Hierarch, the Pontifex, the Magnus Apollo of the tribe; the Alpha and Omega, the first and last of the professors of equivocation; whose mind was an ever-springing fountain of quiddets, and the thread of whose life was an unbroken string of puns from his first to his second childhood? Impossible as it is to do justice to the memory of so great a man, I feel the eulogomania swelling within me; and that I may effectually check its yearnings, I leap athwart a measureless hiatus, and revert to that lugubrious, somnolent, single-sensed, and no-witted Antipunster, whom I apostrophised in the outset.

And now, thou word-measurer, thou line-and-rule mechanic, thou reasoning but not ruminating animal, now that I have produced these authorities, limited to a narrow list from the want of room, not of materials, wilt thou have the ridiculous arrogance to affect contempt for a pun? That genuine wit which thou pretendest to worship, (as the Athenians built an altar to the unknown Deity), has been defined to be an assimilation of distant ideas; and what is a pun but an eliciter of remote meanings which, though they may not always amount to a definite idea, are at all events the materials of one, and therefore ingredients in the composition of real wit. These Protean combinations are the stimulants of fancy, the titillators of the imagination, the awakeners of the

risible faculties; and to condemn them because the same happy results may be produced by a more rare and difficult process, is either an exemplification of the fox and the sour grapes, or the pride of mental luxury, which would quarrel with all gratifications that are cheap and accessible. The sterling commodity is scarce-let us prize it the more when we encounter it; but in the mean time let us not reject a good substitute when it is presented. Gooseberry wine is no very lofty succedaneum for sparkling Champagne, but it is better than fasting. Some may not like the flavour of the beverage, but none would think of abusing the caterer who puts upon the table the best liquor that his cellar affords. These sullen stupidities are reserved for an Anti-pun

ster.

MY TEA-KETTLE.

"O madness to think use of strongest wines,

And strongest drinks, our chief support of health."

MILTON.

A CERTAIN popular writer who is wasting his time and misemploying his formidable pen in vituperating that most innocent and ingratiating of all beverages, Tea, should be condemned, for at least six months, to drink from a slop-basin the washing of a washerwoman's Bohea; or be blown up with some of Twining's best Gunpowder or be doomed to exemplify one of Pope's victims of spleen, and

"A living tea-pot stand, one arm held out,

One bent; the handle this, and that the spout."

His cottage economy may be very accurate in its calculations: I dispute not his agrestical or bucolic lore; but why should this twitter of Twankay presume to denounce it as insalubrious, or brand its frugal infusions with riot and unthrift? Is Sir John Barleycorn, after the brewer's chymist has "drugged our possets;" or "Blue Ruin," with all its juniper seductions; or Roman Purl, still more indigestible than Cleopatra's,to leave no alternative of tipple to the thirsty cottager? Is he to have no scruples for drams, and yet to be squeamish and fastidious about a watery decoction, to play the anchorite about a cup of tea? Sobriety and temperance are not such besetting virtues among our lower orders, that we can afford to narrow their influence by circumscribing the use of this antidote against drunkenness; and the champion of the brewers should recollect the dictum of Raynal—that tea has contributed more to sobriety than the severest laws, the most eloquent harangues of Christian orators, or the best treatises of morality. But we have within our realm five hundred as good as he, who have done full justice to the virtues of this calumniated plant. Dr. Johnson, as Mrs. Thrale knew to her cost, was an almost insatiable tea-bibber, and praised that salutiferous potation with as much cordiality as he drank it.

Bontikoe, a Dutch physician, considers it a universal panacea; and after bestowing the most extravagant encomiums upon it, declares that two hundred cups may be drank in a day with great benefit. The learned Grusterzippius, a German commentator, is of opinion that the "Te veniente die, te decidente," alludes to the morning and evening use of this beverage among the

Romans, while the "Te teneam moriens deficiente manu seems to intimate its being occasionally used as a species of extreme unction among the ancients. The late Emperor of China, Kien Long, of pious memory, composed a laudatory ode upon this fragrant product of his country, and a nephew of the writer's, a Guineapig on board one of the East India ships, having occasion to go to Nankin to buy a pair of trowsers for himself, and a piece of India rubber for his brother, found means of procuring a copy, of which I submit the first verse to the reader's inspection

"Kou-onen peing-teho onen-chang,
King-tang shoo kin Cong-foo-tse;
Chong-choo lee-kee kou-chon whang,
To-hi tche-kiang She-whang-te."

The artful allusion to Confucius in the second line, and the happy introduction of the subject beverage in the fourth, will not escape the most careless critic.

Candour requires that we should not disguise, on the other hand, the opinion of Swift, who thus writes in his Journal to Stella:-"I was telling Sir George Beaumont of my head;-he said he had been ill of the same disorder, and by all means forbid me Bohea Tea, which he said always gave it him, and that Dr Radcliffe said it was very bad. Now I had observed the same thing, and have left it off this month, having found myself ill after it several times; and I mention it that Stella may consider it for her poor own little head." This libellous insinuation does not amount to much. Swift was a splenetic and deficient being, unimpassioned by the beauties of Stella and Vanessa, and