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 Bar-Jona, 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 bero 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 assistance: "Friends! No-man kills me. No-man in the hour Of sleep oppresses me with fraudful power.— If No-man hurt thee, but the hand divine To Jove or to thy father Neptune pray, The brethren cried, and instant strode away" 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 even 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 Hierodes, the Joe Miller of 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 exelaim, "Per magnos, Brute, Deos te oro, qui reges consuêris tollere, eur 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 enquiring 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 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 Eacidas Romanos vincere posse," which might import either that the Eacides 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 mottos 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 asser tion 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 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 Vade-mecum, 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 Anti-punster, 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-punster. H. SPORTING WITHOUT A LICENCE. THERE's a charm when Spring is young, When morn is fair, and the sunny air The sportsman finds a zest, Pheasants whirring through the sky; The hunter loves to dash Through the horn-resounding woods, O'er gap and gate he leaps elate, And at the death has scarcely breath To give the hoop and hollo! By the river's margin dank, With the reeds and rushes mix'd, Like a statue on the bank, See the patient angler fix'd, A summer's day he whiles away And if the fish should baulk his wish, In air let pheasants range, That does not fill my heart, and thrill O clouds that paint the air! O fountains, fields, and groves! In tuneful lays to sing your praise- H. '60 GRIMM'S GHOST. LETTER XI. Uncle and Nephew. EVERY one who is conversant with Richmond and its environs (and what man, since the Diana steam-vessel first started from Queenhithe to Eel-pie Island, can plead ignorance?) must know that passengers are conveyed across the Thames, from Ham to Twickenham, by a ferry-boat: that there is a footpath through a field which leads from -the river to Ham: and that, to attain that footpath, it is necessary to cross a stile. Upon this stile, one fine afternoon in July last, sat, astride, Mr. Robert Robertson and his nephew Tom Osborne, awaiting the return of Platt the ferryman, that they might solace themselves with a view of the tombs in Twickenham church-yard. "Tom," said the uncle to the nephew, "I have long wished to give you something." The eyes of the nephew brightened; he mechanically took off his kidskin glove, and protruded his right hand. "I mean, some little advice." Tom replaced the glove upon his hand, with a look that seemed to say "The less the better." "I take," continued Mr. Robert Robertson, an avuncular interest in all that concerns you; and I cannot but enter my protest against the grotesque garb in which you have enveloped your person. Dress, nephew, was originally intended to guard us against the inclemencies of the weather: but, in your case, I am sorry to say that it deviates into downright ornament. But, lest you should think that I am inclined to too sweeping a censure-' spargere voces ambiguas'-(I hope you keep up your Latin)-I will, with your permission, analyse your apparel from head to foot-ab ovo usque ad mala.' The latter quotation is from Horace. To begin, then, with your hat: I am sorry to find it white: Sir Barnaby Botolph, the Blackwell-hall factor in Cateaton-street, has a very sage apophthegm upon that head, 'Shew me a man with a white hat, and I'll shew you a fool.' Now, I should be sorry, nephew, to stultify you without a hearing, (stultify is a legal verb much in favour with the late Lord Ellenborough): so, prithee tax that bulbous excrescence,' (the expression occurs in George Alexander Stevens,) that fills up the hollow of the article that I am criticising, and tell me whether you mean to suffer judgment to go by default, or to plead the general issue with a justification." “I plead a justification," said Tom, briskly. "Good," answered the professional Mr. Robertson; "bold, too, but hazardous. In what does your justification consist?" "Your example." "Mine!" "Yes, uncle, yours. My aunt Sally has a picture of you painted by Hoppner thirty years ago. It exhibits you patting a favourite filly. The scene is a stable you wear your hat, and that hat has a crown like Mother Shipton's, surrounded by three silk bands with a rosette to each. Just like the smooth-complexioned clergyman's that one so often meets in Saint Paul's Church-yard." "I wonder your aunt Sally keeps that absurd picture," said Mr. Robertson; "but, at all events, the hat is a black one; you have therefore failed in your justification. And, now, nephew, to continue my analysis. The next article to which I am anxious to draw your attention is your cravat. In the good old times a cambric stock, with a Bristol-stone buckle behind, was universally worn. The full-length engraved portrait of General Washington will |