It was made in revenge by somebody, who it did not believe it himself. was disappointed of a regale. It is a vile cold-scrag-of-mutton sophism; a lie palmed upon the palate, which knows better things. If nothing else could be said for a feast, this is sufficient, that from the superflux there is usually something left for the next day. Morally interpreted, it belongs to a class of proverbs, which have a tendency to make us undervalue money. Of this cast are those notable observations, that money is not health; riches cannot purchase every thing: the metaphor that makes gold to be mere muck, with the morality which traces fine clothing to the sheep's back, and denounces pearl as the unHence too, the phrase which imhandsome excretion of an oyster. putes dirt to acres--a sophistry so barefaced, that even the literal sense This, and abundance of similar sage of it is true only in a wet season. saws assuming to inculcate content, we verily believe to have been the the purse invention of some cunning borrower, who had designs upon of his wealthier neighbour, which he could only hope to carry by force Translate any one of these sayings out of of these verbal jugglings. the artful metonyme which envelopes it, and the trick is apparent. Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck-however we may be pleased to scandalise with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us.

wrong.--Our expeOf two disputants, the warmest is generally in the rience would lead us to quite an opposite conclusion. Temper, indeed, is no test of truth; but warmth and earnestness are a proof at least of a man's own conviction of the rectitude of that which he maintains. Coolness is as often the result of an unprincipled indifference to truth or falsehood, as of a sober confidence in a man's own side in a dispute. Nothing is more insulting sometimes than the appearance of this philosophic temper. There is little Titubus, the stammering law-stationer in Lincoln's Inn-we have seldom known this shrewd little fellow engaged in an argument where we were not convinced he had the best of it, if his tongue would but fairly have seconded him. When he has been spluttering excellent broken sense for an hour together, writhing and labouring to be delivered of the point of dispute--the very gist of the controversy knocking at his teeth, which like some obstinate irongrating still obstructed its deliverance, his puny frame convulsed, and face reddening all over at an unfairness in the logic which he wanted articulation to expose, it has moved our gall to see a smooth portly fellow of an adversary, that cared not a button for the merits of the question, by merely laying his hand upon the head of the stationer, and desiring him to be calm (your tall disputants have always the advantage), with a provoking sneer carry the argument clean from him in the opinion of 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.

That verbal allusions are not wit, because they will not bear a translation. 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 synonime, 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?"

That the worst puns are the best.—If by worst be only meant the most far-fetched and startling, we agree to it. A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into the presence, and does not show the less comic for being dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders. What though it limp a little, or prove defective in one leg-all the better. A pun may easily be too curious and artificial. 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 sending it through all the possible ambages of similar sounds; after squeezing, and hauling, and 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; any thing 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 it. A man might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof. The quibble in itself is not considerable.

It is only a new turn given, by a little false pronunciation, to a very common though not very courteous inquiry. Put by one gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have been vapid; to the mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit than rudeness. We must take in the totality of time, place, and person; the pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter; the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on with his burthen; 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.

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 persons 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 imagination. We venture to call it cold; because of thousands who have admired it, it would be difficult to find one who has 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 applied by Swift to a lady's dress, or mantua (as it was then termed) coming in contact with one of those fiddles called Cremonas, are said to be too good to be true, it may with equal truth be asserted of this bi-verbal 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 if it had 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 superfœtation 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 impression, to be forcible, must be simultaneous and undivided.

ELIA.

* "Mantua væ miseræ nimium vicina Cremona."

ONE THOUSAND EIGHT HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE.

It was but yesterday the snow

Of thy dead sire was on the hill—

It was but yesterday the flow

Of thy spring showers encreased the rill,
And made a thousand blossoms swell
To welcome summer's festival-

It was but yesterday I saw

Thy harvests wave their golden treasures,
And man, to Nature's genial law,

Responsive, taste the season's pleasures;
And now all these are of the past,

For this lone hour must be thy last!

Thou must depart! where none may know—
The sun for thee hath ever set,

The star of morn, the silver bow,
No more shall gem thy coronet
And give thee glory; but the sky
Shall shine on thy posterity,
Bright as it ever shone on thee;
While as a torrent they are pouring

On where forgetfulness will be

In ambush couch'd for their devouring,
Where now it waits thy latest sand
From destiny's unpitying hand.

In darkness-in eternal space,
Sightless as a sin-quenched star,
Thou shalt pursue thy wandering race,
Receding into regions far:

On thee the eyes of mortal men

Shall never, never light again;

Memory alone may steal a glance,

Like some wild glimpse in sleep we 're taking,

Of a long perish'd countenance

We have forgotten when awaking

Sad, evanescent, colour'd weak,

As beauty on a dying cheek.

Whence flows the stream of ages? Where
Pass perish'd things its surface bears-

The breathing life, the joy and care,

The good and evil of earth's years?

And were they made with thee to die-
Created who can tell us why?

As dewy flowers that bloom to-day,

Hallowing the summer air with sweetness,
Extinguish'd ere to-morrow's ray,

Leave but memorials of death's fleetness.

Man alone hopes in distant skies

To bloom 'mid some bright paradise.

I once had many pleasant gleams

Of thy prospective hours, and things
That turn'd out but delusive dreams,
Fading beneath thy restless wings;
And many unreckon'd gifts of thine
I never thought could have been mine,

B.- it was, I think, who suggested this subject, as well as the defence of Guy Faux, which I urged him to execute. As, however, he would undertake neither, I suppose I must do both-a task for which he would have been much fitter, no less from the temerity than the felicity of his pen

"Never so sure our rapture to create

As when it touch'd the brink of all we hate." Compared with him, I shall, I fear, make but a common-place piece of business of it; but I should be loth the idea was entirely lost, and besides I may avail myself of some hints of his in the progress of it. I am sometimes, I suspect, a better reporter of the ideas of other people than expounder of my own. I pursue the one too far into paradox or mysticism; the others I am not bound to follow farther than I like, or than seems fair and reasonable.

On the question being started, Asaid, "I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Locke?" In this A. as usual, reckoned without his host. Every one burst out a laughing at the expression of B.'s face, in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. "Yes, the greatest names," he stammered out hastily, "but they were not persons-not persons."-"Not persons?" said A-, looking wise and foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be premature. "That is," rejoined B., "not characters, you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, you mean the Essay on Human Understanding, and the Principia, which we have to this day. Beyond their contents there is nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want to see any one bodily for, is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individuals, more than we can learn from their writings, and yet are curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like Kneller's portraits of them. But who could paint Shakspeare ?"-" Ay," retorted A-, "there it is; then