And yet it may be observed that it was what would be called an Up-sce Dutch jest of the worst kind that cost him his life. Ben Jonson, who lived in a rather wholesomer period of intellect, is also found to disparage "those paranomasies;" but we shall presently convict him of a very fair English pun in one of his best poems. Glorious John has some ill-natured things against the punone of them as follows:

"The head and heart were never lost of those

Who dealt in doggrel or who punned in prose."

Yet it is remarkable that, in denouncing what he considers one of the littlenesses of language, he falls into what has been called another-alliteration. His verse is lubricated by that idiomatic old charm and runs all the more smoothly and happily for it.

Stewart, in his essay on the human mind, treats the pun slightingly, and says, every one that pleases may be a punster. Goldsmith held something of the same opinion with respect to witticisms and good things, which he said could be elaborated with thinking. No doubt there is some truth in both these positions. Brinsley Sheridan and Tom Moore, who certainly worked hard to bring out their airy brilliancies of wit and metaphor, justify Oliver's notion; and in the same way Hood and others prove that people can hatch puns at a great rate, by brooding over them. Still a certain cast of mind, a vivacity and judgment are requisite in these cases. Nothing can make a dull thinker witty-no amount of brain-cudgeling; and it is not from every stick you can get the mercury of a happy punster. The Spectator is among those who, in that classic period, discountenanced the pun. In one of its papers, a very slighting and indeed, so to speak, a very slight argument is offered against it. Having taken a skimming glance at the subject, the writer goes on: Having now pursued the history of the pun from its original to its downfall, I shall here define it to be," et cetera, and so forth-a feeblo definition. The Spectator mistook when he spoke of the downfall of the pun. He neither saw how deeply-rooted it is in the past, nor how strong it was destined to come out in the future. The pun may outlive the Spectator. It has certainly outlived Cato." Dr. Johnson looked grimly askance on the pun

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as an elephant may be supposed to look on the grimace and vivacity of a monkey. The doctor did not like a pun. But what could be expected from a man who could see no poetry in Milton's Lycidas, and who, in recommending some books to a friend, did not mention one on poetry or the drama? Johnson did not even know the etymology of that small word; but thought it meant to pound or to pummel, having in his idea, very probably, the energetic practice of Punch with respect to his consort, Judy. A little knowledge of the French would have served the doctor; for, in this case, he would have known that pun is only the English mode of bringing the Gallic point into the vernacular. Our words point and pun are, in fact, the same; only the latter received its present shape by reason of coming in through the nose, at a later period.

No one who reads a little can avoid perceiving how seductive and popular the pun has been at all times, from the very earliest; and we will here refer to a few remembered passages in which it occurs and to several of the grave men who, contrary to the general impression, have played with paranomasia; feeling, as we do, that it would be easy to find a greater number of instances and increase the interest attachable to such a subject. We shall only pick up a few rare puns here and there, going through the alleys and parterres of literature; without wandering very far out of the familiar tracks, and, especially, without maundering into the beaten ways and stale jokeries of the Joe Millers, Lord Norburys, and other professionals.

The Hebrews must have been acquainted with the pun, that is, in its grave original significance; for we find Abigail punning against her husband to king David, and saying he was rightly called Nabal; by which she meant to convey that the man was a fool for looking after his substance and grumbling when David's regiment of rapparees wanted to eat it up! The pun in those days was far from being a facetious piece of business, apparently, as poor Nabal could testify. Turning to Greece, we find the old dramatists identifying puns with the nature of the tragic volume. Among the ancients, everything falling out unexpectedly, or by apparent chance, had in it a quality of divination. Words possessed a peculiar significancy, especially when they had anything of

equivocation in them, or suggested such. When the Romans, after the evacuation of their city, by Brennus, were discussing the removal of their walls to another site, we are told they heard a centurion in the forum cry "Halt" to the soldiers he was drilling. The city fathers thereupon took this chance word as a private signal from old Quirinus that they were to remain in the original place; and they did remain. The classic reader remembers many such instances. It was the same with words having a double meaning, which, for this reason, formed part of the prevailing supernaturalism of the age. Aristotle tells us that mus was held in great reverence because it formed part of the religious word "museria," the "mysteries;" so that "the smallest monstrous mouse that crept on floor" enjoyed a curious kind of respect-except from the cats, that had little or no idea of paranomasia. The ancients were fond of drawing a punning consolation from the names and titles of their divinities; and the priests and pythonesses would naturally improve the quality of their deceptive oracles by a sprinkling of paranomasia.

The pun, in fact, was part of a grave system, and entered into the most profound conditions of the human feelings. Sophocles shows us Ajax punning on himself in the distraction and pathos of his sufferings. And this, after all, would not seem to be so very untrue to nature; for we remember two instances of that tragic style of pun. Shakespeare makes John of Gaunt, in his old age and great sorrow, with one foot in the grave, pun also on his own name :

"Old Gaunt, indeed, and gaunt in being old, Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as tho grave."

The other instance is historic-that of a king, with a broken spirit, on his dying bed. This was James Stuart, fifth of that name, who died of consumption in the thirty-first year of his age, making it hard for us to recognize in him the gallant Knight of Snowdon who puts down Roderick Dhu at Coilantogle ford. His two infant sons being dead, when they brought James word, as he lay, that the new-born child of his queen, Mary of Lorraine, was a daughter, he exclaimed, "Farewell the crown of Scotland; it came with a lass, and it will go with a lass!" playing with the interjection of sorrow as with something suitable to his heavy sentence and the

sombre state of his feelings. A great number of instances could be found, to show that persons suffering beyond hope of remedy are apt to indulge in bitter pleasantry on their condition. Ajax, in the midst of his pangs and woeful exclamations, pauses to remark that he never thought his lament, "Ai, ai!”— which gave the sound of his own name

would come to accord so well with his miseries. Sophocles had several other punning passages in his plays-no doubt, very gratifying to his audiences.

In the Phanissa of Euripides we have another instance of the grave, bitter pun, where Eteocles, in angry dialogue with his brother Polynices, says the latter was well named-Polynices denoting "much contention;" and the "Hecuba" of the same author, enraged against Venus, comes out with a termagant kind of double entendre, and calls her ladyship the "Goddess of Folly”— playing upon the first syllables of "Aphrodite;" for, while Aphrou signifies "foam," Aphron means 66 a fool;" not a very happy hit, after all, and showing how hard run for a missile that old "mobled queen" must have been. Aristotle, who could make a pun as well as appreciate it, shows, in his "Rhetoric," the consideration which it enjoyed in Athens. It was a very good saying in the Agora-a kind of stock punthat the Draconian laws were well entituled; for none but a Draco (dragon) would have enacted anything so sanguinary. He also mentions how Conon used to reproach Thrasybulus as “rash in counsel;" and how Herodocus ridiculed Thrasymachus as "rash in war." The folk who had names capable of a double meaning, in those old times, were as often touched upon the raw, and annoyed, as such persons are at present. Neither of the above could thank God, as did the poets Shenstone and Coleridge, that their names were not susceptible of any equivocal pleasantry. In the predicament of those rash individuals was a man named Anaschetos (tolerable), who was laughed at for being really an ill-tempered, unbearable fellow; and Isocrates, who was in the habit of denouncing the Athenian desire of maritime supremacy, used to point his objurgation with a pun-to wit: "the arche (command) of the sea is the arche (beginning) of evil." When receiving friends at their houses, the people of Athens had a commonplace old

pun: "You ought not to be more of a chenos (stranger) than a chenos (guest);" a slight difference in pronunciation marking the words of this rather feeble felicity, which, however, under the circumstances, and coming from entertainers, never failed to meet the appreciation due to the very best thing of the kind; just as, with us, the "merry-thought" at table always produces the intended effect, as if it was never heard before.

Coming to Socrates and Plato, whom we should not, at first sight, suspect of a tendency to paranomasia, we find that, between them, they have left several puns behind them. Plato was one of the reporters of the former-a man who left no line of his own writing to posterity. We suspect the general idea of Socrates is not exactly true to his real character; for he was a sarcastic and long-winded talker-as full of jests as Sir Thomas More, and styled constans et perpetuus irrisor mortalium-a sort of mild Mephistophiles. whose harrowing mode of asking questions and poking syllogisms at an adversary was considered in Athens-and some are of the same opinion still-sufficient reason for stopping his mouth. He would not listen to any rhetorical flourishes in philosophy-a matter of which Cicero complains-thinking rhetoric had only the force of an open hand, while his favorite dialectics had all the efficacy of a shut fist; so that all these things, along with his ugly face and shabby person, made the majority hate himespecially as he scorned the politics and men of the agora, and spent his life, as was said, talking weakly and effeminately to a parcel of boys about crotchets and abstractions; and telling them, like a heretic, as he was, that the gods of the people were many, while the God of nature was one! Such a crabbed satirist would naturally be a punster; and his pupil, Plato, in reporting his discourses, makes him pun several times. In Theatetus, Socrates says when the wax in the heart is deep and abundant, objects impressing themselves on this kear (heart) or this keros (wax) become lasting. In Gorgias, Socrates says: "As for me, I love Alcibiades and philosophy; you love the demus (people) of the Athenians and the demus of Pyrilampes." In another place he plays with the names of Love called Eros by mortals and Pteros (winged) by the immortals.

As for Plato himself-we do not generally regard him as a genius capable of making puns in verse to the memory of a departed friend. Diogenes Laertius has recorded for us a specimen of his poetic paranomasia in the shape of a lamenting epigram on the loss of a youth, named Aster; (and that same Laertius, by the by, lately presented himself to us, in one of our public libraries, in a wonderful state of masquerade, between the covers a New York bookhis name being omitted and without allusion, and the title of the translated work changed to something like"Whims, Notions, and Conceits of several remarkable men"-as well as we remember. Not that it is very wonderful to see the learning of the ancients reproduced, with a difference, in the books of the moderns; but such a wholesale appropriation-the stealing of an entire author at once, body and bonesis enough to strike one by the comic sublimity of the thing). But, as we were saying, Diogenes has preserved for us a curious little effort of Plato's muse-the meaning of which is as follows:

EPIGRAM:

"Oh Aster, while alive, you shone

The Morning Star; but now being gone You are the star of Hesper, clear Beyond all others in his sphere; You look upon the stars; would I might be Yon heaven, to gaze with many eyes on thee!"

The conceit of the last couplet, it may be observed, is one which Coleridge has reproduced in his "Lines on an Autumn Evening," where he says he would, for the sake of her he loved, become the starry sky:

"Or soar aloft to be the spangled skies

And gaze upon her with a thousand eyes." And Shelley also seems to have remembered the Platonic fancy; for, in "the Revolt of Islam," he says:

"Fair star of life and love! I cried; 'my soul's delight,

Why lookest thou on the crystalline skies? O that my spirit were yon heaven of night Which gazes on thee with its thousand eyes!'"

Plato does not seem to have been such a very austere philosopher after all. He loved to have the elegances and amenities of life about him; and had a grand carpet on his drawing-room, which Diogenes the Cynic expectorated on, to pull down the pride of the owner. Plato was an advocate for the Graces,

and used to advise Xenocrates to sacrifice to them. Indeed, our opinions of the peculiar austerity of those ancient lovers of wisdom may be a misconception-putting the Stoics out of the question. Aristotle, called by Dante

il maestro di color che sanno," was a bit of a fop, and looked to the neat arrangement of his locks and the effect of his rings and chains, very much like Dickens or Disraeli in days nearer our own. He was a good-natured man; for on one occasion, when Plato was delivering a lecture on the nature of the soul, every one of his hearers slipped out and escaped, but the Stagyrite, who firmly kept his seat to the end. Plato liked him; but once felt called upon, as a friend, to give him some private advice about the style of his hair, which seems not to have been quite so “unassuming as that of Benjamin Feeder, B. A. It must be remembered, however, in excuse of that master of the sages, that he very often went to court, where the king himself, Philip of Macedon, drunk or sober, was always glad to see him and accustomed to pledge him in that golden "mazer" which his majesty used always to keep under his pillow at night, for safety-or, as some think, for nocturnal refreshment.

Of course, Aristophanes, the famous wit and buffo of that bright age, made a good many puns, and the reader will find them in going through his comedies. One or two of them may be mentioned. In the "Peace," Trygeas goes up to the parliament of Jove to implore a cessation of hostilities in Greece, and there sees Mars making puns with a pestle, so to speak. The stern divinity is preparing to pound the Hellenic cities in a mortar, representatively; and he throws in prason (leeks) for Prasiæ, in Laconia; a cheese for Sicily, and Attic honey for Athens. In the "Acharnians," a grumbling old soldier, Tithonus-a grognard of the Phalanx,-who finds himself unable to meet his little bills, has a conceit left him in his misery, and says: "When we were at Marathon we were the pursuers; but now we are the pursued [prosecuted] by every knavish fellow, and taken, too;" a rather poor pun, to be sure; but fair enough, perhaps, for the bullet-head of an old campaigner.

The great pastoral poet of Greecethe best and most genuine of those who have ever written in the idyllic or rustic style, not excepting Allan Ramsay--did

not think the pun too artificial a thing for his country-folk. We happen to remember a good one that occurs in the XXVIIth Idyl, concerning Pentheus, king of Thebes, the Father Mathew of his day-or rather the Neal Dow-who tried to bring his people round to the temperance principle, by some rather highhanded edicts. This Pentheus, going on one occasion among some ladies who were sacrificing to Bacchus in a grove (delicate way of expressing it!), was set upon by the offended bacchantes and fairly pulled to pieces, for his principles in general, and especially for poking his nose where he had no business-evidently with the design of catching some of the ladies in the fact. Bearing his body into Thebes, the women are said to carry with them not so much Pentheus as penthema (mourning). sadness of Ovid, to whom the shores of the Euxine were as austere and disagreeable as they are at present to the European allies-did not prevent him from punning. In the fifth book of his Fasti occur the following lines, referring to men careless of the laws of astronomy -who never, in the words of Sir Thomas Browne, "studied the choragium of the stars:"

The

"Libera currebant et inobservata per annum
Sidera; constabat sed tamen esse deos.
Non illi cœlo labentia signa tenebant,
Sed sua, quæ magnum perdere Crimen erat."

The simple people did not understand the signs of the firmament, but their own; that is, their ensigns or standards, which it was always a disgrace to lose.

That Horace loved puns and made many of them on those occasions when he would banter the love-born Telephus, or grow furious in his merriment (furens recepto amico) to see Pompeius Varus stretched alongside his mahogany, or moralize, in a half-muddled way, on the cursed tree that was near falling on him and killing him, would be a natural conclusion from the character of that gayest and wittiest of Epicurean philosophers. We find traces of this amusement in his verses; indeed, he has written two lyrics for the evident purpose of perpetuating a couple of puns-one of them at least of his own making; and the other also, very probably. This last was a right good joke, known, he says, to all the barbers and blind strollers of the cityomnibus lippis et tonsoribus;-and he goes on to narrate it, con amore, in the Seventh Satire of the First Book. It

is the story of Rupilius Rex and one Persius, who had some difficulty in law business; and as the law was then, as it is still, pretty much of a delusion, a snare, and a hocus pocus, they could not agree; and it so came about that they mutually fell into a train of abusive language, before a large and miscellaneous assembly. The end of this is, that, like Counsellor Curran, who is said (see Joe Miller) to have bothered a hostile fishwoman by calling her an "old pronoun," Persius succeeded in putting down his man by a word-a pun. Having been well sprinkled with the Italian vinegar of Rex-Italo perfusus acuto-he bawled out: "O, Brutus, you who are accustomed to put down kings, why don't you come and strangle this king; it is your proper business!" Not a word more is added; the poet feeling that anything further would only weaken the effect of that overpowering retort. No doubt he loved to repeat the story in his festive mo

ments:

"Oro qui reges consueris tollere cur non Hunc regem jugulas?"

The regem would receive the full delighted emphasis, and the friends round the table would applaud once more with all their belles! Rupilius, of course, is supposed to be floored by that last hit, and unable to continue the contest.

Then we have the epistle of the jolly little bard to Vinnius Asina-whose name was only too provocative of the punning sallies of his friends. Vinnius is commissioned by the lyrist to carry some poetry to Augustus; and the messenger is addressed in the quality or under the metaphor of an ass (Asina), on the subject of the errand. He is advised rather to refuse the budget of poesy should he find it too heavy, than toss it off his back, in an improper mode and place. In the end the poet bids him-with a play on the words—not to stumble and break the orders he has got. To the last, the burden of the lyric is a pun. No doubt there were more puns discoverable in the verse of this gay writer, in his own day, than can be detected in ours. Passing from the vinearbors and shady green sward of the Sabine farm into the midst of the mighty metropolis

"The smoke and affluence and great din of Rome"

we find a greater punster than Horace

in the Forum, with all the turba Remi about him-Cicero-the painful penner of that eloquence which has immortalized him, and which Brutus was in the habit of styling fracta et elumbis-effeminate and weak-loined. Cicero was a punster, and a very good one, too,by all accounts, and rather proud of his points; which, no doubt, he manufactured in a prepense way, like Sheridan. One of them is: "Ego quoque tibi jure favebo," addressed to a cook; the word quoque sounding like cocus, a cook, and jure being the ablative of jus, which is "soup" as well as "right." A Jew of Sicily, making himself too officious in the great impeachment of the infamous Proconsul of that island, Cicero asked: "What has a Jew to do with Verres (pork)?” and no doubt the Forum or the Campus rang with a shout of "Hoc habet!" Juvenal, in his Tenth Satire, laughs at this propensity of the orator, making him say, in a punning burst of egotism: "O fortunatam, natam me consule Romam!" Which Dryden renders thus:

"Fortune foretuned the dying notes of Rome, Till I, thy Consul sole, consoled its doom." Juvenal says that Cicero might have defied the swords of Antony's people, if he had always talked in that manner. But though Juvenal and others before him ridiculed Cicero's puns and his pedantry and prolixity, we must remember that the orator's pointed sayings and witticisms were gathered and reported by no less a man than Julius Caesarthat military leader preserving a strong love of literature and science in the midst of the stern anxieties and chances of war. Lucan, in the Pharsalia, makes him say of himself:-

"media inter prælia semper Sideribus calique plagis superisque vacavi." And once, in crossing the Alps with his army, he was chiefly occupied with the perusal of a treatise on grammatical anafogy. Cicero, as Mr. Disraeli well ob

serves, must have been an excellent talker and writer of witticisms, when such a distinguished man would become the collector of them-Boswellize them, in fact, though vainly for posterityseeing they have been lost in the lapse of time.

Julian, styled the Apostate-the Frederick II. of his age, who loved to divide his mind between philosophic literature and war-has left behind him two