Essays and Tales

The shepherd’s pipe may be said to be full of music, for it is composed of nine different kinds of verses, which by their several lengths resemble the nine stops of the old musical instrument, that is likewise the subject of the poem.

The altar is inscribed with the epitaph of Troïlus the son of Hecuba; which, by the way, makes me believe that these false pieces of wit are much more ancient than the authors to whom they are generally ascribed; at least, I will never be persuaded that so fine a writer as Theocritus could have been the author of any such simple works.

It was impossible for a man to succeed in these performances who was not a kind of painter, or at least a designer.  He was first of all to draw the outline of the subject which he intended to write upon, and afterwards conform the description to the figure of his subject.  The poetry was to contract or dilate itself according to the mould in which it was cast.  In a word, the verses were to be cramped or extended to the dimensions of the frame that was prepared for them; and to undergo the fate of those persons whom the tyrant Procrustes used to lodge in his iron bed: if they were too short, he stretched them on a rack; and if they were too long, chopped off a part of their legs, till they fitted the couch which he had prepared for them.

Mr. Dryden hints at this obsolete kind of wit in one of the following verses in his “Mac Flecknoe;” which an English reader cannot understand, who does not know that there are those little poems above mentioned in the shape of wings and altars:—

—Choose for thy commandSome peaceful province in acrostic land;There may’st thou wings display, and altars raise,And torture one poor word a thousand ways.

This fashion of false wit was revived by several poets of the last age, and in particular may be met with among Mr. Herbert’s poems; and, if I am not mistaken, in the translation of Du Bartas.  I do not remember any other kind of work among the moderns which more resembles the performances I have mentioned than that famous picture of King Charles the First, which has the whole Book of Psalms written in the lines of the face, and, the hair of the head.  When I was last at Oxford I perused one of the whiskers, and was reading the other, but could not go so far in it as I would have done, by reason of the impatience of my friends and fellow-travellers, who all of them pressed to see such a piece of curiosity.  I have since heard, that there is now an eminent writing-master in town, who has transcribed all the Old Testament in a full-bottomed periwig: and if the fashion should introduce the thick kind of wigs which were in vogue some few years ago, he promises to add two or three supernumerary locks that should contain all the Apocrypha.  He designed this wig originally for King William, having disposed of the two Books of Kings in the two forks of the foretop; but that glorious monarch dying before the wig was finished, there is a space left in it for the face of any one that has a mind to purchase it.

But to return to our ancient poems in picture.  I would humbly propose, for the benefit of our modern smatterers in poetry, that they would imitate their brethren among the ancients in those ingenious devices.  I have communicated this thought to a young poetical lover of my acquaintance, who intends to present his mistress with a copy of verses made in the shape of her fan; and, if he tells me true, has already finished the three first sticks of it.  He has likewise promised me to get the measure of his mistress’s marriage finger with a design to make a posy in the fashion of a ring, which shall exactly fit it.  It is so very easy to enlarge upon a good hint, that I do not question but my ingenious readers will apply what I have said to many other particulars; and that we shall see the town filled in a very little time with poetical tippets, handkerchiefs, snuff-boxes, and the like female ornaments.  I shall therefore conclude with a word of advice to those admirable English authors who call themselves Pindaric writers, that they would apply themselves to this kind of wit without loss of time, as being provided better than any other poets with verses of all sizes and dimensions.

Second Paper

Operose nihil aguat.Seneca.Busy about nothing.

There is nothing more certain than that every man would be a wit if he could; and notwithstanding pedants of pretended depth and solidity are apt to decry the writings of a polite author, as flash and froth, they all of them show, upon occasion, that they would spare no pains to arrive at the character of those whom they seem to despise.  For this reason we often find them endeavouring at works of fancy, which cost them infinite pangs in the production.  The truth of it is, a man had better be a galley-slave than a wit, were one to gain that title by those elaborate trifles which have been the inventions of such authors as were often masters of great learning, but no genius.

In my last paper I mentioned some of these false wits among the ancients; and in this shall give the reader two or three other species of them, that flourished in the same early ages of the world.  The first I shall produce are the lipogrammatists or letter-droppers of antiquity, that would take an exception, without any reason, against some particular letter in the alphabet, so as not to admit it once into a whole poem.  One Tryphiodorus was a great master in this kind of writing.  He composed an “Odyssey” or epic poem on the adventures of Ulysses, consisting of four-and-twenty books, having entirely banished the letter A from his first book, which was called Alpha, as lucus à non lucendo, because there was not an Alpha in it.  His second book was inscribed Beta for the same reason.  In short, the poet excluded the whole four-and-twenty letters in their turns, and showed them, one after another, that he could do his business without them.

It must have been very pleasant to have seen this poet avoiding the reprobate letter, as much as another would a false quantity, and making his escape from it through the several Greek dialects, when he was pressed with it in any particular syllable.  For the most apt and elegant word in the whole language was rejected, like a diamond with a flaw in it, if it appeared blemished with a wrong letter.  I shall only observe upon this head, that if the work I have here mentioned had been now extant, the “Odyssey” of Tryphiodorus, in all probability, would have been oftener quoted by our learned pedants than the “Odyssey” of Homer.  What a perpetual fund would it have been of obsolete words and phrases, unusual barbarisms and rusticities, absurd spellings and complicated dialects!  I make no question but that it would have been looked upon as one of the most valuable treasuries of the Greek tongue.

I find likewise among the ancients that ingenious kind of conceit which the moderns distinguish by the name of a rebus, that does not sink a letter, but a whole word, by substituting a picture in its place.  When Cæsar was one of the masters of the Roman mint, he placed the figure of an elephant upon the reverse of the public money; the word Cæsar signifying an elephant in the Punic language.  This was artificially contrived by Cæsar, because it was not lawful for a private man to stamp his own figure upon the coin of the commonwealth.  Cicero, who was so called from the founder of his family, that was marked on the nose with a little wen like a vetch, which is Cicer in Latin, instead of Marcus Tullius Cicero, ordered the words Marcus Tullius, with a figure of a vetch at the end of them, to be inscribed on a public monument.  This was done probably to show that he was neither ashamed of his name nor family, notwithstanding the envy of his competitors had often reproached him with both.  In the same manner we read of a famous building that was marked in several parts of it with the figures of a frog and a lizard; those words in Greek having been the names of the architects, who by the laws of their country were never permitted to inscribe their own names upon their works.  For the same reason it is thought that the forelock of the horse, in the antique equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, represents at a distance the shape of an owl, to intimate the country of the statuary, who, in all probability, was an Athenian.  This kind of wit was very much in vogue among our own countrymen about an age or two ago, who did not practise it for any oblique reason, as the ancients above-mentioned, but purely for the sake of being witty.  Among innumerable instances that may be given of this nature, I shall produce the device of one Mr. Newberry, as I find it mentioned by our learned Camden in his Remains.  Mr. Newberry, to represent his name by a picture, hung up at his door the sign of a yew-tree, that has several berries upon it, and in the midst of them a great golden N hung upon a bough of the tree, which by the help of a little false spelling made up the word Newberry.

I shall conclude this topic with a rebus, which has been lately hewn out in freestone, and erected over two of the portals of Blenheim House, being the figure of a monstrous lion tearing to pieces a little cock.  For the better understanding of which device I must acquaint my English reader that a cock has the misfortune to be called in Latin by the same word that signifies a Frenchman, as a lion is the emblem of the English nation.  Such a device in so noble a pile of building looks like a pun in an heroic poem; and I am very sorry the truly ingenious architect would suffer the statuary to blemish his excellent plan with so poor a conceit.  But I hope what I have said will gain quarter for the cock, and deliver him out of the lion’s paw.

I find likewise in ancient times the conceit of making an echo talk sensibly, and give rational answers.  If this could be excusable in any writer, it would be in Ovid where he introduces the Echo as a nymph, before she was worn away into nothing but a voice.  The learned Erasmus, though a man of wit and genius, has composed a dialogue upon this silly kind of device, and made use of an Echo, who seems to have been a very extraordinary linguist, for she answers the person she talks with in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, according as she found the syllables which she was to repeat in any of those learned languages.  Hudibras, in ridicule of this false kind of wit, has described Bruin bewailing the loss of his bear to the solitary Echo, who is of great use to the poet in several distiches, as she does not only repeat after him, but helps out his verse, and furnishes him with rhymes:—

He raged, and kept as heavy a coil asStout Hercules for loss of Hylas;Forcing the valleys to repeatThe accents of his sad regret;He beat his breast, and tore his hair,For loss of his dear crony bear:That Echo from the hollow groundHis doleful wailings did resoundMore wistfully by many times,Than in small poets’ splay-foot rhymes,That make her, in their rueful stories,To answer to int’rogatories,And most unconscionably deposeThings of which she nothing knows;And when she has said all she can say,’Tis wrested to the lover’s fancy.Quoth he, “O whither, wicked Bruin,Art thou fled to my”—Echo, Ruin?“I thought th’ hadst scorn’d to budge a stepFor fear.”  Quoth Echo, Marry guep.“Am I not here to take thy part?”Then what has quell’d thy stubborn heart?Have these bones rattled, and this headSo often in thy quarrel bled?Nor did I ever winch or grudge it,For thy dear sake.”  Quoth she, Mum budget.Think’st thou ’twill not be laid i’ th’ dish,Thou turn’dst thy back?”  Quoth Echo, Pish.To run from those th’ hadst overcomeThus cowardly?”  Quoth Echo, Mum.“But what a-vengeance makes thee flyFrom me too as thine enemy?Or if thou hadst no thought of me,Nor what I have endured for thee,Yet shame and honour might prevailTo keep thee thus from turning tail:For who would grudge to spend his blood inHis honour’s cause?”  Quoth she, A pudding. Part I., Cant. 3, 183.

Third Paper

Hoc est quod palles?  Cur quis non prandeat, hoc est?Pers., Sat. iii.  85.Is it for this you gain those meagre looks,And sacrifice your dinner to your books?

Several kinds of false wit that vanished in the refined ages of the world, discovered themselves again in the times of monkish ignorance.

As the monks were the masters of all that little learning which was then extant, and had their whole lives entirely disengaged from business, it is no wonder that several of them, who wanted genius for higher performances, employed many hours in the composition of such tricks in writing as required much time and little capacity.  I have seen half the “Æneid” turned into Latin rhymes by one of the beaux esprits of that dark age: who says, in his preface to it, that the “Æneid” wanted nothing but the sweets of rhyme to make it the most perfect work in its kind.  I have likewise seen a hymn in hexameters to the Virgin Mary, which filled a whole book, though it consisted but of the eight following words:—

Tot tibi sunt, Virgo, dotes, quot sidera coelo.Thou hast as many virtues, O Virgin, as there are stars in heaven.

The poet rang the changes upon these eight several words, and by that means made his verses almost as numerous as the virtues and stars which they celebrated.  It is no wonder that men who had so much time upon their hands did not only restore all the antiquated pieces of false wit, but enriched the world with inventions of their own.  It is to this age that we owe the production of anagrams, which is nothing else but a transmutation of one word into another, or the turning of the same set of letters into different words; which may change night into day, or black into white, if chance, who is the goddess that presides over these sorts of composition, shall so direct.  I remember a witty author, in allusion to this kind of writing, calls his rival, who, it seems, was distorted, and had his limbs set in places that did not properly belong to them, “the anagram of a man.”

When the anagrammatist takes a name to work upon, he considers it at first as a mine not broken up, which will not show the treasure it contains till he shall have spent many hours in the search of it; for it is his business to find out one word that conceals itself in another, and to examine the letters in all the variety of stations in which they can possibly be ranged.  I have heard of a gentleman who, when this kind of wit was in fashion, endeavoured to gain his mistress’s heart by it.  She was one of the finest women of her age, and known by the name of the Lady Mary Boon.  The lover not being able to make anything of Mary, by certain liberties indulged to this kind of writing converted it into Moll; and after having shut himself up for half a year, with indefatigable industry produced an anagram.  Upon the presenting it to his mistress, who was a little vexed in her heart to see herself degraded into Moll Boon, she told him, to his infinite surprise, that he had mistaken her surname, for that it was not Boon, but Bohun.

—Ibi omnisEffusus labor.—

The lover was thunder-struck with his misfortune, insomuch that in a little time after he lost his senses, which, indeed, had been very much impaired by that continual application he had given to his anagram.

The acrostic was probably invented about the same time with the anagram, though it is impossible to decide whether the inventor of the one or the other were the greater blockhead.  The simple acrostic is nothing but the name or title of a person, or thing, made out of the initial letters of several verses, and by that means written, after the manner of the Chinese, in a perpendicular line.  But besides these there are compound acrostics, when the principal letters stand two or three deep.  I have seen some of them where the verses have not only been edged by a name at each extremity, but have had the same name running down like a seam through the middle of the poem.

There is another near relation of the anagrams and acrostics, which is commonly called a chronogram.  This kind of wit appears very often on many modern medals, especially those of Germany, when they represent in the inscription the year in which they were coined.  Thus we see on a medal of Gustavus Adolphus time following words, ChrIstVs DuX ergo trIVMphVs.  If you take the pains to pick the figures out of the several words, and range them in their proper order, you will find they amount to mdcxvvvii, or 1627, the year in which the medal was stamped: for as some of the letters distinguish themselves from the rest, and overtop their fellows, they are to be considered in a double capacity, both as letters and as figures.  Your laborious German wits will turn over a whole dictionary for one of these ingenious devices.  A man would think they were searching after an apt classical term, but instead of that they are looking out a word that has an L, an M, or a D in it.  When, therefore, we meet with any of these inscriptions, we are not so much to look in them for the thought, as for the year of the Lord.

The bouts-rimés were the favourites of the French nation for a whole age together, and that at a time when it abounded in wit and learning.  They were a list of words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who was to make a poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the list: the more uncommon the rhymes were, the more extraordinary was the genius of the poet that could accommodate his verses to them.  I do not know any greater instance of the decay of wit and learning among the French, which generally follows the declension of empire, than the endeavouring to restore this foolish kind of wit.  If the reader will be at trouble to see examples of it, let him look into the new Mercure Gallant, where the author every month gives a list of rhymes to be filled up by the ingenious, in order to be communicated to the public in the Mercure for the succeeding month.  That for the month of November last, which now lies before me, is as follows:—

Lauriers

Guerriers

Musette

Lisette

Cæsars

Etendars

Houlette

Folette

One would be amazed to see so learned a man as Menage talking seriously on this kind of trifle in the following passage:—

“Monsieur de la Chambre has told me that he never knew what he was going to write when he took his pen into his hand; but that one sentence always produced another.  For my own part, I never knew what I should write next when I was making verses.  In the first place I got all my rhymes together, and was afterwards perhaps three or four months in filling them up.  I one day showed Monsieur Gombaud a composition of this nature, in which, among others, I had made use of the four following rhymes, Amaryllis, Phyllis, Maine, Arne; desiring him to give me his opinion of it.  He told me immediately that my verses were good for nothing.  And upon my asking his reason, he said, because the rhymes are too common, and for that reason easy to be put into verse.  ‘Marry,’ says I, ‘if it be so, I am very well rewarded for all the pains I have been at!’  But by Monsieur Gombaud’s leave, notwithstanding the severity of the criticism, the verses were good.”  (Vide “Menagiana.”)  Thus far the learned Menage, whom I have translated word for word.

The first occasion of these bouts-rimés made them in some manner excusable, as they were tasks which the French ladies used to impose on their lovers.  But when a grave author, like him above-mentioned, tasked himself, could there be anything more ridiculous?  Or would not one be apt to believe that the author played booty, and did not make his list of rhymes till he had finished his poem?

I shall only add that this piece of false wit has been finely ridiculed by Monsieur Sarasin, in a poem entitled “La Défaite des Bouts-Rimés.”  (The Rout of the Bouts-Rimés).

I must subjoin to this last kind of wit the double rhymes, which are used in doggrel poetry, and generally applauded by ignorant readers.  If the thought of the couplet in such compositions is good, the rhyme adds little to it; and if bad, it will not be in the power of the rhyme to recommend it.  I am afraid that great numbers of those who admire the incomparable “Hudibras,” do it more on account of these doggrel rhymes than of the parts that really deserve admiration.  I am sure I have heard the

Pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,Was beat with fist, instead of a stick (Canto I, II),

and—

There was an ancient philosopherWho had read Alexander Ross over(Part I., Canto 2, 1),

more frequently quoted than the finest pieces of wit in the whole poem.

Fourth Paper

Non equidem hoc studeo bullatis ut mihi nugisPagina turgescat, dare pondus idonea fumo.Pers., Sat. v. 19.’Tis not indeed my talent to engageIn lofty trifles, or to swell my pageWith wind and noise.Dryden.

There is no kind of false wit which has been so recommended by the practice of all ages as that which consists in a jingle of words, and is comprehended under the general name of punning.  It is indeed impossible to kill a weed which the soil has a natural disposition to produce.  The seeds of punning are in the minds of all men, and though they may be subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest genius that is not broken and cultivated by the rules of art.  Imitation is natural to us, and when it does not raise the mind to poetry, painting, music, or other more noble arts, it often breaks out in puns and quibbles.

Aristotle, in the eleventh chapter of his book of rhetoric, describes two or three kinds of puns, which he calls paragrams, among the beauties of good writing, and produces instances of them out of some of the greatest authors in the Greek tongue.  Cicero has sprinkled several of his works with puns, and, in his book where he lays down the rules of oratory, quotes abundance of sayings as pieces of wit, which also, upon examination, prove arrant puns.  But the age in which the pun chiefly flourished was in the reign of King James the First.  That learned monarch was himself a tolerable punster, and made very few bishops or Privy Councillors that had not some time or other signalised themselves by a clinch, or a conundrum.  It was, therefore, in this age that the pun appeared with pomp and dignity.  It had been before admitted into merry speeches and ludicrous compositions, but was now delivered with great gravity from the pulpit, or pronounced in the most solemn manner at the council-table.  The greatest authors, in their most serious works, made frequent use of puns.  The sermons of Bishop Andrews, and the tragedies of Shakespeare, are full of them.  The sinner was punned into repentance by the former; as in the latter, nothing is more usual than to see a hero weeping and quibbling for a dozen lines together.

I must add to these great authorities, which seem to have given a kind of sanction to this piece of false wit, that all the writers of rhetoric have treated of punning with very great respect, and divided the several kinds of it into hard names, that are reckoned among the figures of speech, and recommended as ornaments in discourse.  I remember a country schoolmaster of my acquaintance told me once, that he had been in company with a gentleman whom he looked upon to be the greatest paragrammatist among the moderns.  Upon inquiry, I found my learned friend had dined that day with Mr. Swan, the famous punster; and desiring him to give me some account of Mr. Swan’s conversation, he told me that he generally talked in the Paranomasia, that he sometimes gave in to the Plocé, but that in his humble opinion he shone most in the Antanaclasis.

I must not here omit that a famous university of this land was formerly very much infested with puns; but whether or not this might arise from the fens and marshes in which it was situated, and which are now drained, I must leave to the determination of more skilful naturalists.

After this short history of punning, one would wonder how it should be so entirely banished out of the learned world as it is at present, especially since it had found a place in the writings of the most ancient polite authors.  To account for this we must consider that the first race of authors, who were the great heroes in writing, were destitute of all rules and arts of criticism; and for that reason, though they excel later writers in greatness of genius, they fall short of them in accuracy and correctness.  The moderns cannot reach their beauties, but can avoid their imperfections.  When the world was furnished with these authors of the first eminence, there grew up another set of writers, who gained themselves a reputation by the remarks which they made on the works of those who preceded them.  It was one of the employments of these secondary authors to distinguish the several kinds of wit by terms of art, and to consider them as more or less perfect, according as they were founded in truth.  It is no wonder, therefore, that even such authors as Isocrates, Plato, and Cicero, should have such little blemishes as are not to be met with in authors of a much inferior character, who have written since those several blemishes were discovered.  I do not find that there was a proper separation made between puns and true wit by any of the ancient authors, except Quintilian and Longinus.  But when this distinction was once settled, it was very natural for all men of sense to agree in it.  As for the revival of this false wit, it happened about the time of the revival of letters; but as soon as it was once detected, it immediately vanished and disappeared.  At the same time there is no question but, as it has sunk in one age and rose in another, it will again recover itself in some distant period of time, as pedantry and ignorance shall prevail upon wit and sense.  And, to speak the truth, I do very much apprehend, by some of the last winter’s productions, which had their sets of admirers, that our posterity will in a few years degenerate into a race of punsters: at least, a man may be very excusable for any apprehensions of this kind, that has seen acrostics handed about the town with great secresy and applause; to which I must also add a little epigram called the “Witches’ Prayer,” that fell into verse when it was read either backward or forward, excepting only that it cursed one way, and blessed the other.  When one sees there are actually such painstakers among our British wits, who can tell what it may end in?  If we must lash one another, let it be with the manly strokes of wit and satire: for I am of the old philosopher’s opinion, that, if I must suffer from one or the other, I would rather it should be from the paw of a lion than from the hoof of an ass.  I do not speak this out of any spirit of party.  There is a most crying dulness on both sides.  I have seen Tory acrostics and Whig anagrams, and do not quarrel with either of them because they are Whigs or Tories, but because they are anagrams and acrostics.