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 es bounding into the presence, and does not show the less ic for being dragged in sometimes by the head and shoulders. What though it limp a little, or prove defective in one leg -- all the [p 258] better. A pun may easily be too curious and artificial. Who has not at oime 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 ceits, every man tributing his shot, and some there the most expert shooters of the day; after making a poor word run the gauill it is ready to drop; after hunting and winding 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 er, who was never preo the trade, whom the pany 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 one out with something so whimsical, yet so perti; 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 Hoods 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 perfe all its parts. What it gains in pleteness, 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 eaining are those which will least bear an analysis. Of this kind is the following, recorded, with a sort of stigma, in one of Swifts 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 exg this, and ing 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 siderable. It is only a urn given, by a little false pronunciation, to a very on, though not very courteous inquiry. Put by oleman to a 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 iality of time, place, and person; the pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter; the oopping at leisure, the other hurrying on with his burthen; the ihough rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, with the utter and iricable irrelevancy of the sed; the place -- a public street, not favourable to frivolous iigations; the affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry (the oion) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the urn given to it) in the implied satire; namely, that few of that tribe are expected [p 259] to eat of the good things which they carry, they being in most tries sidered rather as the temporary trustees than owners of such dainties,which the fellow was beginning to uand; but then the wig again es in, and he make nothing of it: all put together stitute a picture: Hogar