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I know I should have translated it to them: you remember what admirable work I used to make of such stories in broken Italian. I have heard old Churchill tell Bussy English puns out of jest-books: particularly a reply about eating hare, which he translated, "j'ai mon ventre plein de poil." Adieu! ARLINGTON STREET, March 29, 1745.
What a benefactor an honest laughter-maker is! Since Dickens there has been nobody to fill our lungs like Kipling. Is it not better that the public should have 'My Lord the Elephant' and 'Brugglesmith' to laugh outright at than that they should be feebly sniggering over the jest-books begotten on English Dulness by Yankee humour, as they were eight or nine years ago?
I will proceed to set forth a few of the injuries he has done me. In the first place, he never made or took a joke. This insensibility on Mr. Barlow's part not only cast its own gloom over my boyhood, but blighted even the sixpenny jest-books of the time; for, groaning under a moral spell constraining me to refer all things to Mr.
In the Facetiæ of Hierocles we have one of the earliest jest-books that has been saved from the wreck of time. It is a curious proof of the fallen state of learning; the Sophists had long since made themselves ridiculous; books alone will not make a man of sense; and in the jokes of Hierocles the blunderer is always called a man of learning.
Jest-books tell us of a defendant against whom a claim for compensation was made by a complainant who alleged that the former's dog had bitten him. The defence was, first, that the dog was lame, blind, and toothless; second, that it had died a week before; and third, that the defendant never possessed a dog.
If I had bought some of the blind minstrel's almanacs and jest-books I might indeed apologize, but ballads are another thing.
It is, however, simply a collection of humorous anecdotes, not specially examples of folly or stupidity, most of which are found in earlier jest-books.
He could repeat all the observations that were retailed in the atmosphere of the playhouses, and had all the good things of the high wits by rote long before they made way into the jest-books.
Made up and fashioned into Clinches, Bulls, Quirkes, Yerkes, Quips, and Jerkes. Apothegmatically bundled vp and garbled at the request of John Garrett's Ghost." such is the elaborate title of the collection of jests made by John Taylor, the Water Poet, which owes very little to preceding English jest-books.
Three consist of tricks played by women upon their husbands, such as are found in the ordinary jest-books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In one a man, who had taken a buzzard, invites some friends to dine with him.
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