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Such a Device in so noble a Pile of Building looks like a Punn in an Heroick 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.
Having pursued the History of a Punn, from its Original to its Downfal, I shall here define it to be a Conceit arising from the use of two Words that agree in the Sound, but differ in the Sense.
The only way therefore to try a Piece of Wit, is to translate it into a different Language: If it bears the Test, you may pronounce it true; but if it vanishes in the Experiment, you may conclude it to have been a Punn. In short, one may say of a Punn, as the Countryman described his Nightingale, that it is vox et praeterea nihil, a Sound, and nothing but a Sound.
Mixt Wit therefore is a Composition of Punn and true Wit, and is more or less perfect as the Resemblance lies in the Ideas or in the Words: Its Foundations are laid partly in Falsehood and partly in Truth: Reason puts in her Claim for one Half of it, and Extravagance for the other.
that he most would gaze and wonder at, Is th' horned mitre, and the bloody hat, The crooked staffe, their coule's strange form and store, Save that he saw the fame in hell before. The first satire of the fifth book is levelled at Racking Landlords. The following lines are a strong example of the taste of those times for the Punn and Paronomasia.
But the Age in which the Punn chiefly flourished, was the Reign of King James the First. That learned Monarch was himself a tolerable Punnster, and made very few Bishops or Privy-Counsellors that had not some time or other signalized themselves by a Clinch, or a Conundrum. It was therefore in this Age that the Punn appeared with Pomp and Dignity.
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