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Updated: June 12, 2025
In lists of legal facetiæ the habit of punning is not more noticeable than the prevalent unamiability of the jests. Advocates are intellectual gladiators, using their tongues as soldiers of fortune use their swords; and when they speak, it is to vanquish an adversary.
"'Love, virtue, valour, yea, all human charms, Are shrunk and centred in that heap of bones. Oh! there are wondrous beauties in the grave!" I made some punning rejoinder, and we sallied out to earn an appetite in the Tuilleries for Madame Laurent's dinner. At the hour of half-past five we repaired to our engagement.
The sense of the Comic is much blunted by habits of punning and of using humouristic phrase: the trick of employing Johnsonian polysyllables to treat of the infinitely little. And it really may be humorous, of a kind, yet it will miss the point by going too much round about it. A certain French Duke Pasquier died, some years back, at a very advanced age.
"One mile away from home is not so good as being in it," says a proverb with a punning turn which cannot be brought out in English. Another says, "Every day is happy at home, every moment miserable abroad." It may therefore be profitable to look inside a Chinese home, if only to discover wherein its attractiveness lies.
You have thirty thousand francs a year, and the proceeds of your pen; you have justified your motto: Ars thesaurusque virtus, that punning device our ancestors were always seeking, and yet you never appear in the Bois de Boulogne! We live in times when virtue ought to show itself."
Still I venture to deny that even punning is incompatible with poetry, or that those who make the pun can have no deeper feeling in their bosoms which they are perhaps too shamefaced to utter. The fact is that that which gives its inexpressible charm to mountaineering is the incessant series of exquisite natural scenes, which are for the most part enjoyed by the mountaineer alone.
If so, I certainly began early to exhibit a result, of which the cause was, in some mysterious way, long subsequent to the effect; unless the Puppet Plays of Claverton inspired my wit. However that may be, I developed at this period a decided faculty for punning, and that is an unusual thing at that age.
Does the master wit of the Play consist in any one class of fun, as verbal conceits in the punning line; practical jokes; Euphuism, so-called; banter in speech and retort, versemaking and sonneteering, learned quips, or in the use of all these combined in a way to bring out the point of the Play the clash of natural with artificial methods. Is wit or purpose dominant in the Play?
My good friend, For favours to my son and wife, I shall love you whilst I've life, Your clysters, potions, help'd to save, Our infant lambkin from the grave. The infant lambkin was probably John Lamb, but of course it might have been Charles. The expression, however, proves that punning ran in the family. Lamb's library contained his father's copy of Hudibras.
They did not spend their leisure in jesting, punning and guffawing, but in praying, studying, and working, for even their vacations were turned into days of toil. They spent their all in one endeavor to save men from a yawning Pit and a lurid Hell. Nowadays we live in perpetual relaxation and recreation.
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