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Updated: June 5, 2025
He was a good natural punster, and endowed with a lively wit. The circuit was never dull when Platt was present; but there was one trait in his character as an advocate that judges always profess to disapprove of he loved popular applause, and his singularly bold and curious mode of cross-examination sometimes brought him both rebuke and hearty laughter from the most austere of judges.
"Why," said Hamilton, laying down his knife and fork, and preparing himself by a large draught of the champagne, "why, Madame d'Epernonville appeared without her tour; you know, Lord Bolingbroke, that tour is the polite name for false hair. "Excellent! famous!" cried we all, except Huet, who seemed to regard the punster with a very disrespectful eye. Hamilton saw it.
At last the old man tossed his head, and whipped his boot with his crop. I have no doubt I deprived that man of a great deal of happiness; for if anything is disappointing to a punster, it is not seeing his joke. He had not done with me yet, however, and before abandoning me as an incorrigible lunatic, asked if I would like to see Naples. "Naples! By all means, but not at this time of year."
Few things are less digestible than abortive efforts at the humorous; the stream of conversation instantly freezes up; the disconcerted punster wears the look of his well-known kinsman, the detected pickpocket; and a scribe, so mercilessly suicidal as regards his better fame, deserves, when a plain blunt jury comes to sit upon the body, to be found in mystical Latin, felo de se, or in plain English "a fellow deceased."
Some men carry things to extremes; I wouldn't myself like to be a punster in toto, but only now and then to have a finger in one. But really, the condition of mind seems to be the same as that of some of our criminals who profess they committed the deed because they "couldn't help it," or the boy who was asked angrily "why he whistled?" "He didn't," he replied, "it whistled itself."
Much of this great roadway is metaled with kunkur, an oolitic limestone found near the surface of the soil in Hindustan; and all Anglo-India laughed at the joke of an irreverent punster who, apropos of the fact that this application of kunkur to the road-bed was made under the orders of Lord William Bentinck, then governor-general, dubbed that gentleman William the Kunkurer.
Although I never sat down to open a school of instruction, a man should not despise the humblest teaching, or he may be deficient in many things he should have a knowledge of. There was once an old fox-hunting squire whose ambition was to be known as a punster.
We soon discover that we are dealing, not with a mere punster or jester, not with a mere master of grimace or manufacturer of broad grins, not with an eccentric oddity in prose or verse, not with a merry-andrew who tickles to senseless laughter, not with a spasmodic melodramatist who writhes in fictitious pain, but that we are dealing with a sincere, truthful, and most gifted nature, many-sided, many-colored, harmonious as a whole, and having a real unity as the centre of its power.
"But I thought Tappy Oko and I saved the Island," chuckled the Scarecrow, nudging the Imperial Punster. "Had the Imperial Army not retired and left the field to you, there would have been no victory," faltered the General in a timid voice. "Therefore, in a way we are responsible for the victory. A great general always knows when to retire."
In France he would have been a great epigrammatist, like Hugo. In England he is a punster. There was nothing at least in this group I have loosely called the Eccentrics that disturbs the general sense that all their generation was part of the sunset of the great revolutionary poets.
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