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I stood out in the yard, and attracted by some noise, looked in. There our new servant was, with a short pipe in his mouth, and a mug of ale beside him. The others called out for a speech. Upon which he rose from the chair and got upon the table, and spoke to them." "What did he say?" "O I cannot tell you half of it. He made the wittiest and most brilliant speech I ever heard.
He was a man in whose presence nothing reprehensible was out of danger; quick in discerning whatever was wrong or ridiculous, and not unwilling to expose it. "There are," says Steele, "in his writings many oblique strokes upon some of the wittiest men of the age." His delight was more to excite merriment than detestation; and he detects follies rather than crimes.
And when they were all out of sight, he went back, and lay down on his bed and wept, once and for all. Then he arose, and went down into the hall to abbots and monks, and earls and knights, and was the boldest, cheeriest, wittiest of them all. "They say," quoth he to Torfrida that night, "that some men have gray heads on green shoulders. I have a gray heart in a green body."
He has a duel scar on his left cheek all the nobility have them over there. I've a cousin living in Berlin she's the wittiest person and she says the German child of the future will be born with a scarred left cheek!" Well, I was sick enough of hearing of Mr. von Inwald before the day was over. All morning in the spring-house they talked Mr. von Inwald.
Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most winning eloquence a rich flow of spirits and fulness of health and life a deep sense of wonder and beauty in the earth and man an instinct of the dynamic and supernatural laws which underlie and vivify this material universe and its appearances, healthy, yet irregular and unscientific, all but superstitious turn him loose in any country in Europe, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it will not be difficult, alas! to cast his horoscope.
The greatest of all the wits, however, Alexander Pope, was his firm friend and admirer; and in the "Dunciad," wherein the wittiest of poets impaled so many of the small fry of the age with his pungent and vindictive shaft, he also slew some of the most malevolent of Handel's foes. Fielding, in "Tom Jones," has an amusing hit at the taste of the period: "It was Mr.
Who, as he saw Sheridan and Fox eagerly arguing as to whether Caleb Baldwin, the Westminster costermonger, could hold his own with Isaac Bittoon, the Jew, would have guessed that the one was the deepest political philosopher in Europe, and that the other would be remembered as the author of the wittiest comedy and of the finest speech of his generation?
He says that it is concluded among merchants, that where a trade hath once been and do decay, it never recovers again, and therefore that the manufacture of cloath of England will never come to esteem again; that, among other faults, Sir Richard Ford cannot keepe a secret, and that it is so much the part of a merchant to be guilty of that fault that the Duke of Yoke is resolved to commit no more secrets to the merchants of the Royall Company; that Sir Ellis Layton is, for a speech of forty words, the wittiest man that ever he knew in his life, but longer he is nothing, his judgment being nothing at all, but his wit most absolute.
The works of Overbury besides his Wife, which is reckoned the wittiest and most finished of all, are, first Characters, or witty descriptions of the prophesies of sundry persons. This piece has relation to some characters of his own time, which can afford little satisfaction to a modern reader. Second, The Remedy of Love in two parts, a poem 1620, Octavo, 2s.
His own strong preference was for the Bar, but his father, who had already brought up one son to that profession and found it more expensive than profitable, looked very unfavourably on the design; and under paternal pressure the wittiest Englishman of his generation determined to seek Holy Orders, or, to use his own old-fashioned phrase, to "enter the Church."
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