with one word, and the clever feat surprises us. We are not looking for it, as our life is plain-spoken, does not twist its intention nor its language, and passes for what it is. A friend, really wanting to know if Foote the comedian had ever been in Cork, in good faith asked him. "No," said he; "but I have seen a good many drawings of it." So the new conundrum finds us unprepared: "Which goes the quicker,—a full minute or a spare moment?" That pleases the mind, but it does not make us laugh as when Abraham Lincoln, in his attack of small-pox, said, "Now I am willing to see the office-seekers, for at last I have something I can give 'em all." We laugh because the play upon the word "give" betrays and yet relieves the moral annoyance of that class of beggars.
Punning can enhance its quality by lurking in the quotation of well-known and esteemed lines; as when a man who is importuned to subscribe to something, on the score of the virtue there is in giving, should quote the tender George Herbert,—
"Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives."
In this way Mr. Thackeray made one of his best puns. Some one was talking to him of a man of talent, who was prodigiously addicted to beer; saying what a pity it was, for they hardly knew his equal. "Yes," said Thackeray, "take him for half-and-half, we ne'er shall look upon his like again."
So Douglas Jerrold, referring in one of his plays to the English habit of scrawling names and lines with
