That is in the finest style of an exaggeration which has been inherited by Americans and is the source of much of their wit and humor. Here is a coarser specimen, but perfectly witty. A person, remarking to a famous criminal lawyer that his client would certainly go to hell, had for a reply, "Go to hell! he ought to be thankful that there is a hell he can go to."
This characteristic will recur under the head of Falstaff.
Some of the similes which Americans derive from their professions, and apply to persons, have all the character of wit. A farmer says of a meagre and unequal speech that it was "pretty scattering," alluding to ground crops that grow unevenly. An iron-founder will say of a speech that was all fusion and passion that, notwithstanding, it "didn't make a weld." Miners in the West use the word "color" for the finest gold in the ground. One of them remarked of a man who had been tried and found worthless, "I have panned him out clear down to the bed rock, but I can't even raise the color." Frequenters of the race-course mention a beaten politician as "the longest-eared horse they ever saw," as the ears hang to a jaded horse. And a Nantucket captain, when asked his opinion of a very rhetorical preacher, said, "He's a good sailor, but a bad carrier."
The poetry of Donne, Cowley, Suckling, and others of that epoch, easily furnish examples of similes which stop so far short of beauty that their aptness only serves to raise a smile. Suckling says,—
