But after all, give me leave to lament, that I cannot have the honour of being the sole inventor of this incomparable rule: though I solemnly protest, upon the word of an author (if an author may have credit), that I never had the least hint toward it, any more than the ladies' letters and young children's pronunciation, till a year after I had proposed this rule to Dr.——, who was an excellent judge of the advantage it might be to the public; when, to my great surprise, tumbling over the third tome of Alstedius, p. 71, right loth to believe my eyes, I met with the following passage: "Ambigua multam faciunt ad hanc rem, oujusmodi exempla plurima reperiuntur apud Plautum, qui in ambiguis crebro ludit. Joci captantur ex permutatione syllabarum et vocum, ut pro Decretum, Discretum; pro Medicus, Mendicus et Merdicus: pro Polycarpus, Polyeopros. Item ex syllabarum ellipsi, ut ait Althusisus, cap. iii. civil. convers. pro Casimirus, J'rus; pro Marcus, Arcus; pro Vinosus, Osus; pro Sacerdotium, Otium. Sic, additione literæ, pro Urbanus, Turbanus:" which exactly corresponded to every branch and circumstance of my rule. Then, indeed, I could not avoid breaking out into the following exclamations, and that after a most pathetic manner: "Wretched Tom Pun-Sibi! Wretched indeed! Are all thy nocturnal lucubrations come to this? Must another, for being a hundred years before thee in the world, run away with the glory of thy own invention? It is true, he must. Happy Alstedius! who, I thought, would have stood me in all-stead, upon consulting thy method of joking! All's tedious to me now, since thou hast robbed me of that honour which would have set me above all writers of the present age. And why not, happy Tom Pun-Sibi? did we not jump together like true wits? But, alas! thou art on the safest side of the bush; my credit being liable to the suspicion of the world, because you wrote before me. Ill-natured critics, in spite of all my protestations, will condemn me, right or wrong, for a plagiary. Henceforward never write any thing of thy own; but pillage and trespass upon all that ever wrote before thee: search among dust and moths for things new to the learned. Farewell, study; from this moment I abandon thee: for, wherever I can get a paragraph upon any subject whatsoever ready done to my hand, my head shall have no further trouble than see it fairly transcribed!"—And this method, I hope, will help me to swell out the Second Part of this work.
THE END OF THE FIRST PART.
TOM PUN-SIBI;
OR,
THE GIBER GIB'D[14].
Mirandi novitate movebere mostri.—Ovid.
[14] The Art of Punning was originally printed at Dublin in 1719, immediately reprinted in London, and then pretty generally ascribed to Dr. Swift. It appears, however, that in this instance the Dean was only an assistant; the piece having been written by Dr. Sheridan, and corrected and improved by Dr. Swift, Dr. Delany, and Mr. Rochfort. Although it does not seem calculated to give offence to any one, it however called forth the above Satire from the pen of Dr. Tisdal.