It is my fate to mix with a circle of fashionable dilettanti, each of them capable of sustaining a part in rational discourse, and of conducting the intellectual conflict with some share of vigour and learning; who, nevertheless, meet together to fritter away time, patience, and attention, with a series of unconnected quibbles and conundrums. Instead of the rich web of fancy, glowing with the vivid creations of lively, intelligent minds, the conversation presents a motley intermixture of shreds of wit and patches of conceit, a chequer-work of incongruities, the very orts and scraps of the "Feast of Reason," the dozings of science, and dregs of literature. If I relate to this group of punsters the most affecting circumstance, I am heard with impatience and inattention, till I chance unwittingly to utter a word susceptible of a double or triple interpretation. The mischievous spark of folly immediately ignites, the moral interest of my tale is undermined, and a loud report of laughter announces the explosion. The genius of orthography frowns in vain: puns are, by the law of custom, entitled to claim entrance into the sensorium either by the eye or the ear: but when a pseudo pun ("for indeed there are counterfeits abroad") is perceptible to neither sense—when read, its wit is not discoverable; and when heard, it cannot be understood: to avoid the horror of an explanation, I find myself obliged to perjure my senses by laughing in ignorance and very sadness, and thus contribute a sanction to the practice I would fain abolish. The evil is subversive of the first principle of society. Is it little to hunger for the bread of wisdom, and to be fed with the husks of folly? Is it little to thirst for the Castalian fount, and see its waters idly wasted in sport or malice? Is it little to seek for the interchange of souls, and find only the reciprocity of nonsense?
P.S. By BERNARD BLACKMANTLE.
To which complaint, I add this note
And sketch, by way of antidote,
The glorious art can life enhance,
A Pun will cause a Bear to dance,
And as we here have proof,—provoke
A bashful man to stand a joke.
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