Such things are pleasantly congenial with the scent of lavender in an old-world garden that knows nothing of how busy people are in the new world outside its boundary. But what are we to say when we find in a volume of serious biography published last year only as a previously unheard-of instance of the wit of the “subject,” the story of the gentleman who, standing at the entrance to his club, was taken for the porter by a member coming out?
“Call me a cab,” said the latter.
“You're a cab,” was the prompt reply.
The story in the biography stops there; but the original one shows the wit making a second score on punning points.
“What do you mean?” cried the other. “I told you to call me a cab.”
“And I've called you a cab. You didn't expect me to call you handsome,” said the ready respondent.
Now that story was a familiar Strand story forty years ago when H. J. Byron was at the height of his fame, and he was made the hero of the pun (assuming that it is possible for a hero to make a pun).
But, of course, no one can vouch for the mint from which such small coin issues. If a well-known man is in the habit of making puns all the puns of his generation are told in the next with his name attached to them. H. J. Byron was certainly as good a punster as ever wrote a burlesque for the old Gaiety; though a good deal of the effect of his puns was due to their delivery by Edward Terry. But nothing that Byron wrote was so good as Burnand's title to his Burlesque on Rob Roy, the play which Mrs Bateman had just revived at Sadler's Wells. Burnand called it Robbing Roy, or Scotch'd, not Kilt. The parody on “Roy's Wife,” sung by Terry, was exquisite, and very topical,—
Roy's wife of Alldivalloch!
Oh, while she