STAMMERING WIT.
Stammering, (says Coleridge,) is sometimes the cause of a pun. Some one was mentioning in Lamb’s presence the cold-heartedness of the Duke of Cumberland, in restraining the duchess from rushing up to the embrace of her son, whom she had not seen for a considerable time, and insisting on her receiving him in state. “How horribly cold it was,” said the narrator. “Yes,” said Lamb, in his stuttering way; “but you know he is the Duke of Cu-cum-ber-land.”
ORIGIN OF BOTTLED ALE.
Alexander Newell, Dean of St. Paul’s, and Master of Westminster School, in the reign of Queen Mary, was an excellent angler. But Fuller says, while Newell was catching of fishes, Bishop Bonner was catching of Newell, and would certainly have sent him to the shambles, had not a good London merchant conveyed him away upon the seas. Newell was fishing upon the banks of the Thames when he received the first intimation of his danger, which was so pressing, that he dared not go back to his own house to make any preparation for his flight. Like an honest angler, he had taken with him provisions for the day; and when, in the first year of England’s deliverance, he returned to his country, and to his own haunts, he remembered that on the day of his flight he had left a bottle of beer in a safe place on the bank: there he looked for it, and “found it no bottle, but a gun—such the sound at the opening thereof; and this (says Fuller) is believed (casualty is mother of more invention than industry) to be the original of bottled ale in England.”
BAD’S THE BEST.
Canning was once asked by an English clergyman, at whose parsonage he was visiting, how he liked the sermon he had preached that morning. “Why, it was a short sermon,” quoth Canning. “O yes,” said the preacher, “you know I avoid being tedious.” “Ah, but,” replied Canning, “you were tedious.”