MCDXLVI.—"THE WIDE, WIDE SEA."
Hood says that, "A Quaker loves the ocean for its broad brim."
MCDXLVII.—CONDITIONAL AGREEMENT.
Dr. A——, when dangerously ill at an hotel, was applied to by the landlord to pass his bill. The doctor, observing that all the charges were very high, wrote at the bottom of the account, "If I die, I pass this account; if I live, I'll examine it."
MCDXLVIII.—ON A SQUINTING POETESS.
To no one muse does she her glance confine,
But has an eye, at once, to all the nine.
MCDXLIX.—A NEAT SUGGESTION.
A Welsh judge, celebrated as a suitor for all sorts of places and his neglect of personal cleanliness, was thus addressed by Mr. Jekyll: "As you have asked the Ministry for everything else, ask them for a piece of soap and a nailbrush."
MCDL.—SCOTCH "WUT."
It requires (says Sydney Smith) a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. Their only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of Wut, is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals. They are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love metaphysically. I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, "What you say, my lord, is very true of love in the aibstract, but——" Here the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.