3.—“Light only on the box.”—Bryant and May.
4.—“—sigh to think that he had found
4.—“His warmest welcome at an inn.”—Shenstone.
The most that can be advanced against those poetic conceits of the kind condemned by Addison is that they appeal in a greater degree to the eye than to the ear, and while we may be conscious of their artificial nature we should also be catholic enough to admit their ingenuity, and when they are sufficiently amusing to provoke laughter, or excite a smile, they should not be denied the attributes of wit; for, after all, when we free ourselves from the suspicion of affectation, do we not agree that the chief end of wit is to amuse?
NO! DON’T. (Period 1854.)
“So they are sending out books to amuse the poor fellows at Scutari—and very proper. I will send five-and-twenty copies of my last five-act tragedy of ‘The Roman Grandmother.’”
These remarks have been suggested to the writer by his discovering in one of his old scrap-books a little collection of curiosities of verse culled in Bookland byways “oompty” years ago. These do not consist of specimens of the minor Greek poets’ eccentricities, but in every case they are examples of what Addison would have unhesitatingly catalogued as “false wit”; and yet, not only are some of them genuinely amusing and others highly ingenious, but several display a painstaking which almost amounts to genius—if genius be “the capacity for taking pains.”
We can, for example, appreciate the immense industry of the author who set himself to compose a series, of verses in which the letter “e” should be entirely omitted, and the painstaking of the author will be yet further acknowledged when it is known that “e” is the most used letter in the English alphabet, the relative proportion of its use being 120 times to j 4, k 8, g 17, and i 40.