Sniff, indeed? Perish the thought!
"Tinpot" used as an adjective does not spoil the following curious bit of description penned by a London girl during a stay in Ryde:
"I am enjoying myself very much in a quiet, non-dissipated, tinpot way—walking on the sea-wall and the pier, reading Carlyle and Marion Crawford, and making little vests for Kilburn orphans."
A dissipated tinpot
Only a girl could have written that, and of its kind it is admirable.
An idea largely held by girls, in common with women and men who have a witty tendency, is that appreciation is a form of ignorance. It was, be it here called to remembrance, to correct this notion, that Wordsworth wrote, "True knowledge leads to love," and that Browning wrote, "Admiration grows as knowledge grows."
Appreciation a form of ignorance
It is doubtless the circumstance that unkindness is so often confounded with wit that has led to the fact that of all good gifts the good gift of wit is the one held in least liking by the majority of persons. The truth would seem to be that, with wit, as with everything else not intrinsically bad, the thing of main importance is that it be handled carefully. Like gunpowder, it has its uses to him who knows how to avail himself of them. He who does not, would do well to do what certain savages once did. Having come into the possession of a bag of gunpowder, they carefully preserved it till the spring, when they planted it as they did their corn. It did not burst forth when the corn burst forth; so much the better for the sowers. That gunpowder was very safely deposited, and much wit might with equal advantage be held over till the next planting season.