‘Good and bad join in telling the source of their birth;
The bad own their edge, and the good own their worth.’
The vocal and histrionic arts have often had their victims. Who can possibly have forgotten Luttrell’s famous compliment to Miss Tree:
‘On this Tree when a nightingale settles and sings,
The Tree will return her as good as she brings.’
Here, if ever, was a pun on a name defensible. Less well known is this quatrain on the famous actor, William Farren, who died in 1861:
‘If Farren, cleverest of men,
Should go to right-about,
What part of town will he be then?
Why, “Farren-done-Without”!’
Those ladies of beauty and fashion whose names were susceptible at once of pun and compliment have naturally inspired the wits of their respective days. Thus, it was said of the charming sisters Gunning, that Cupid, perceiving that the beaux of the time were proof against his darts, had now laid down his bow and conquered by ‘gunning.’ But perhaps the best thing of the sort ever composed was Lord Lyttelton’s tribute to Lady Brown:
‘When I was young and debonair,
The brownest nymph to me was fair;
But now I’m old and wiser grown,
The fairest nymph to me is Brown.’
Other celebrities could be named who came off badly in their encounter with the punsters. But, indeed, the list of such jests might be indefinitely extended, for the habit of making puns on patronymics has always been very widely spread, and has found many a sympathetic historian.
