These classical essays do not suit our climate very well, yet nothing is to be objected to them where, as in the one just cited, they are pure. But I strongly dislike hybrids, by which I intend such a retort as the Oxford Don is alleged to have made to the youths who hissed him as he passed—Laudatur AB HIS; and the quotation of a line from the Eclogue of Virgil, where a lady’s dress is torn by a fiddle, is barely more than a verbal conceit, though incomparably preferable to the aggravating all-us jelly-us of Brother Crug, which is a mere phonetic abortion.
Whatever verdict may be pronounced on their successors, as they approach our own period, it must be said of the assemblages of facetiæ, made public by former generations down to the last century, that they leave us no alternative but this conclusion—that, with exceedingly few exceptions, considering the space of time involved, the genuine, enjoyable, laughable, recallable jest was unknown to antiquity, and is the offspring of modern thought and conditions.
Of the jeux d’esprit and humour of the olden days the archaic cast is not merely in the spelling or in the matter, but it is in the bone and blood; and just as it would be idle to imagine that an Englishman of the Tudor epoch could be converted into a modern Englishman by arraying his person in modern clothes, so it is futile to attempt to draw the jocular literature of passed centuries into harmony with our own by adapting the orthography and language to the prevailing mode.
Save in a few rare cases, where the life of the subject is indestructible, the entire body of old-fashioned wit and wisdom is as exotic as a tropical plant within the Arctic circle.
CHAPTER XVIII.
“Joe Miller’s Jests”—History, Character, and Success of the Publication—John Mottley The Editor.
POSSIBLY it might be more correct to regard Joe Miller’s Jests as marking a new era in this branch of literature and department of ingenuity than as a work possessing pretensions to rank as a model to succeeding editors of similar collections. I am speaking of the little shilling volume originally issued under the care of John Mottley in 1739, and not of the modern publication which bears the same name, and has little beyond the name in common with it.