From Isthmian or Nemæan game;
Others derive it from the Bear
That’s fixed in Northern hemisphere,
And round about his pole does make
A circle like a bear at stake,
That at the chain’s end wheels about
And overturns the rabble rout.’
I need not multiply examples of this sort.—Wit or ludicrous invention produces its effect oftenest by comparison, but not always. It frequently effects its purposes by unexpected and subtle distinctions. For instance, in the first kind, Mr. Sheridan’s description of Mr. Addington’s administration as the fag-end of Mr. Pitt’s, who had remained so long on the treasury bench that, like Nicias in the fable, ‘he left the sitting part of the man behind him,’ is as fine an example of metaphorical wit as any on record. The same idea seems, however, to have been included in the old well-known nickname of the Rump Parliament. Almost as happy an instance of the other kind of wit, which consists in sudden retorts, in turns upon an idea, and diverting the train of your adversary’s argument abruptly and adroitly into another channel, may be seen in the sarcastic reply of Porson, who hearing some one observe that ‘certain modern poets would be read and admired when Homer and Virgil were forgotten,’ made answer—‘And not till then!’ Sir Robert Walpole’s definition of the gratitude of place-expectants, ‘That it is a lively sense of future favours,’ is no doubt wit, but it does not consist in the finding out any coincidence or likeness, but in suddenly transposing the order of time in the common account of this feeling, so as to make the professions of those who pretend to it correspond more with their practice. It is filling up a blank in the human heart with a word that explains its hollowness at once. Voltaire’s saying, in answer to a stranger who was observing how tall his trees grew—‘That they had nothing else to do’—was a quaint mixture of wit and humour, making it out as if they really led a lazy, laborious life; but there was here neither allusion or metaphor. Again, that master-stroke in Hudibras is sterling wit and profound satire, where speaking of certain religious hypocrites he says, that they
‘Compound for sins they are inclin’d to,
By damning those they have no mind to;’