The Punster's Pocket-book

R. 31. The Rule of Random. When a man speaks any thing that comes uppermost, and some good pun-finder discovers what he never meant in it, then he is to say, 'You have hit it!' As Major Grimes did: complaining that he staid at home by reason of an issue in a leg, which was just beginning to run, he was answered by Mr. – , 'I wonder that you should be confined who have such running legs.' The Major replied, 'You have hit it; for I meant that.'

R. 32. The Rule of Scandal. Never to speak well of another punster; ex. gr. 'Who, he! Lord, sir, he has not sense enough to play at crambo;' or 'He does not know the meaning of synonymous words;' or, 'He never rose so high as a conundrum or a carrywhichit.'

R. 33. The Rule of Catch is, when you hear a man conning a pun softly to himself, to whip it out of his mouth, and pass it upon the company for your own: as for instance; mustard happened to be mentioned in company where I was, and a gentleman with his eyes fixed upon the ceiling, was at Mus – mus, sinapi – sinapi – snap eye – bite nose; – One in the company, over-hearing him, bit him, and snapped it up, and said, 'Mustard is the stoutest seed in the world, for it takes the greatest man by the nose.'

R. 34. The Golden Rule allows you to change one syllable for another; by this, you may either lop off, insert, or add to a word; ex. gr.

For Church —Kirk.

For Bangor —Clangor.

For Presbyter —Has-biter.

This rule is of such consequence, that a man was once tried for his life by it. The case was thus: A certain man was brought before a judge of assize for murder: his lordship asked his name, and being answered Spillman, the judge said, 'Take away Sp, and his name is Ill-man; put K to it, and it is Killman: away with him, gaoler; his very name has hanged him[12 - A presbyterian preacher of the last age chose to exemplify the Golden Rule, by dissecting the name of the great enemy of mankind: 'Take away D, and it is Evil, take away the E, and it is Vile, take away the V, and it is Ill—Ill, Vile, Evil, Devil.'].' This 34th rule, on this occasion, became a rule of court, and was so well liked, that a justice of peace, who shall be nameless, applied every tittle of it to a man brought to him upon the same account, after this manner: 'Come, sir, I conjure you, as I am one of his majesty's justices of the peace, to tell me your name.' – 'My name, an't please you, is Watson.' – 'O ho, sir! Watson! mighty well! Take away Sp from it, and it is Ill-man, and put K to it, and it is Kill-man: away with him, constable, his very name will hang him.'

Let us now consider a new case; as for instance, 'The church of England, as by law established.' Put a T before it, and it is Test-ablished: take away the Test and put in o, and it is Abolished.

How much was Tom Gordon, the late ingenious author of Parson Alberoni, obliged to it, in that very natural story which he framed concerning the preacher, where he tells you, one of the congregation called the minister an Humbassandor for an Ambassador[13 - The story here alluded to is told in a pamphlet, entitled, 'A modest Apology for Parson Alberoni, Governor to King Philip, a Minor, and universal Curate of the whole Spanish Monarchy, &c. by Thomas Gordon, Esq. 1719,' and is as follows: 'There is, in a certain diocese in this nation, a living worth about six hundred pounds a-year. This, and two or three more preferments, maintain the doctor in becoming ease and corpulency. He keeps a chariot in town, and a journeyman in the country; his curate and his coach-horses are his equal drudges, saving that the four-legged cattle are better fed, and have sleeker cassocks, than his spiritual dray-horse. The doctor goes down once a-year, to shear his flock and fill his pockets, or, in other words, to receive the wages of his embassy; and then, sometimes in an afternoon, if his belly do not happen to be too full, he vouchsafes to mount the pulpit, and to instruct his people in the greatness of his character and dullness. This composes the whole parish to rest; but the doctor one day denouncing himself the Lord's Ambassador with greater fire and loudness than could have been reasonably expected from him, it roused a clown of the congregation, who waked his next neighbour with, 'Dost hear, Tom, dost hear?' – 'Ay,' says Tom, yawning, 'what does he say?' – 'Say?' answered the other, 'he says a plaguy lie, to be sure; he says as how he is my Lord's Humbassandor, but I think he is more rather the Lord's Receiver-General, for he never comes but to take money.' Six hundred pounds a-year is, modestly speaking, a competent fee for lulling the largest congregation in England asleep once in a twelvemonth. Such tithes are the price of napping; and such mighty odds are there between a curtain lecture and a cushion lecture.' See the collection of Tracts by Gordon and Trenchard, vol. i. p. 130.].

Give me leave, courteous reader, to recommend to your perusal and practice this most excellent rule, which is of such universal use and advantage to the learned world, that the most valuable discoveries, both as to antiquities and etymologies, are made by it; nay, further, I will venture to say, that all words which are introduced to enrich and make a language copious, beautiful, and harmonious, arise chiefly from this rule. Let any man but consult Bentley's Horace, and he will see what useful discoveries that very learned gentleman has made by the help of this rule; or, indeed, poor Horace would have lain under the eternal reproach of making 'a fox eat oats,' had not the learned doctor, with great judgment and penetration, found out nitedula to be a blunder of the librarians for vulpecula; which nitedula, the doctor says, signifies a grass-mouse, and this clears up the whole matter, because it makes the story hang well together: for all the world knows, that weazles have a most tender regard and affection to grass mice, whereas they hate foxes as they do fire-brands. In short, all various lections are to be attributed to this rule: so are all the Greek dialects; or Homer would have wanted the sonorous beauty of his oio's. But the greatest and best masters of this rule, without dispute, were the Dorians, who made nothing of saying tin for soie, tenos for ekeinos, surisdomes for surizomen, &c. From this too we have our quasis in Lexicons. Was it not, by rule the 34th, that the Samaritan, Chaldee, Æthiopic, Syriac, Arabic, and Persian languages were formed from the original Hebrew? for which I appeal to the Polyglot. And among our modern languages, are not the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, derived and formed from the Latin by the same power? How much poets have been obliged to it, we need no further proof than the figures prothesis, epenthesis, apocope, paragoge, and ellipsis. Trimming and fitting of words to make them more agreeable to our ears, Dionysius Halicarnassensis has taken notice of, in his book 'De Compositione Vocum,' where he pleasantly compares your polite reformers of words to masons with hammers, who break off rugged corners of stones, that they may become more even and firm in their places.

But after all, give me leave to lament, that I cannot have the honour of being the sole inventor of this incomparable rule: though I solemnly protest, upon the word of an author (if an author may have credit), that I never had the least hint toward it, any more than the ladies' letters and young children's pronunciation, till a year after I had proposed this rule to Dr. – , who was an excellent judge of the advantage it might be to the public; when, to my great surprise, tumbling over the third tome of Alstedius, p. 71, right loth to believe my eyes, I met with the following passage: "Ambigua multam faciunt ad hanc rem, oujusmodi exempla plurima reperiuntur apud Plautum, qui in ambiguis crebro ludit. Joci captantur ex permutatione syllabarum et vocum, ut pro Decretum, Discretum; pro Medicus, Mendicus et Merdicus: pro Polycarpus, Polyeopros. Item ex syllabarum ellipsi, ut ait Althusisus, cap. iii. civil. convers. pro Casimirus, J'rus; pro Marcus, Arcus; pro Vinosus, Osus; pro Sacerdotium, Otium. Sic, additione literæ, pro Urbanus, Turbanus:" which exactly corresponded to every branch and circumstance of my rule. Then, indeed, I could not avoid breaking out into the following exclamations, and that after a most pathetic manner: "Wretched Tom Pun-Sibi! Wretched indeed! Are all thy nocturnal lucubrations come to this? Must another, for being a hundred years before thee in the world, run away with the glory of thy own invention? It is true, he must. Happy Alstedius! who, I thought, would have stood me in all-stead, upon consulting thy method of joking! All's tedious to me now, since thou hast robbed me of that honour which would have set me above all writers of the present age. And why not, happy Tom Pun-Sibi? did we not jump together like true wits? But, alas! thou art on the safest side of the bush; my credit being liable to the suspicion of the world, because you wrote before me. Ill-natured critics, in spite of all my protestations, will condemn me, right or wrong, for a plagiary. Henceforward never write any thing of thy own; but pillage and trespass upon all that ever wrote before thee: search among dust and moths for things new to the learned. Farewell, study; from this moment I abandon thee: for, wherever I can get a paragraph upon any subject whatsoever ready done to my hand, my head shall have no further trouble than see it fairly transcribed!" – And this method, I hope, will help me to swell out the Second Part of this work.

THE END OF THE FIRST PART

TOM PUN-SIBI;

OR,

THE GIBER GIB'D[14 - The Art of Punning was originally printed at Dublin in 1719, immediately reprinted in London, and then pretty generally ascribed to Dr. Swift. It appears, however, that in this instance the Dean was only an assistant; the piece having been written by Dr. Sheridan, and corrected and improved by Dr. Swift, Dr. Delany, and Mr. Rochfort. Although it does not seem calculated to give offence to any one, it however called forth the above Satire from the pen of Dr. Tisdal.]

Mirandi novitate movebere mostri.– Ovid.

Tom was a little merry grig,
Fiddled and danced to his own jig;
Good-natured, but a little silly;
Irresolute, and shally-shilly:
What he should do, he cou'dn't guess.
Swift used him like a man at chess;
He told him once that he had wit,
But was in jest, and Tom was bit.
Thought himself second son of Phœbus,
For ballad, pun, lampoon, and rebus.
He took a draught of Helicon,
But swallowed so much water down,
He got a dropsy; now they say, 'tis
Turn'd to poetic diabetes;
For all the liquor he has pass'd,
Is without spirit, salt, or taste:
But, since it pass'd, Tom thought it wit,
And so he writ, and writ, and writ:
He writ the famous Punning Art,
The Benefit of p – s and f – t;
He writ the Wonder of all Wonders;
He writ the Blunder of all Blunders;
He writ a merry farce or poppet,
Taught actors how to squeak and hop it;
A treatise on the Wooden-man[15 - The wooden-man was a famed door-post in Dublin.],
A ballad on the nose of Dan;
The art of making April fools,
The four-and-thirty quibbling rules.
The learned say, that Tom went snacks
With Philomaths, for almanacks;
Though they divided are, for some say,
He writ for Whaley, some for Cumpstey[16 - Famous Irish almanack makers.].
Hundreds there are, who will make oath,
That he writ almanacks for both;
And, though they made the calculations,
Tom writ the monthly observations!
Such were his writings, but his chatter
Was one continual clitter-clatter.
Swift slit his tongue, and made it talk,
Cry, 'Cup o' sack,' and 'Walk, knave, walk!'
And fitted little prating Pall
For wire-cage, in Common-Hall;
Made him expert at quibble-jargon,
And quaint at selling of a bargain.
Pall, he could talk in different linguos,
But he could not be taught distinguos:
Swift tried in vain, and angry thereat,
Into a spaniel turn'd the parrot;
Made him to walk on his hind-legs,
He dances, fawns, and paws, and begs;
Then cuts a caper o'er a stick[17 - This was literally true between Swift and Sheridan.],
Lies close, does whine, and creep, and lick:
Swift put a bit upon his snout,
Poor Tom! he daren't look about;
But when that Swift does give the word,
He snaps it up, though 'twere a t – .
Swift strokes his back, and gives him victual,
And then he makes him lick his spittle.
Sometimes he takes him on his lap,
And makes him grin, and snarl, and snap.
He sets the little cur at me;
Kick'd, he leapt upon his knee;
I took him by the neck to shake him,
And made him void his album Græcum.
'Turn out the stinking cur, pox take him!'