Essays and Tales
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Joseph Addison >> Essays and Tales
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The pair of wings consists of twelve verses, or rather feathers,
every verse decreasing gradually in its measure according to its
situation in the wing. The subject of it, as in the rest of the
poems which follow, bears some remote affinity with the figure, for
it describes a god of love, who is always painted with wings.
The axe, methinks, would have been a good figure for a lampoon, had
the edge of it consisted of the most satirical parts of the work;
but as it is in the original, I take it to have been nothing else
but the poesy of an axe which was consecrated to Minerva, and was
thought to be the same that Epeus made use of in the building of the
Trojan horse; which is a hint I shall leave to the consideration of
the critics. I am apt to think that the poesy was written
originally upon the axe, like those which our modern cutlers
inscribe upon their knives; and that, therefore, the poesy still
remains in its ancient shape, though the axe itself is lost.
The shepherd's pipe may be said to be full of music, for it is
composed of nine different kinds of verses, which by their several
lengths resemble the nine stops of the old musical instrument, that
is likewise the subject of the poem.
The altar is inscribed with the epitaph of Troilus the son of
Hecuba; which, by the way, makes me believe that these false pieces
of wit are much more ancient than the authors to whom they are
generally ascribed; at least, I will never be persuaded that so fine
a writer as Theocritus could have been the author of any such simple
works.
It was impossible for a man to succeed in these performances who was
not a kind of painter, or at least a designer. He was first of all
to draw the outline of the subject which he intended to write upon,
and afterwards conform the description to the figure of his subject.
The poetry was to contract or dilate itself according to the mould
in which it was cast. In a word, the verses were to be cramped or
extended to the dimensions of the frame that was prepared for them;
and to undergo the fate of those persons whom the tyrant Procrustes
used to lodge in his iron bed: if they were too short, he stretched
them on a rack; and if they were too long, chopped off a part of
their legs, till they fitted the couch which he had prepared for
them.
Mr. Dryden hints at this obsolete kind of wit in one of the
following verses in his "Mac Flecknoe;" which an English reader
cannot understand, who does not know that there are those little
poems above mentioned in the shape of wings and altars:-
- Choose for thy command
Some peaceful province in acrostic land;
There may'st thou wings display, and altars raise,
And torture one poor word a thousand ways.
This fashion of false wit was revived by several poets of the last
age, and in particular may be met with among Mr. Herbert's poems;
and, if I am not mistaken, in the translation of Du Bartas. I do
not remember any other kind of work among the moderns which more
resembles the performances I have mentioned than that famous picture
of King Charles the First, which has the whole Book of Psalms
written in the lines of the face, and, the hair of the head. When I
was last at Oxford I perused one of the whiskers, and was reading
the other, but could not go so far in it as I would have done, by
reason of the impatience of my friends and fellow-travellers, who
all of them pressed to see such a piece of curiosity. I have since
heard, that there is now an eminent writing-master in town, who has
transcribed all the Old Testament in a full-bottomed periwig: and
if the fashion should introduce the thick kind of wigs which were in
vogue some few years ago, he promises to add two or three
supernumerary locks that should contain all the Apocrypha. He
designed this wig originally for King William, having disposed of
the two Books of Kings in the two forks of the foretop; but that
glorious monarch dying before the wig was finished, there is a space
left in it for the face of any one that has a mind to purchase it.
But to return to our ancient poems in picture. I would humbly
propose, for the benefit of our modern smatterers in poetry, that
they would imitate their brethren among the ancients in those
ingenious devices. I have communicated this thought to a young
poetical lover of my acquaintance, who intends to present his
mistress with a copy of verses made in the shape of her fan; and, if
he tells me true, has already finished the three first sticks of it.
He has likewise promised me to get the measure of his mistress's
marriage finger with a design to make a posy in the fashion of a
ring, which shall exactly fit it. It is so very easy to enlarge
upon a good hint, that I do not question but my ingenious readers
will apply what I have said to many other particulars; and that we
shall see the town filled in a very little time with poetical
tippets, handkerchiefs, snuff-boxes, and the like female ornaments.
I shall therefore conclude with a word of advice to those admirable
English authors who call themselves Pindaric writers, that they
would apply themselves to this kind of wit without loss of time, as
being provided better than any other poets with verses of all sizes
and dimensions.
NEXT ESSAY
Operose nihil aguat.
SENECA.
Busy about nothing.
There is nothing more certain than that every man would be a wit if
he could; and notwithstanding pedants of pretended depth and
solidity are apt to decry the writings of a polite author, as flash
and froth, they all of them show, upon occasion, that they would
spare no pains to arrive at the character of those whom they seem to
despise. For this reason we often find them endeavouring at works
of fancy, which cost them infinite pangs in the production. The
truth of it is, a man had better be a galley-slave than a wit, were
one to gain that title by those elaborate trifles which have been
the inventions of such authors as were often masters of great
learning, but no genius.
In my last paper I mentioned some of these false wits among the
ancients; and in this shall give the reader two or three other
species of them, that flourished in the same early ages of the
world. The first I shall produce are the lipogrammatists or letter-
droppers of antiquity, that would take an exception, without any
reason, against some particular letter in the alphabet, so as not to
admit it once into a whole poem. One Tryphiodorus was a great
master in this kind of writing. He composed an "Odyssey" or epic
poem on the adventures of Ulysses, consisting of four-and-twenty
books, having entirely banished the letter A from his first book,
which was called Alpha, as lucus a non lucendo, because there was
not an Alpha in it. His second book was inscribed Beta for the same
reason. In short, the poet excluded the whole four-and-twenty
letters in their turns, and showed them, one after another, that he
could do his business without them.
It must have been very pleasant to have seen this poet avoiding the
reprobate letter, as much as another would a false quantity, and
making his escape from it through the several Greek dialects, when
he was pressed with it in any particular syllable. For the most apt
and elegant word in the whole language was rejected, like a diamond
with a flaw in it, if it appeared blemished with a wrong letter. I
shall only observe upon this head, that if the work I have here
mentioned had been now extant, the "Odyssey" of Tryphiodorus, in all
probability, would have been oftener quoted by our learned pedants
than the "Odyssey" of Homer. What a perpetual fund would it have
been of obsolete words and phrases, unusual barbarisms and
rusticities, absurd spellings and complicated dialects! I make no
question but that it would have been looked upon as one of the most
valuable treasuries of the Greek tongue.
I find likewise among the ancients that ingenious kind of conceit
which the moderns distinguish by the name of a rebus, that does not
sink a letter, but a whole word, by substituting a picture in its
place. When Caesar was one of the masters of the Roman mint, he
placed the figure of an elephant upon the reverse of the public
money; the word Caesar signifying an elephant in the Punic language.
This was artificially contrived by Caesar, because it was not lawful
for a private man to stamp his own figure upon the coin of the
commonwealth. Cicero, who was so called from the founder of his
family, that was marked on the nose with a little wen like a vetch,
which is Cicer in Latin, instead of Marcus Tullius Cicero, ordered
the words Marcus Tullius, with a figure of a vetch at the end of
them, to be inscribed on a public monument. This was done probably
to show that he was neither ashamed of his name nor family,
notwithstanding the envy of his competitors had often reproached him
with both. In the same manner we read of a famous building that was
marked in several parts of it with the figures of a frog and a
lizard; those words in Greek having been the names of the
architects, who by the laws of their country were never permitted to
inscribe their own names upon their works. For the same reason it
is thought that the forelock of the horse, in the antique equestrian
statue of Marcus Aurelius, represents at a distance the shape of an
owl, to intimate the country of the statuary, who, in all
probability, was an Athenian. This kind of wit was very much in
vogue among our own countrymen about an age or two ago, who did not
practise it for any oblique reason, as the ancients above-mentioned,
but purely for the sake of being witty. Among innumerable instances
that may be given of this nature, I shall produce the device of one
Mr. Newberry, as I find it mentioned by our learned Camden in his
Remains. Mr. Newberry, to represent his name by a picture, hung up
at his door the sign of a yew-tree, that has several berries upon
it, and in the midst of them a great golden N hung upon a bough of
the tree, which by the help of a little false spelling made up the
word Newberry.
I shall conclude this topic with a rebus, which has been lately hewn
out in freestone, and erected over two of the portals of Blenheim
House, being the figure of a monstrous lion tearing to pieces a
little cock. For the better understanding of which device I must
acquaint my English reader that a cock has the misfortune to be
called in Latin by the same word that signifies a Frenchman, as a
lion is the emblem of the English nation. Such a device in so noble
a pile of building looks like a pun in an heroic poem; and I am very
sorry the truly ingenious architect would suffer the statuary to
blemish his excellent plan with so poor a conceit. But I hope what
I have said will gain quarter for the cock, and deliver him out of
the lion's paw.
I find likewise in ancient times the conceit of making an echo talk
sensibly, and give rational answers. If this could be excusable in
any writer, it would be in Ovid where he introduces the Echo as a
nymph, before she was worn away into nothing but a voice. The
learned Erasmus, though a man of wit and genius, has composed a
dialogue upon this silly kind of device, and made use of an Echo,
who seems to have been a very extraordinary linguist, for she
answers the person she talks with in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew,
according as she found the syllables which she was to repeat in any
of those learned languages. Hudibras, in ridicule of this false
kind of wit, has described Bruin bewailing the loss of his bear to
the solitary Echo, who is of great use to the poet in several
distiches, as she does not only repeat after him, but helps out his
verse, and furnishes him with rhymes:-
He raged, and kept as heavy a coil as
Stout Hercules for loss of Hylas;
Forcing the valleys to repeat
The accents of his sad regret;
He beat his breast, and tore his hair,
For loss of his dear crony bear:
That Echo from the hollow ground
His doleful wailings did resound
More wistfully by many times,
Than in small poets' splay-foot rhymes,
That make her, in their rueful stories,
To answer to int'rogatories,
And most unconscionably depose
Things of which she nothing knows;
And when she has said all she can say,
'Tis wrested to the lover's fancy.
Quoth he, "O whither, wicked Bruin,
Art thou fled to my"--Echo, Ruin?
"I thought th' hadst scorn'd to budge a step
For fear." Quoth Echo, Marry guep.
"Am I not here to take thy part?"
Then what has quell'd thy stubborn heart?
Have these bones rattled, and this head
So often in thy quarrel bled?
Nor did I ever winch or grudge it,
For thy dear sake." Quoth she, Mum budget.
Think'st thou 'twill not be laid i' th' dish,
Thou turn'dst thy back?" Quoth Echo, Pish.
To run from those th' hadst overcome
Thus cowardly?" Quoth Echo, Mum.
"But what a-vengeance makes thee fly
From me too as thine enemy?
Or if thou hadst no thought of me,
Nor what I have endured for thee,
Yet shame and honour might prevail
To keep thee thus from turning tail:
For who would grudge to spend his blood in
His honour's cause?" Quoth she, A pudding.
Part I., Cant. 3, 183.
NEXT ESSAY
Hoc est quod palles? Cur quis non prandeat, hoc est?
PERS., Sat. iii. 85.
Is it for this you gain those meagre looks,
And sacrifice your dinner to your books?
Several kinds of false wit that vanished in the refined ages of the
world, discovered themselves again in the times of monkish
ignorance.
As the monks were the masters of all that little learning which was
then extant, and had their whole lives entirely disengaged from
business, it is no wonder that several of them, who wanted genius
for higher performances, employed many hours in the composition of
such tricks in writing as required much time and little capacity. I
have seen half the "AEneid" turned into Latin rhymes by one of the
beaux esprits of that dark age: who says, in his preface to it,
that the "AEneid" wanted nothing but the sweets of rhyme to make it
the most perfect work in its kind. I have likewise seen a hymn in
hexameters to the Virgin Mary, which filled a whole book, though it
consisted but of the eight following words
Tot tibi sunt, Virgo, dotes, quot sidera coelo.
Thou hast as many virtues, O Virgin, as there are stars in heaven.
The poet rang the changes upon these eight several words, and by
that means made his verses almost as numerous as the virtues and
stars which they celebrated. It is no wonder that men who had so
much time upon their hands did not only restore all the antiquated
pieces of false wit, but enriched the world with inventions of their
own. It is to this age that we owe the production of anagrams,
which is nothing else but a transmutation of one word into another,
or the turning of the same set of letters into different words;
which may change night into day, or black into white, if chance, who
is the goddess that presides over these sorts of composition, shall
so direct. I remember a witty author, in allusion to this kind of
writing, calls his rival, who, it seems, was distorted, and had his
limbs set in places that did not properly belong to them, "the
anagram of a man."
When the anagrammatist takes a name to work upon, he considers it at
first as a mine not broken up, which will not show the treasure it
contains till he shall have spent many hours in the search of it;
for it is his business to find out one word that conceals itself in
another, and to examine the letters in all the variety of stations
in which they can possibly be ranged. I have heard of a gentleman
who, when this kind of wit was in fashion, endeavoured to gain his
mistress's heart by it. She was one of the finest women of her age,
and known by the name of the Lady Mary Boon. The lover not being
able to make anything of Mary, by certain liberties indulged to this
kind of writing converted it into Moll; and after having shut
himself up for half a year, with indefatigable industry produced an
anagram. Upon the presenting it to his mistress, who was a little
vexed in her heart to see herself degraded into Moll Boon, she told
him, to his infinite surprise, that he had mistaken her surname, for
that it was not Boon, but Bohun.
- Ibi omnis
Effusus labor.--
The lover was thunder-struck with his misfortune, insomuch that in a
little time after he lost his senses, which, indeed, had been very
much impaired by that continual application he had given to his
anagram.
The acrostic was probably invented about the same time with the
anagram, though it is impossible to decide whether the inventor of
the one or the other were the greater blockhead. The simple
acrostic is nothing but the name or title of a person, or thing,
made out of the initial letters of several verses, and by that means
written, after the manner of the Chinese, in a perpendicular line.
But besides these there are compound acrostics, when the principal
letters stand two or three deep. I have seen some of them where the
verses have not only been edged by a name at each extremity, but
have had the same name running down like a seam through the middle
of the poem.
There is another near relation of the anagrams and acrostics, which
is commonly called a chronogram. This kind of wit appears very
often on many modern medals, especially those of Germany, when they
represent in the inscription the year in which they were coined.
Thus we see on a medal of Gustavus Adolphus time following words,
CHRISTVS DUX ERGO TRIVMPHVS. If you take the pains to pick the
figures out of the several words, and range them in their proper
order, you will find they amount to MDCXVVVII, or 1627, the year in
which the medal was stamped: for as some of the letters distinguish
themselves from the rest, and overtop their fellows, they are to be
considered in a double capacity, both as letters and as figures.
Your laborious German wits will turn over a whole dictionary for one
of these ingenious devices. A man would think they were searching
after an apt classical term, but instead of that they are looking
out a word that has an L, an M, or a D in it. When, therefore, we
meet with any of these inscriptions, we are not so much to look in
them for the thought, as for the year of the Lord.
The bouts-rimes were the favourites of the French nation for a whole
age together, and that at a time when it abounded in wit and
learning. They were a list of words that rhyme to one another,
drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who was to make a
poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the
list: the more uncommon the rhymes were, the more extraordinary was
the genius of the poet that could accommodate his verses to them. I
do not know any greater instance of the decay of wit and learning
among the French, which generally follows the declension of empire,
than the endeavouring to restore this foolish kind of wit. If the
reader will be at trouble to see examples of it, let him look into
the new Mercure Gallant, where the author every month gives a list
of rhymes to be filled up by the ingenious, in order to be
communicated to the public in the Mercure for the succeeding month.
That for the month of November last, which now lies before me, is as
follows
Lauriers
Guerriers
Musette
Lisette
Caesars
Etendars
Houlette
Folette
One would be amazed to see so learned a man as Menage talking
seriously on this kind of trifle in the following passage:-
"Monsieur de la Chambre has told me that he never knew what he was
going to write when he took his pen into his hand; but that one
sentence always produced another. For my own part, I never knew
what I should write next when I was making verses. In the first
place I got all my rhymes together, and was afterwards perhaps three
or four months in filling them up. I one day showed Monsieur
Gombaud a composition of this nature, in which, among others, I had
made use of the four following rhymes, Amaryllis, Phyllis, Maine,
Arne; desiring him to give me his opinion of it. He told me
immediately that my verses were good for nothing. And upon my
asking his reason, he said, because the rhymes are too common, and
for that reason easy to be put into verse. 'Marry,' says I, 'if it
be so, I am very well rewarded for all the pains I have been at!'
But by Monsieur Gombaud's leave, notwithstanding the severity of the
criticism, the verses were good." (Vide "Menagiana.") Thus far the
learned Menage, whom I have translated word for word.
The first occasion of these bouts-rimes made them in some manner
excusable, as they were tasks which the French ladies used to impose
on their lovers. But when a grave author, like him above-mentioned,
tasked himself, could there be anything more ridiculous? Or would
not one be apt to believe that the author played booty, and did not
make his list of rhymes till he had finished his poem?
I shall only add that this piece of false wit has been finely
ridiculed by Monsieur Sarasin, in a poem entitled "La Defaite des
Bouts-Rimes." (The Rout of the Bouts-Rimes).
I must subjoin to this last kind of wit the double rhymes, which are
used in doggrel poetry, and generally applauded by ignorant readers.
If the thought of the couplet in such compositions is good, the
rhyme adds little to it; and if bad, it will not be in the power of
the rhyme to recommend it. I am afraid that great numbers of those
who admire the incomparable "Hudibras," do it more on account of
these doggrel rhymes than of the parts that really deserve
admiration. I am sure I have heard the
Pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,
Was beat with fist, instead of a stick (Canto I, II),
and--
There was an ancient philosopher
Who had read Alexander Ross over
(Part I., Canto 2, 1),
more frequently quoted than the finest pieces of wit in the whole
poem.
NEXT ESSAY
Non equidem hoc studeo bullatis ut mihi nugis
Pagina turgescat, dare pondus idonea fumo.
PERS., Sat. v. 19.
'Tis not indeed my talent to engage
In lofty trifles, or to swell my page
With wind and noise.
DRYDEN.
There is no kind of false wit which has been so recommended by the
practice of all ages as that which consists in a jingle of words,
and is comprehended under the general name of punning. It is indeed
impossible to kill a weed which the soil has a natural disposition
to produce. The seeds of punning are in the minds of all men, and
though they may be subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense,
they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest genius that is not
broken and cultivated by the rules of art. Imitation is natural to
us, and when it does not raise the mind to poetry, painting, music,
or other more noble arts, it often breaks out in puns and quibbles.
Aristotle, in the eleventh chapter of his book of rhetoric,
describes two or three kinds of puns, which he calls paragrams,
among the beauties of good writing, and produces instances of them
out of some of the greatest authors in the Greek tongue. Cicero has
sprinkled several of his works with puns, and, in his book where he
lays down the rules of oratory, quotes abundance of sayings as
pieces of wit, which also, upon examination, prove arrant puns. But
the age in which the pun chiefly flourished was in the reign of King
James the First. That learned monarch was himself a tolerable
punster, and made very few bishops or Privy Councillors that had not
some time or other signalised themselves by a clinch, or a
conundrum. It was, therefore, in this age that the pun appeared
with pomp and dignity. It had been before admitted into merry
speeches and ludicrous compositions, but was now delivered with
great gravity from the pulpit, or pronounced in the most solemn
manner at the council-table. The greatest authors, in their most
serious works, made frequent use of puns. The sermons of Bishop
Andrews, and the tragedies of Shakespeare, are full of them. The
sinner was punned into repentance by the former; as in the latter,
nothing is more usual than to see a hero weeping and quibbling for a
dozen lines together.
I must add to these great authorities, which seem to have given a
kind of sanction to this piece of false wit, that all the writers of
rhetoric have treated of punning with very great respect, and
divided the several kinds of it into hard names, that are reckoned
among the figures of speech, and recommended as ornaments in
discourse. I remember a country schoolmaster of my acquaintance
told me once, that he had been in company with a gentleman whom he
looked upon to be the greatest paragrammatist among the moderns.
Upon inquiry, I found my learned friend had dined that day with Mr.
Swan, the famous punster; and desiring him to give me some account
of Mr. Swan's conversation, he told me that he generally talked in
the Paranomasia, that he sometimes gave in to the Ploce, but that in
his humble opinion he shone most in the Antanaclasis.
I must not here omit that a famous university of this land was
formerly very much infested with puns; but whether or not this might
arise from the fens and marshes in which it was situated, and which
are now drained, I must leave to the determination of more skilful
naturalists.
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