��Apophthegms, Sentiments
��He was no great friend to puns, though he once by accident made a singular one. A person who affected to live after the Greek manner, and to anoint himself with oil, was one day mentioned before him. Johnson, in the course of conversation on the singularity of his practice, gave him the denomination of, This man of Greece, or grease, as you please to take it x .
Of a member of parliament, who, after having harangued for some hours in the house of commons, came into a company where Johnson was, and endeavoured to talk him down, he said, This man has a pulse in his tongue.
He was not displeased with a kind of pun made by a person, who (after having been tired to death by two ladies who talked
��' Obscenity and impiety (he said) have always been repressed in my company/ Life, iv. 295. See also ib. iii. 189.
Susan Burney, sending her sister a report of a conversation at Streat- ham when Johnson was present, re ports Mrs. Thrale as crying out : ' Good G-d ! why somebody else mentioned that book to me.' Mrs. Raine Ellis, who has edited Fanny Burney's Early Diary with great skill, says in a footnote: ' The care less old ejaculations have, in almost every case, been modified, or effaced in the manuscripts of the diaries, old and new; in many cases by Mme. D'Arblay herself, in more by her niece, who was the editor of her later diaries. These almost unmean ing expletives seem to have passed unrebuked by Dr. Johnson in the case of Mrs. Thrale, although he would not suffer Boswell to write "by my soul." [ My illustrious friend said, " It is very well, Sir ; but you should not swear." ' Life, ii. in.] His ear had become used to them, or she was incorrigible.' Early Diary of F. Burney r , ii. 234.
1 'Johnson had a great contempt for that species of wit.' Life, ii. 241. Boswell, recording a pun by John
��son, says: 'It was the first time that I knew him stoop to such sport.' Ib. iii. 325. In his Dictionary, he defines punster as a low wit, who endeavours at reputation by double meaning.
Dryden, after quoting Horace's pun on ' Mr. King' (Satires, i. 7. 35), continues : ' But it may be puns were then in fashion, as they were wit in the sermons of the last age and in the Court of King Charles II.' Scott's Dryden 's Works, xiii. 97.
' A great Critic formerly held these clenches in such abhorrence that he declared " he that would pun would pick a pocket." Yet Mr. Dennis's works afford us notable examples in this kind.' The Dunciad, 2nd ed. i. 6i,. Shaftesbury wrote in 1714: 'All Humour had something of the Quibble. The very Language of the Court was Punning. But 'tis now banish'd the Town and all Good Company. There are only some few Footsteps of it in the Country ; and it seems at last confin'd to the Nurserys of Youth, as the chief Entertain ment of Pedants and their Pupils.' Char act eri sticks, ed. 1714, i. 64.
- I never knew an enemy to puns
who was not an ill-natured man.' Lamb's Letters, ed. 1888, ii. 148.
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