Rowe, the famous Yorkshire trumpeter. These, I suppose, were the first
plays I ever saw. Those were pleasant walks to Claverton, and pleasant
days at Claverton Hall! I wish Hans Breitmann and his "Avay in die
Ewigkeit" did not come in, like a ludicrous, lugubrious burden, to all
one's reminiscences of places and people one knew upward of fifty years
ago.

I have been accused of having acquired a bad habit of _punning from
Shakespeare!_--a delightful idea, that made me laugh till I cried the
first time it was suggested to me. If so, I certainly began early to
exhibit a result, of which the cause was, in some mysterious way, long
subsequent to the effect; unless the Puppet Plays of Claverton inspired
my wit. However that may be, I developed at this period a decided
faculty for punning, and that is an unusual thing at that age. Children
have considerable enjoyment of humor, as many of their favorite fairy
and other stories attest; they are often themselves extremely droll and
humorous in their assumed play characters and the stories they invent to
divert their companions; but punning is a not very noble species of wit;
it partakes of mental dexterity, requires neither fancy, humor, nor
imagination, and deals in words with double meanings, a subtlety very
little congenial to the simple and earnest intelligence of childhood.

_Les enfans terribles_ say such things daily, and make their
grandmothers' caps stand on end with their precocious astuteness; but
the clever sayings of most clever children, repeated and reported by
admiring friends and relations, are, for the most part, simply the
result of unused faculties, exercising themselves in, to them, an unused
world; only therefore surprising to worn-out faculties, which have
almost ceased to exercise themselves in, to them, an almost worn-out
world.