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