many other pieces of wit, how remote soever they may appear at first
sight from the foregoing description, which upon examination will be
found to agree with it.

As true wit generally consists in this resemblance and congruity of
ideas, false wit chiefly consists in the resemblance and congruity
sometimes of single letters, as in anagrams, chronograms, lipograms,
and acrostics; sometimes of syllables, as in echoes and doggrel
rhymes; sometimes of words, as in puns and quibbles; and sometimes
of whole sentences or poems, cast into the figures of eggs, axes, or
altars; nay, some carry the notion of wit so far as to ascribe it
even to external mimicry, and to look upon a man as an ingenious
person that can resemble the tone, posture, or face of another.

As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in
the resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances,
there is another kind of wit which consists partly in the
resemblance of ideas and partly in the resemblance of words, which
for distinction sake I shall call mixed wit. This kind of wit is
that which abounds in Cowley more than in any author that ever
wrote. Mr. Waller has likewise a great deal of it. Mr. Dryden is
very sparing in it. Milton had a genius much above it. Spenser is
in the same class with Milton. The Italians, even in their epic
poetry, are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself upon
the ancient poets, has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we
look after mixed wit among the Greek writers, we shall find it
nowhere but in the epigrammatists. There are indeed some strokes of
it in the little poem ascribed to Musaeus, which by that as well as
many other marks betrays itself to be a modern composition. If we
look into the Latin writers we find none of this mixed wit in