his mistress that the fire of love, like that of the sun, which
produces so many living creatures, should not only warm, but beget.
Love in another place cooks Pleasure at his fire. Sometimes the
poet's heart is frozen in every breast, and sometimes scorched in
every eye. Sometimes he is drowned in tears and burnt in love, like
a ship set on fire in the middle of the sea.

The reader may observe in every one of these instances that the poet
mixes the qualities of fire with those of love; and in the same
sentence, speaking of it both as a passion and as real fire,
surprises the reader with those seeming resemblances or
contradictions that make up all the wit in this kind of writing.
Mixed wit, therefore, is a composition of pun and true wit, and is
more or less perfect as the resemblance lies in the ideas or in the
words. Its foundations are laid partly in falsehood and partly in
truth; reason puts in her claim for one half of it, and extravagance
for the other. The only province, therefore, for this kind of wit
is epigram, or those little occasional poems that in their own
nature are nothing else but a tissue of epigrams. I cannot conclude
this head of mixed wit without owning that the admirable poet, out
of whom I have taken the examples of it, had as much true wit as any
author that ever wrote; and indeed all other talents of an
extraordinary genius.

It may be expected, since I am upon this subject, that I should take
notice of Mr. Dryden's definition of wit, which, with all the
deference that is due to the judgment of so great a man, is not so
properly a definition of wit as of good writing in general. Wit, as
he defines it, is "a propriety of words and thoughts adapted to the
subject." If this be a true definition of wit, I am apt to think