Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 007.djvu/49

 greatest sages, poets, and philosophers of all ages, have been enrolled upon this proscribed list!

Even in Holy Writ, whatever might have been the intention of the speaker, there is authority for a play upon words equivalent to a pun. When Simon Bar-Jona, for his superior faith, received the name of Peter, (which in Greek signifies a stone or rock,) the divine bestower of that appellation exclaimed, "I say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church," &c—Homer has made the wily Ulysses save his life by means of a pun. In the ninth book of the Odyssey that hero informs the Cyclops that his name is Noman; and when the monster, after having had his eye put out in his sleep, awakes in agony, he thus roars to his companions for assistance:

It will be observed that Pope has preserved the equivoque in his translation, which attests his respect for this most ancient jeu-de-mots; while Ulysses is described as hurrying away in high glee, "pleased with the effect of conduct and of art," which is an evidence that Homer felicitated himself upon the happiness of the thought. This passage exhibits a very rude and primitive state of the art; for had any modern Cyclopes been invoked to aid their comrade under similar circumstances they would have seen through so flimsy a trick even with one eye.

Later Greek writers were by no means slow in following so notable an example. Plutarch has preserved several of these Pteroenta, or flying words, particularly King Philip's celebrated pun to the physician who attended him when his collar-bone was broken; and Diogenes the Cynic made so happy an equivoque upon a damsel's eye, which the profligate Didymus undertook to cure, that Scaliger said he would rather have been author of it than King of Navarre. From the comic authors a whole galaxy of similar jokes might be collected; but I reserve the specification for a new edition of Hierodes, the Joe Miller of Alexandria, which I am preparing for the press in ten volumes quarto.

The Romans, who imitated the Greeks in every thing, were not likely to forget their puns, verbaque apta joco. Cicero informs us that Cæsar was a celebrated performer in this way. Horace in his seventh satire, giving an account of the quarrel between Persios and Rupilius Rex, before Brutus the Prætor, makes the former exclaim, "Per magnos, Brute, Deos te oro, qui reges consuêris tollere, cur non hunc Regem jugulas?" thus playing upon the names of both parties. Martial was an accomplished punster; and Ovid not only quibbled upon words, but metamorphosed them into a thousand phantasies and vagaries.

The same valuable privilege formed the staple commodity of the ancient Oracles; for if the presiding deities had not been shrewd punsters or able to inspire the Pythoness with ready equivoques, the whole establishment must speedily have been declared bankrupt. Sometimes indeed they only dabbled in accentuation, and accomplished their prophecies by the transposition of a stop, as in the well-known