Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 8.djvu/405

Rh expecting money of him every visit, the king reproved him with a pun, saying, he had the key in his own hands." For the word, in the original, signifies both a key and collar-bone.

We have also several puns recorded in Diogenes Laertius's "Lives of the Philosophers," and those made by the wisest and gravest men among them, even by Diogenes the cynick, who, although pretending to withstand the irresistible charms of punning, was cursed with the name of an Abhorrer, yet, in spight of all his ill-nature and affectation (for he was a tubpreacher), he made so excellent a pun, that Scaliger said, "he would rather have been author of it, than king of Navarre." The story is as follows: Didymus (not Didymus the commentator upon Homer, but a famous rake among the ladies at Athens) having taken in hand to cure a virgin's eye that was sore, had this caution given him by Diogenes, "Take care you do not corrupt your pupil." The word signifying both the pupil of the eye and a virgin.

It would be endless to produce all the authorities that might be gathered, from Diodorus Siculus, Herodotus, Proconosius, Bergæus, Dionysius Halicarnassensis, Lycophron, Pindar, Apollonius, Menander, Aristophanes, Corinthus Cous, Nonnus, Demosthenes, Euripides, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, &c.; from every one of which I should have produced some quotations, were it not that we are so unfortunate in this kingdom not to have Greek types sufficient