Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/39

 for this reflects back upon it the color of wit. She is a duenna who blunders into being a go-between and making a capital match. "Go to! you are a woman: go." "Who, I? No! I defy thee. God's light! I was never called so in mine own house before." "You are a thing to thank God on." "I am no thing to thank God on, I would thou should'st know it." And the grim irony of Hamlet, who, after killing Polonius, replies to the king that the old man is at supper, has grown upon us through the slow perception of the courtiers, who know he is killed as well as we do, and have been sent to find the body, but cannot take the point of Hamlet's answers.

In a play of Douglas Jerrold, an old sailor gets a box on the ear while trying to snatch a kiss. "There," cries he, "like my luck! always wrecked on the coral reefs." When the manager heard the play read he could not see the point, and increased the wit for us by making Jerrold strike it out.

Perhaps the best modern instance of this kind is the colossal stupidity of some foreign critics, who gave such an exquisite flavor to Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad" by blaming his ignorance and misapprehension of places, pictures, and traditions.

The Beaufort negroes are unconsciously witty when, perceiving that an idea is dawning upon them, they say they feel their head "growing thinner." A premium for involuntary wit must be conferred upon the old lady in New Bedford, who heard about the cheapness of the manufactured oils and the great increase in the use of