Shakspeare's statement, that 'a jest's prosperity lies not in the tongue of him who makes it,' is unhappily not quite correct. It often lies not only in his tongue but in his manner of speaking it, and in the occasion which brings it forth; and all these advantages are lost when it is re-told. In works, therefore, such as Timbs' Anecdote Lives of the later Wits and Humorists (Bentley) before us, the editor has a much more difficult task, and one less likely to be appreciated than may be supposed. With the exception too of Douglas Jerrold and one or two others, whose sayings have not only been 'extremely quoted,' as Praed expresses it, but published, it is very hard to discover what they said. A wit is in this view almost as unfortunate as an actor, since if we have neither seen nor heard him, we are not likely to be in a position to judge how great a wit he was. On the other hand, a work of this kind is very useful in putting the saddle on the right horse, and also in tracing the accepted witticism to its true source.

For example, no bon mot has been in more general use of late than that attributed to Sir George Cornewall Lewis. 'How pleasant would life be but for its amusements; and especially if there was no such thing as "a little music" in the world.' Now, the germ of this, as Mr Timbs shews us, is to be found in Talleyrand's Memoirs. 'Is not Geneva dull?' asked a friend of his. 'Yes,' he replied, 'especially when they amuse themselves.'

There has been no one like Talleyrand for cynicism; for though Jerrold has a reputation for bitter aloes, there was generally some fun about his satire, which prevented irritation on the part of its object. Imagine a lady hearing that this had been said of her: 'She is insupportable;' with the addition (as if the prudent statesman had gone too far, and wished to make amends): 'that is her only defect.' Thulieres, who wrote on the Polish Revolution, once observed: 'I never did but one mischievous work in my life.' 'And when will it be ended?' inquired Talleyrand. It was he who remarked upon the murder of the Duke d'Enghien, that 'it was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.' Curiously enough, Charles Buller said of this 'that such an expression could never be uttered by an Englishman, and could be heard by no Englishman without disgust;' and yet this saying has been more quoted of late—and seriously too—than almost any other, both by our statesmen and our newspaper writers. Madame de StaËl drew a portrait of him, as an elderly lady, in her novel of Delphine, and also of herself as the heroine. 'They tell me,' said he, 'that we are both of us in your novel in the disguise of women.' Perhaps his very best witticism was upon an old lady of rank, who married a valet de chambre, and it was made at the whist-table. 'Ah,' said he, 'it was late in the game: at nine[1] we don't reckon honours.'

A very different sort of Wit was Archbishop Whately; for though he was caustic enough, he could be comical, and even did not shrink from a pun. This is generally a low species of wit, but it must be remembered that perhaps the very best 'good thing' that was ever uttered, Jerrold's definition of dogmatism (grown-up puppyism), included it. Pinel was speaking to the archbishop about the (then) new and improved treatment of lunatics, and mentioned that gardening was found to be a good occupation for them. 'I should doubt that,' replied His Grace; 'they might grow madder.' He once confounded a horse-dealer who was endeavouring to sell him a very powerful animal. 'There is nothing, your Grace,' said he, 'which he can't draw.' 'Can he draw an inference?' inquired Whately. It is curious how many now popular jokes and even riddles emanated from the brain of the Archbishop of Dublin: What Joan of Arc was made of; the difference between forms and ceremonies; why a man never starves in the Great Desert, &c. The answer to the following he withheld; it has puzzled many persons who make nothing of a double acrostic, and will probably continue to do so:

One of his great pleasures was to poke fun at people who will think philosophically upon questions that only require the commonest of common-sense. He propounded to a whole roomful of divines the problem: 'Why do white sheep eat so very much more than black sheep?' There were all sorts of reasons suggested. One profound person thought since black attracted the sun, that black sheep could get on with less nutriment than the others. Dr Whately shook his head: 'White sheep eat more because there are more of them.'

The archbishop was the very personification of shrewdness, and he was not afraid to say what he thought.

'Concealment,' he observed, 'is a good spur to curiosity, which gives an interest to investigation, and the Letters of Junius would have been long forgotten if the author could have been clearly pointed out at the time.' This is very true, though few would have had the courage to say it. The Letters of Junius are inferior to those of The Englishman (also, by-the-bye, anonymous), published in the Times newspaper some years ago, and even inferior to many of the biting personal articles (beneath contempt, viewed in that light) printed later still in the Queen's Messenger.

Lord John Russell, like 'Single-speech Hamilton,' said one good thing, on which we believe his reputation in that line rests; he defined a proverb as 'The wisdom of many and the wit of one.' Rogers observed it was the only saying for which he envied any man, and Rogers was a good judge. Sydney Smith said of the latter's slow habit of composition, that 'when he produced a couplet he went to bed, the knocker was tied up, straw laid down, the caudle made, and that the answer to inquirers was, that Mr Rogers was as well as could be expected.' And he was almost as elaborate with his sayings as with his verses. When they were said, however, they were very good. 'When Croker wrote his review in the Quarterly upon Macaulay's History, Rogers remarked that he had "intended murder, but committed suicide."'

A great advantage bestowed on us by the publication of these volumes is that they contain several famous things which are not to be found elsewhere, or only with much difficulty. One of these is Lord Byron's Question and Answer upon Rogers, which (if we remember right) is suppressed, and at all events is not to be found in many editions of his works; another, of a very different kind, is Albert Smith's 'Engineer's Story,' which used to convulse the audience in the Egyptian Hall. Of course one misses the hubble-bubble of the pipe, and the inimitable manner with which the narrator informed us: 'He told me the stupidest story I ever heard in my life, and now I am going to tell it to you.'

There are some very disappointing things in this work, which, however, are not to be laid at the door of Mr Timbs; a good many wits appear in it, who—for all that is related of them—never made a witticism. Dr Maginn, for example, had a great reputation, but it has not outlived him, and nothing we read here of him impresses us favourably, or indeed at all. 'Father Prout' also, as the Rev. Francis Mahoney called himself, may have been a most charming companion, but he is very dull reading. We are afraid that whisky had a good deal to do with the exhilaration experienced in their society by these gentlemen's friends. Even John Hookham Frere—when he comes to be 'fried,' as the Americans call it—was not so much of a joker, and made a little wit go a very long way. It is true that the farther we go back the less likely it is that good sayings should be preserved; but those that are preserved should be worth hearing. On the other hand, all that is written stands on the same ground, and it is certain that the examples given of the more modern writers are much superior to those of their elder brothers.

Of the seniors, Canning is one of the most remarkable, though the impression that he was greatly overrated by his contemporaries is not to be eluded. In many respects he reminds us of the living Disraeli. Moore says of him, in his Life of Sheridan, that he joined the Tories 'because of the difficulties which even genius like his would experience in rising to its full growth under the shadowy branches of the Whig aristocracy;' and generally the interest attaching to him, as in the case of the present Premier, is of a personal character. His mode of life was, for statesmen of that day, domestic, and he is said to have invented the now popular game of 'Twenty Questions.' In the example here given of it, however, the answers are not simply 'Yes' and 'No,' so that the thing which is to be guessed must have been very much more easily arrived at, and his 'power of logical division' need not have been overwhelming. As a drawing-room wit he had a great reputation; but as a statesman, Sydney Smith gives this characteristic account of him: 'His being "in office" is like a fly in amber. Nobody cares about the fly; the only question is, How the mischief did it get there? When he is jocular, he is strong; when he is serious, he is like Samson in a wig. Call him a legislator, a reasoner, and the conductor of the affairs of a great nation, and it seems to me as absurd as if a butterfly were to teach bees to make honey. That he is an extraordinary writer of small poetry, and a diner-out of the highest metre, I do most readily admit.' He certainly said some very injudicious things in parliament; for example, his description of the American navy—'Half-a-dozen fir frigates with bits of bunting flying at their heads'—excited Cousin Jonathan, as it well might, beyond all bounds. He compared Lord Sidmouth (Mr Addington), because he was included in every ministry, to the small-pox, 'since everybody must have it once in their lives.' His wittiest verses perhaps occur in the poem composed on the tomb of Lord Anglesey's leg, lost at Waterloo:

A very lively poem, no doubt; but how inferior, when compared with one on a somewhat similar subject by Thomas Hood, namely, Ben Battle:

Comparisons, however, are odious; and it would be especially odious to Mr Canning to pursue this one.

Of the once famous Captain Morris, we read that his poems reached a twenty-fourth edition. But where are they now? His verses were principally Anacreontic; his To my Cup received the gold cup from the Harmonic Society; but they are greatly inferior to Tom Moore's. In Hood's line, however, he was more successful, and his Town and Country might well have been written by that great humorist himself:

The above is excellent; nor is the Captain less felicitous in describing the other view of the subject—which was no doubt his own—namely, the disadvantages of a rustic life:

It is sad to think that the last line will be almost the only one familiar to our readers, and that the memory of the gallant captain has died away, not indeed 'from all the circle of the hills,' but from the London squares he loved, and which knew him so well.

It is not as a wit that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is chiefly famous, but his Table-talk contains many things that would have made the reputation of a diner-out; sometimes they are metaphorical, as when, upon a friend of Fox's, who would take the very words out of his mouth, and always put himself forward to interpret him, he observed that the man always put him in mind of the steeple of St Martin's on Ludgate Hill, which is constantly getting in the way when you wish to see the dome of St Paul's. Sometimes they are philosophic, as when he remarked that all women past seventy, whom ever he knew, were divided into three classes—1. That dear old soul; 2. That old woman; 3. That old witch. And again, they are sometimes purely witty, as, 'Some men are like musical glasses—to produce their finest tones, you must keep them wet.'

Coleridge has also left some fine definitions, which are only not witty because of their wisdom. He compares a single Thought to a wave of the sea, which takes its form from the waves which precede and follow it; and Experience to the stern-lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.

His epigram on a bad singer is excellent:

With respect to the Irish wits who are introduced in these volumes, the reader is in many cases disposed to imagine that some of the joke must lie in the brogue, which print is unable to render; but Curran is a brilliant exception. There is nothing more humorous in the whole work than the account of his duel with Judge Egan. The latter was a big man, and directed the attention of the second to the advantage which in this respect his adversary had over him.

'He may hit me as easily as he would a haystack, and I might as well be aiming at the edge of a knife as at his lean carcass.'

'Well,' said Curran, 'let the gentleman chalk the size of my body on your side, and let every ball hitting outside of that go for nothing.'

Even Sydney Smith never beat this; but he said many things as humorous as this one of Curran's, and indeed was always saying them. Here is one, also, as it happens, respecting fat and leanness. Speaking of having been shampooed at Mahommed's Baths at Brighton, he said: 'They squeezed enough out of me to make a lean curate.' Every one knows the advice he gave to the Bishop of New Zealand, just before his departure for that cannibal diocese: 'A bishop should be given to hospitality, and never be without a smoked little boy in the bacon-rack and a cold missionary on the sideboard.' The above is perhaps the best example of the lengths to which Sydney Smith's imagination would run in the way of humour; as the following is the most characteristic stroke of Jerrold's caustic tongue. At a certain supper of sheep's heads a guest was so charmed with his fare that he threw down his knife and fork, exclaiming: 'Well, say I, sheep's heads for ever!' 'There's egotism,' said Jerrold.

There is nothing, it has been written, so dreary as a jest-book; and for fear our article on this subject should come under the same condemnation, we here bring it to a conclusion, with a cordial expression of approval of the cake from which we have extracted so many plums.

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