"After having despatched these two important points of grinning and whistling, I hope you will oblige the world with some reflections upon yawning, as I have seen it practised on a Twelfth Night among other Christmas gambols at the house of a very worthy gentleman who entertains his tenants at that time of the year. They yawn for a Cheshire cheese, and begin about midnight, when the whole company is supposed to be drowsy. He that yawns widest, and at the same time so naturally as to produce the most yawns among the spectators, carries home the cheese. If you handle this subject as you ought, I question not but your paper will set half the kingdom a-yawning, though I dare promise you it will never make anybody fall asleep." Johnson observes that Addison never out-steps the modesty of nature, nor raises merriment or wonder by the violation of truth. He wrote several essays in the "Spectator" on wit, and condemns much that commonly passes under the name. Together with verbal humour and many absurd devices connected with it, he especially repudiates the rebus. In the first part of the following extract he refers to this device being used for other objects than those of amusement, and he might have reminded us of the alphabets of primitive times, when the picture of an animal signified the sound with which its name commenced; but the rebus proper is merely a bad attempt at humour--a sort of pictorial pun-- "I find likewise among the ancients that ingenious kind of conceit which the moderns distinguish by the name of a rebus, that does not sink a letter, but a whole word, by substituting a picture in its place. When Caesar was one of the masters of the Roman mint, he placed the figure of an elephant upon the reverse of the public money; the word Caesar signifying an elephant in the Punic language. This was artificially contrived by Caesar, because it was not lawful for a private man to stamp his own figure upon the coin of the Commonwealth. Cicero, so called from the founder of his family, who was marked on the nose with a little wen like a vetch, (which is Cicer in Latin,) instead of Marcus Tullius Cicero, ordered the words Marcus Tullius with the figure of a vetch at the end of them, to be inscribed on a public monument. This was done probably to show that he was neither ashamed of his name or family, notwithstanding the envy of his competitors had often reproached him with both. In the same manner we read of a famous building that was marked in several parts of it with the figures of a frog and a lizard; these words in Greek having been the names of the architects, who by the laws of their country were never permitted to inscribe their own names upon their works. For the same reason, it is thought that the forelock of the horse in the antique