“There was a certain fool that always, when the sun shone, would weep, and when the rain rained would laugh; and his reason was, that sunshine followed rain, but rain sunshine.” So, again, in the _Conceits, Clinches, Flashes, and Whimzies_, of 1639, where the arrangement is similarly in paragraphs, but where at the same time the contents answer better to the title than to the Ana, there are 287 heads, and to discover half a dozen passable illustrations is a task of difficulty. These _bijoux_, which the author, a Lancashire man, carefully garnered up as they struck his own fancy, or fell from the society which he kept, are after the following style:-- “An antiquary,” says one, “loves everything (as Dutchmen do cheese) for being mouldy and worm-eaten.” “A simple fellow in gay clothes is like a cinnamon-tree; the bark is of more worth than the body.” “Another said, a woman was like a piece of old grogram, always fretting.” A few more might be added, not for their wit, but for their casual elucidation of some obsolete word or custom; but we must not deny the writer the credit of introducing the PUN. Better have been made since; but, after all, we are here in the days of Charles I. N^{o.} 145 inquires why few women loved to eat eggs? _Answer_: Because they cannot endure to bear _the yoke_. A far from brilliant effort spoiled in the wording! “Why are tailors like woodcocks? _A._ Because they live by their long bills.” Perchance, the best in this indifferent medley is N^{o.} 177, which depends on the different meanings of _liber_ and _libra_:-- “A rich bookseller wished himself a scholar, and one said to him: ‘You are one already, being _doctus in libris_.’ ‘Nay,’ replied the other, ‘I am but _dives in libris_.’” These classical essays do not suit our climate very well, yet nothing is to be objected to them where, as in the one just cited, they are _pure_. But I strongly dislike hybrids, by which I intend such a retort as the Oxford Don is alleged to have made to the youths who hissed him as he passed--_Laudatur_ AB HIS; and the quotation of a line from the Eclogue of Virgil, where a lady’s dress is torn by a fiddle, is barely more than a verbal conceit, though incomparably preferable to the aggravating _all-us jelly-us_ of Brother Crug, which is a mere phonetic abortion. Whatever verdict may be pronounced on their successors, as they approach our own period, it must be said of the assemblages of _facetiæ_, made public by former generations down to the last century, that they leave us no alternative but this conclusion--that, with exceedingly few exceptions, considering the space of time involved, the genuine, enjoyable, laughable, recallable jest was unknown to antiquity, and is the offspring of modern thought and conditions.