The _jeu d’esprit_ was reserved for Walpole, though the circumstance on which it was founded had happened often enough before; but in point of fact it was a saying strictly characteristic of the period, and in the author of it we recognise a signally representative type of the latter-day, as contrasted with the old-world, wit. Walpole, indeed, belonged to the modern school of humourists, which may be said to date back to the era of the Restoration, but which did not, so to speak, attain adult growth till the fuller development of the club and the coffee-house as aids to the theatre in the establishment of new jocular canons and doctrines. The book called _Joe Miller’s Jests_ was, both in its inception and its progress, an emanation from the altered state of feeling in regard to such matters. The early editions were, in a literary aspect, wretched enough, and destitute alike of judgment and taste on the part of the compiler. But if the sponsorship of Miller was originally of a nominal and shadowy character, it must be said that, as the volume received from time to time additions, which doubled and trebled its bulk, from an endless variety of fresh sources, the fatherhood of the worthy actor became by degrees absolutely fictitious--a mere _nom de plume_; and it is not too much to allow that, with all its weaknesses, the work in its augmented shape, as the ordinary reader is accustomed to come across it, is a creditable sample of its kind, and will probably yield a better insight into the particular field of inquiry than any other single publication in our language. Of course, the first impression of 1739 and the current text are so distinct from each other as to have practically little in common between them beyond the name and the tradition. It started by being a strange tissue of deceptive pretences; but it hit the nail on the head; the notion tickled the public fancy; and the title is almost part of the British constitution. The ancient lines have long been obliterated; the pamphlet of seventy pages has swollen into a volume of five hundred; and the editor and publisher are recollected only by the curious; while in all literary centres and among nearly all classes of readers the man whose name was affixed to the venture without his consent or knowledge, and whose personal capabilities in the joking way were below zero, remains a household word from century to century, like the superscription over a venerable house of business of partners who have been dead and buried these hundred years, and survive above the door and on the bill-heads from considerations of expediency.