The joke-wright and the anecdote-monger may be treated as two exceptionally fortunate professional persons, who enter the field of their labours and researches with a light heart and an empty budget. Their accumulation of stock is immense. The capital of all their ancestors becomes their fee simple _ex officio_. There need be among them no struggling beginners, no modest apprenticeship; and all that is expected at their hands is a certain proficiency in conveyancing, and the addition, before they and the world bid each other farewell, of a donation or two to the bank for the benefit of the public and of ensuing freeholders for evermore. The introduction of typography, in jocular as in all other branches of literature, was instrumental in accomplishing a transition from oral delivery to the printed collection. In lieu of the minstrel and the _bordeur_, such sections of the public as could read might have in their closets and window-recesses garlands of facetiæ in prose or verse. The press slowly superseded the reciter and the professional buffoon with his budget of witticisms and tales. But the process was of course a very gradual one, so long as the diffusion of culture remained imperfect and partial; and for a great length of time the old-world system of reading from the MS., or repeating _extempore_ to an audience, and of the passage of jests and tales from mouth to mouth, continued more or less to flourish, just as it does in the form of a revival, among certain classes of the modern English community, who seem to do from choice what their forerunners did from need. A vein of exaggeration, which is apt to characterise anecdotes as they are repeated from mouth to mouth, or transferred from one book to another, resolves itself into mere innocuous caricature or gasconade, where the plot is of a comic turn; but where a certain indelicacy or double sense accompanies the original version, the new-renderer has it in his power to pander to the prevailing taste by making a gross story immeasurably more exceptionable, either by simple intensification or by connecting incidents and expressions with persons to whom they never in point of fact belonged. Now, this I take to be very much the case with the _Jests of Scogin_, a compilation of the Tudor era by a doctor, as it is said, who was guilty of writing a fair amount of matter in a similar vein, but who, if these Jests were truly of his composition, shewed by his _Book of the Introduction of Knowledge_, and one or two other works, that he was capable of something higher. I refer to Doctor Andrew Borde, a learned and ingenious man, as we may perceive, but far from being fastidious in his writings, or (which is worse) in ascribing to the most exalted characters of an antecedent epoch a tolerance of the most outrageous and vulgar buffoonery.