Though the Greeks and Romans considered puns an ornament to writings and discourses of all kinds, modern critics have decided that they ought to be admitted only in writings of a light nature; and that they decrease the force and beauty of grave and serious compositions, which ought to wear an air of dignified sublimity, unmixed with any thing of a trivial nature. The lines immediately preceding the before-mentioned passages are thus altered by a French editor. _Vide_ Note 72. Ad hæc mala hoc etiam mihi accedit; hæc Andria, _Quam clam patre uxorem duxit Pamphilus_, gravida ab eo est. The original lines are, Ad hæc mala hoc etiam mihi accedit; hæc Andria, _Sine ista uxor, sine amica est_ gravida a Pamphilo est. NOTE 93. _Boy or girl, say they, the child shall be brought up._ In the Latin, Quidquid peperisset decreverunt tollere. Boy or girl, they have resolved that it shall be _taken up_. The words _taken up_ allude to the custom which prevailed in Greece, of destroying children. This barbarous cruelty was practised on various pretences; if an infant was, at its birth, deformed in any of its members, or if it appeared extremely feeble or sickly, the laws allowed, and even enjoined, that it should be exposed: sometimes illegitimacy was considered a sufficient cause for the exposure of a child. Though the parents were generally allowed to choose whether their offspring should be destroyed or preserved; in some parts of Greece all the inhabitants were compelled to send their new-born infants to officers appointed to examine them: who, if they found them not robust and healthy, cast them immediately into deep caverns, called ἀποθέται, which were dedicated to this purpose. It was customary, in Athens, to place a new-born infant on the ground at the feet of its father, if he then took it up in his arms, it was considered that he bound himself to educate and provide for the child: hence, the expression _tollere_, _to take up_: but, if on the contrary, he refused to acknowledge it, a person appointed for that purpose conveyed it to some desert place at a distance from the city: and there left it to perish. The Thebans are said to have been the only people in Greece, among whom this barbarous custom did not prevail: but the story of Œdipus, a prince who was exposed, though afterwards preserved, is a proof that they did not altogether abstain from this practice. NOTE 94. _To prove that she is a citizen of Athens._