It would be vain, at this time of the world's age, to enter upon a serious disquisition into the "art or mystery" of punning: it would be useless to argue upon its utility, the genius and talent required for carrying it on, or the pleasure or amusement derivable from it. The fact is self-evident, that puns are an acknowledged ingredient of the English language amongst the middling classes, and are, in their societies, the very plums in the pudding of conversation. It may be said that punning is a vice, and we are quite ready to admit the charge; but still it exists and flourishes amongst dapper clerks in public offices, hangers-on of the theatres; amongst very young persons at the universities; in military messes amongst the subalterns; in the City amongst apprentices; and, in some instances, with old wits _razee_, who are driven to extravagant quibbles to furnish their quota of entertainment to the society in which they are endured. A punster (that is, a regular hard-going thick and thin punster) is the dullest and stupidest companion alive, if he could but be made to think so. He sits gaping for an opportunity to jingle his nonsense with whatever happens to be going on, and, catching at some detached bit of a rational conversation, perverts its sense to his favourite sound, so that, instead of anything like a continuous intellectual intercourse, which one might hope to enjoy in pleasant society, one is perpetually interrupted by his absurd distortions and unseasonable ribaldry, as ill-timed and as ill-placed as songs in an opera sung by persons in the depth of despair, or on the point of death. Admitting, however, the viciousness, the felonious sinfulness of punning, it is to be apprehended that the liberty of the pun is like the liberty of the press, which, says the patriot, is like the air, and if we have it not we cannot breathe. Therefore, seeing that it is quite impossible to put down punning, the next best thing we can do is to regulate it, in the way they regulate peccadilloes in Paris, and teach men to commit punnery as Cæsar died and Frenchmen dissipate--with decency. The proverb says, "wits jump," so may punsters, and two bright geniuses may hit upon the same idea at different periods quite unconsciously. To avoid any unnecessary repetition or apparent plagiarisms, therefore, by these coincidences, we venture to address this paper to young beginners in the craft, to the rising generation of witlings; and we are led to do this more particularly, from feeling that the tyro in punning, as well as in everything else, firmly believes that which he for the first time has heard or read, to be as novel and entertaining to his older friends, who have heard it or read it before he was born, as to himself, who never met with it till the day upon which he so liberally and joyously retails it to the first hearers he can fall in with.