The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore HookHook, Theodore Edward
General
The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures, Bons Mots, Puns, and Hoaxes of Theodore Hook
Hook, Theodore Edward
English wit and humor
To talk of yellow pickles at dinner, and say the way to _Turn 'em
Green_ is through Hammersmith--all allusions to eating men, for
_Eton_ men, or _Staines_ on the table-cloth--or _Egg-ham_, are all
exploded--as are all stuff about _Maids_ and _Thornbacks_, and
_Plaice_--or saying to a lady who asks you to help her to the wing
of a chicken, that it is a mere matter of _a pinion_--all quibbles
about dressing _hare_ and cutting it--all stuff about a merry fellow
being given to _wine_--or upon helping yourself to say you have a
_platonic_ affection for roast beef--or when fried fish runs short,
singing to the mistress of the house, with Tom Moore,--
"Your sole, though a very sweet sole, love,
Will ne'er be sufficient for me,"
are entirely banished.
At the play-house never talk of being a _Pittite_ because you happen
not to be in the boxes--never observe what a _Kean_ eye one actor
has, or that another can never grow old because he must always be
_Young_--never talk of the uncertainty of _Mundane_ affairs in a
farce, or observe how _Terrybly_ well a man plays Mr. Simpson--banish
from your mind the possibility of saying the Covent Garden manager
has put his best _Foot_ forward, or that you should like to go to
_Chester_ for a day or two--or that you would give the world to
be tied to a _Tree_--or that Mr. _Make ready_ is a presentable
actor--all such stuff is interdicted.
In speaking of Parliament, forget Broom and Birch, Wood and Cole,
Scarlett and White, Lamb and the Leakes, the Hares and the Herons,
the Cootes and the Cruins--such jumbles will lead into great
difficulties, and invariably end, without infinite caution, in an
observation, that the conduct of that House is always regulated by
the best possible _Manners_.
There are some temptations very difficult to avoid--for instance,
last Saturday we saw gazetted, as a bankrupt, "Sir John Lade,
Cornhill, watchmaker!" Now this, we confess, was a provocation hard
of resistance--when one sees a _lad_ of sixty-four _set up_ only to
_break down_, and perceives that whatever he may do with _watches_,
he could not make a _case_ before the Insolvent Debtors' Court; and
moreover, since his taking to watchmaking arose from his having, in
the _spring_ of life, gone upon _tick_, and that the circumstance
may be considered as a _striking_ instance of a _bad wind-up_--we
admit that in the hands of a young beginner such a thing is quite
irresistible, but such temptations should be avoided as much as
possible.
We have not room to set down all the prohibited puns extant; but we
have just shown that the things which one hears, when one dines in
the City (where men eat peas with a two-pronged fork, and bet hats
with each other), as novelties, and the perfection of good fun, are
all flat, stale, and unprofitable to those who have lived a little
longer and seen a little more of the world, and have heard puns when
it was the fashion to commit them at the west end of the town.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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