Of course, authors who have so little respect for the legitimate meaning of English words cannot be expected to pay regard to the rules of English grammar; nor is it to be imagined that their course of solid reading has been such as to enable them to know that Hobbes was not particularly distinguished for his poetry. But all this is included in the broad, general licence which these poets take out. In another piece, _Bluebeard from a New Point of Hue_,—the puns you see even extend to the playbill and the title-page of the production—the same author takes occasion, on the same principle, to pun until all is _blue_. Fatima calls Abomilique a “blue bore.” _Abom._ Everything takes that colour in my eyes; This, ’stead of being fash’nablest of flies, And red, when I look at it, in two twos, Changes its form and colour—it’s a _blouse_. ’Stead of yellow covering, my foot Seems, in my eyes, clad in a _Blu_cher boot. Every hotel I may put up at, boasts The selfsame sign—of course, it’s the _Blue_-Posts. Whene’er a portrait-painter I employ, He makes me look like Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. My palanquin, the one I bought for you, Becomes an omnibus, the Royal _Blue_. Ladies seem blue-stockings and bloomers through it; Each song I hear appears composed by _Blewitt_; In my siesta, every afternoon, I dream I’m in the air in a big _b’loon_. This is simply a long punning exercise, of a sustained effort to the jingling of words of similar sound, but wholly destitute of similarity of sense. There is not that startling conjunction of similar dissimilarities which constitutes the true pun. It cannot be said that there is any wit in making Bluebeard see everything blue, because his beard is blue. If he had been remarkable for his blue eyes, there might have been some point in it. Sydney Smith, who was as little accustomed to found his jokes upon a just estimate of things as any of the burlesque writers, once said that it required a surgical operation to get a joke into the head of a Scotchman. Yet plain James Hogg has given us a better specimen of a pun than any of these professional English wits. Some one at table mentioned that it was reported Dr. Parr had married a woman beneath him in station. “Ay, ay,” said Hogg, “she is, nae doot, below Parr.” Here is a pun perfect in all its parts, preserving at once exactness of sound and sense, and giving at the same time a humorous colouring to a commonplace fact. The above specimens, however, are the best in the pieces before us. The majority of the puns are of the most audacious kind, many of them suggestive of a joker in the last stage of drivelling senility.