Wit can be blundered into as well as a pun. The unmerited praise of it can be earned by mental awkwardness and want of tact. A widower, who had loved a lady previous to his marriage to another, approached his first love after the death of his wife, and sought to renew the old attachment. After he had made his offer, at a juncture more critical than the turning-point of Waterloo, he was permitted to add, "And I know that all my children will follow you to the grave with the same affection that they showed when their mother died." This is certainly the _pallida mors_ of Horace beating _æquo pede_ at the door. Wit can also be enhanced by a droll incompetence of understanding on the part of the listener. Sydney Smith, complaining of the heat, told a lady that he wished he could take off his flesh and sit in his bones. The wit consists in extending the congruity of taking clothes off to the flesh, and there is an electric instant of mental possibility. But it is enhanced to us when we recollect the shocked and puzzled look of the lady, who saw only an indelicacy in a remark which was really delicate to the pitch of ghastliness,--stripped, in fact, of every rag of that most indelicate of all things, prudery. Thus the raillery of Falstaff owes half its excellence to Dame Quickly's consistent misinterpretation, for this reflects back upon it the color of wit. She is a duenna who blunders into being a go-between and making a capital match. "Go to! you are a woman: go." "Who, I? No! I defy thee. God's light! I was never called so in mine own house before." "You are a thing to thank God on." "I am no thing to thank God on, I would thou should'st know it." And the grim irony of Hamlet, who, after killing Polonius, replies to the king that the old man is at supper, has grown upon us through the slow perception of the courtiers, who know he is killed as well as we do, and have been sent to find the body, but cannot take the point of Hamlet's answers. In a play of Douglas Jerrold, an old sailor gets a box on the ear while trying to snatch a kiss. "There," cries he, "like my luck! always wrecked on the coral reefs." When the manager heard the play read he could not see the point, and increased the wit for us by making Jerrold strike it out. Perhaps the best modern instance of this kind is the colossal stupidity of some foreign critics, who gave such an exquisite flavor to Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad" by blaming his ignorance and misapprehension of places, pictures, and traditions. The Beaufort negroes are unconsciously witty when, perceiving that an idea is dawning upon them, they say they feel their head "growing thinner." A premium for involuntary wit must be conferred upon the old lady in New Bedford, who heard about the cheapness of the manufactured oils and the great increase in the use of them, which threatened to drive sperm-oil out of the market: "Dear me, the poor whales! What will they do?"