some obscure, unthought-of fellow in a corner, who was never ’prentice to the trade, whom the company for very pity passed over, as we do by a known poor man when a money-subscription is going round, no one calling upon him for his quota—­has all at once come out with something so whimsical, yet so pertinent; so brazen in its pretensions, yet so impossible to be denied; so exquisitely good, and so deplorably bad, at the same time,—­that it has proved a Robin Hood’s shot; any thing ulterior to that is despaired of; and the party breaks up, unanimously voting it to be the very worst (that is, best) pun of the evening.  This species of wit is the better for not being perfect in all its parts.  What it gains in completeness, it loses in naturalness.  The more exactly it satisfies the critical, the less hold it has upon some other faculties.  The puns which are most entertaining are those which will least bear an analysis.  Of this kind is the following, recorded, with a sort of stigma, in one of Swift’s Miscellanies.

An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through the streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question:  “Prithee, friend, is that thy own hare, or a wig?”

There is no excusing this, and no resisting it.  A man might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof.  The quibble in itself is not considerable.  It is only a new turn given, by a little false pronunciation, to a very common, though not very courteous inquiry.  Put by one gentleman to another at a dinner-party, it would have been vapid; to the mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit than rudeness.  We must take in the totality of time, place, and person; the pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter; the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on with his burthen; the innocent though rather abrupt tendency of the first member of the question, with the utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second; the place—­a public street, not favourable to frivolous investigations; the affrontive quality of the primitive inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred to the derivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire; namely, that few of that tribe are expected to eat of the good things which they carry, they being in most countries considered rather as the temporary trustees than owners of such dainties,—­which the fellow was beginning to understand; but then the wig again comes in, and he can make nothing of it:  all put together constitute a picture:  Hogarth could have made it intelligible on canvass.