Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very bad pun, because of the defectiveness in the concluding member, which is its very beauty, and constitutes the surprise.  The same persons shall cry up for admirable the cold quibble from Virgil about the broken Cremona;[1] because it is made out in all its parts, and leaves nothing to the imagination.  We venture to call it cold; because of thousands who have admired it, it would be difficult to find one who has heartily chuckled at it.  As appealing to the judgment merely (setting the risible faculty aside,) we must pronounce it a monument of curious felicity.  But as some stories are said to be too good to be true, it may with equal truth be asserted of this bi-verbal allusion, that it is too good to be natural.  One cannot help suspecting that the incident was invented to fit the line.  It would have been better had it been less perfect.  Like some Virgilian hemistichs, it has suffered by filling up.  The nimium Vicina was enough in conscience; the Cremonae afterwards loads it.  It is in fact a double pun; and we have always observed that a superfoetation in this sort of wit is dangerous.  When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic to follow it up.  We do not care to be cheated a second time; or, perhaps, the mind of man (with reverence be it spoken) is not capacious enough to lodge two puns at a time.  The impression, to be forcible, must be simultaneous and undivided.

[Footnote 1:  Swift.]

X.—­THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES

Those who use this proverb can never have seen Mrs. Conrady.

The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from the celestial beauty.  As she partakes more or less of this heavenly light, she informs, with corresponding characters, the fleshly tenement which she chooses, and frames to herself a suitable mansion.

All which only proves that the soul of Mrs. Conrady, in her pre-existent state, was no great judge of architecture.

To the same effect, in a Hymn in honour of Beauty, divine Spenser, platonizing, sings:—­

  —­“Every spirit as it is more pure,
  And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
  So it the fairer body doth procure
  To habit in, and it more fairly dight
  With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 
  For of the soul the body form doth take: 
  For soul is form, and doth the body make.”

But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. Conrady.

These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philosophy; for here, in his very next stanza but one, is a saving clause, which throws us all out again, and leaves us as much to seek as ever:—­

  “Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind
  Dwells in deformed tabernacle drown’d,
  Either by chance, against the course of kind,
  Or through unaptness in the substance found,
  Which it assumed of some stubborn ground,
  That will not yield unto her form’s direction,
  But is perform’d with some foul imperfection.”