[341] ’Nov. 14, 1779.  Mr. Beauclerk has built a library in Great Russellstreet, that reaches half way to Highgate.  Everybody goes to see it; it has put the Museum’s nose quite out of joint.’  Walpole’s Letters, vii. 273.  It contained upwards of 30,000 volumes, and the sale extended over fifty days.  Two days’ sale were given to the works on divinity, including, in the words of the catalogue, ’Heterodox! et Increduli.  Angl.  Freethinkers and their opponents.’ Dr. Johnson:  His Friends and His Critics, p. 315.  It sold for L5,011 (ante, in. 420, note 4).  Wilkes’s own library—­a large one—­had been sold in 1764, in a five days’ sale, as is shewn by the Auctioneer’s Catalogue, which is in the Bodleian.

[342] ’Our own language has from the Reformation to the present time been chiefly dignified and adorned by the works of our divines, who, considered as commentators, controvertists, or preachers, have undoubtedly left all other nations far behind them.’ The Idler, No. 91.

[343] Mr. Wilkes probably did not know that there is in an English sermon the most comprehensive and lively account of that entertaining faculty, for which he himself is so much admired.  It is in Dr. Barrow’s first volume, and fourteenth sermon, ’Against foolish Talking and Jesting.’ My old acquaintance, the late Corbyn Morris, in his ingenious Essay on Wit, Humour, and Ridicule, calls it ’a profuse description of Wit;’ but I do not see how it could be curtailed, without leaving out some good circumstance of discrimination.  As it is not generally known, and may perhaps dispose some to read sermons, from which they may receive real advantage, while looking only for entertainment, I shall here subjoin it:—­’But first (says the learned preacher) it may be demanded, what the thing we speak of is?  Or what this facetiousness (or wit as he calls it before) doth import?  To which questions I might reply, as Democritus did to him that asked the definition of a man, “’Tis that which we all see and know.”  Any one better apprehends what it is by acquaintance, than I can inform him by description.  It is, indeed, a thing so versatile and multiform, appearing in so many shapes, so many postures, so many garbs, so variously apprehended by several eyes and judgements, that it seemeth no less hard to settle a clear and certain notion thereof, than to make a portrait of Proteus, or to define the figure of the fleeting air.  Sometimes it lieth in pat allusion to a known story, or in seasonable application of a trivial saying, or in forging an apposite tale; sometimes it playeth in words and phrases, taking advantage from the ambiguity of their sense, or the affinity of their sound:  sometimes it is wrapped in a dress of humorous expression:  sometimes it lurketh under an odd similitude:  sometimes it is lodged in a sly question, in a smart answer, in a quirkish reason, in a shrewd intimation, in cunningly diverting or cleverly retorting an objection: