[Footnote 1:  chymes]

[Footnote 2:  This is an error. [Greek:  Anagramma] meant in old Greek what it now means.  Lycophron, who lived B.C. 280, and wrote a Greek poem on Cassandra, was famous for his Anagrams, of which two survive.  The Cabalists had a branch of their study called Themuru, changing, which made mystical anagrams of sacred names.]

[Footnote 3:  was called]

[Footnote 4:  The invention of Acrostics is attributed to Porphyrius Optatianus, a writer of the 4th century.  But the arguments of the Comedies of Plautus are in form of acrostics, and acrostics occur in the original Hebrew of the ’Book of Psalms’.]

[Footnote 5:  was]

[Footnote 6:  known by the name of]

[Footnote 7:  The Chronogram was popular also, especially among the Germans, for inscriptions upon marble or in books.  More than once, also, in Germany and Belgium a poem was written in a hundred hexameters, each yielding a chronogram of the date it was to celebrate.]

[Footnote 8:  Bouts rimes are said to have been suggested to the wits of Paris by the complaint of a verse turner named Dulot, who grieved one day over the loss of three hundred sonnets; and when surprise was expressed at the large number, said they were the ‘rhymed ends,’ that only wanted filling up.]

[Footnote 9:  Menagiana, vol.  I. p. 174, ed.  Amst. 1713.  The Menagiana were published in 4 volumes, in 1695 and 1696.  Gilles Menage died at Paris in 1692, aged 79.  He was a scholar and man of the world, who had a retentive memory, and, says Bayle,

  ‘could say a thousand good things in a thousand pleasing ways.’

The repertory here quoted from is the best of the numerous collections of ‘ana.’]

[Footnote 10:  double]

[Footnote 11:  Jean Francois Sarasin, whose works were first collected by Menage, and published in 1656, two years after his death.  His defeat of the Bouts-Rimes, has for first title ‘Dulot Vaincu’ is in four cantos, and was written in four or five days.]

[Footnote 12:  nothing]

* * * * *

No. 61.  Thursday, May 10, 1711.  Addison.

      ’Non equidem studeo, bullalis ut mihi nugis
      Pagina turgescal, dare pondus idonea fumo.’

      Pers.

There is no kind of false Wit which has been so recommended by the Practice of all Ages, as that which consists in a Jingle of Words, and is comprehended under the general Name of Punning.  It is indeed impossible to kill a Weed, which the Soil has a natural Disposition to produce.  The Seeds of Punning are in the Minds of all Men, and tho’ they may be subdued by Reason, Reflection and good Sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest Genius, that is not broken and cultivated by the Rules of Art.  Imitation is natural to us, and when it does not raise the Mind to Poetry, Painting, Musick, or other more noble Arts, it often breaks out in Punns and Quibbles.