That wit does not consist in the discovery of a merely unexpected likeness or even contrast in word or thought, is plain if we look at what is called a conceit, which has all the qualities of wit—­except wit.  For example, Warner, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a long poem called “Albion’s England,” which had an immense contemporary popularity, and is not without a certain value still to the student of language.  In this I find a perfect specimen of what is called a conceit.  Queen Eleanor strikes Fair Rosamond, and Warner says,

  Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
  Soft were those lips that bled.[1]

[Footnote 1:  This, and one or two of the following illustrations, were used again by Mr. Lowell in his “Shakespeare Once More”:  Works (Riverside edition), III, 53.]

This is bad as fancy for precisely the same reason that it would be good as a pun.  The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as a pun is intentionally so.  To make the contrast what it should have been,—­to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast,—­it should read: 

  Hard was the hand that gave the blow,
  Soft were those lips that bled,

for otherwise there is no identity of meaning in the word “hard” as applied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the proper logical copula is wanting.  Of the same kind is the conceit which belongs, I believe, to our countryman General Morris: 

  Her heart and morning broke together
  In tears,

which is so preposterous that had it been intended for fun we might almost have laughed at it.  Here again the logic is unintentionally violated in the word broke, and the sentence becomes absurd, though not funny.  Had it been applied to a merchant ruined by the failure of the United States Bank, we should at once see the ludicrousness of it, though here, again, there would be no true wit: 

  His heart and Biddle broke together
  On ’change.

Now let me give an instance of true fancy from Butler, the author of “Hudibras,” certainly the greatest wit who ever wrote English, and whose wit is so profound, so purely the wit of thought, that we might almost rank him with the humorists, but that his genius was cramped with a contemporary, and therefore transitory, subject.  Butler says of loyalty that it is

  True as the dial to the sun
  Although it be not shined upon.

Now what is the difference between this and the examples from Warner and Morris which I have just quoted?  Simply that the comparison turning upon the word true, the mind is satisfied, because the analogy between the word as used morally and as used physically is so perfect as to leave no gap for the reasoning faculty to jolt over.  But it is precisely this jolt, not so violent as to be displeasing, violent enough to discompose our thoughts with an agreeable sense of surprise, which it is the object of a pun to give