the city in a punt, endeavoring to catch small fry,
"_East Angles_"; or, if you please, observe that "the _punters_ are losing
the fish," "catching nothing but a cold," or that "the fish are too deep
for them." Call the Thames a "_tidy_" river; but say you prefer the _Isis_
in hot weather.

Personal deformities or constitutional calamities are always to be laid
hold of. If anybody tells you that a dear friend has lost his sight,
observe that it will make him more hospitable than ever, since now he
would be glad _to see anybody_.

If a clergyman breaks his leg, remark that he is no longer a clergyman,
but a _lame man_. If a poet is seized with apoplexy, affect to disbelieve
it, although you know it to be true, in order to say--

Poeta nascitur non _fit_;

and then, to carry the joke one step farther, add, "that it is not a _fit_
subject for a jest."

A man falling into a tan-pit, you may call "sinking in the _sublime_"; a
climbing boy suffocated in a chimney meets with a _sootable_ death; and a
pretty girl having caught the smallpox is to be much _pitted_.

On the subject of the ear and its defects, talk first of something in
which _a cow sticks_, and end by telling the story of the man who, having
taken great pains to explain something to his companion, at last got in a
rage at his apparent stupidity, and exclaimed, "Why, my dear sir, don't
you comprehend? The thing is as plain as A, B, C." "I dare say it is,"
said the other; "but I am D, E, F."

It may be as well to give the beginner something of a notion of the use he
may make of the most ordinary words, for the purpose of quibbleism. For
instance, in the way of observation: The loss of a hat is always _felt_;
if you don't like sugar, you may _lump_ it; a glazier is a _panes_-taking
man; candles are burnt because _wick-ed_ things always come to _light_; a
lady who takes you home from a party is kind in her _carriage_, and you
say "Nunc est _ridendum_" when you step into it; if it happen to be a
chariot, she is a _charitable_ person; birds'-nests and king-killing are
synonymous, because they are _high trees on_; a bill for building a bridge
should be sanctioned by the Court of _Arches_ as well as the House of
_Piers_; when a man is dull, he goes to the seaside to _Brighton_; a
Cockney lover, when sentimental, should live in _Heigh Hoburn_; the
greatest fibber is the man most to _re-lie_ upon; a dean expecting a
bishopric looks _for lawn_; a _sui_-cide kills p