gories, fables, parables, and riddles, to discoast from the
plain and simple way of speech, why may not facetiousness, issuing
from the same principles, directed to the same ends, serving to like
purposes, be likewise used blamelessly? If those exorbitancies of
speech may be accommodated to instill good doctrine into the head,
to excite good passions in the heart, to illustrate and adorn the
truth, in a delightful and taking way, and facetious discourse be
sometimes notoriously conducible to the same ends, why, they being
retained, should it be rejected, especially considering how
difficult often it may be to distinguish those forms of discourse
from this, or exactly to define the limits which sever rhetoric and
raillery. Some elegant figures and trophies of rhetoric (biting
sarcasms, sly ironies, strong metaphors, lofty hyperboles,
paronomasies, oxymorons, and the like, frequently used by the best
speakers, and not seldom even by sacred writers) do lie very near
upon the confines of jocularity, and are not easily differenced from
those sallies of wit wherein the lepid way doth consist: so that
were this wholly culpable, it would be matter of scruple whether one
hath committed a fault or no when he meant only to play the orator
or the poet; and hard surely it would be to find a judge who could
precisely set out the difference between a jest and a flourish.

8. I shall only add, that of old even the sagest and gravest
persons (persons of most rigid and severe virtue) did much affect
this kind of discourse, and did apply it to noble purposes. The
great introducer of moral wisdom among the pagans did practise it so
much (by it repressing the windy pride and fallacious vanity of
sophisters in his time), that he thereby got the name of [Greek],
the droll; and the rest of those who pursued his design do, by
numberless stories and apophthegms recorded of them, appear well
skilled and much delighted in this way. Many great princes (as
Augustus Caesar, for one, many of whose jests are extant in
Macrobius), many grave statesmen (as Cicero particularly, who
composed several books of jests), many famous captains (as Fabius,
M. Cato the Censor, Scipio Africanus, Epaminondas, Themistocles,
Phocion, and many others, whose witty sayings together with their
martial exploits are reported by historians), have pleased
themselves herein, and made it a condiment of their weighty
businesses. So that