convey the same thoughts or meanings is a
fiction as transparent as it is preposterous. A word is nothing but an
arbitrary sign, and apart from the thought connected with it, it is an
empty unmeaning sound. The link is too slight in puns, the disparity
between the things they represent as similar, too great--there is too
much falsity. The worst kind of them is where the words are unlike in
spelling, and even somewhat so in sound, and where the same reference
cannot be made to suit both. Such are puns of the "atrocious" or
"villainous" class--a fertile source of bad riddles. For instance, "Why
is an old shoe like ancient Greece?" "Because it had a sole on (Solon)."
Here the words are very dissimilar and the allusion is imperfect--the
description of an old shoe being wrong and forced.

The founders of many of our great families have shown how much this kind
of humour was once appreciated by using it in their mottoes. Thus Onslow
has "_Festina lente_" and Vernon more happily "_Ver non semper floret_."
Some puns are amusingly ingenious when the reference hinges well on both
words, some additional verbal or other connection is shown, and the
words are exactly alike. When there are not two words, but one is used
in two senses, there is still greater improvement. Thus the Rev. R. S.
Hawker--a man of such mediaeval tastes that he was claimed, falsely, I
believe, as a Roman Catholic--made an apt reply to a nobleman who had
told him in the heat of religious controversy that he would not be
priest-ridden--

"Priest-ridden thou! it cannot be
By prophet or by priest,
Balaam is dead, and none but he
Would choose thee for his beast!"

We also consider that the mendicant deserved a coin, who, knowing the
love of wit in Louis XIV., complained sadly to him, _Ton image est
partout--excepte dans ma poche_. In such cases the pun is sometimes
transformed, for it only invariably exists where the words are equivocal
and where the allusion is peculiarly applicable to the double meaning
the falsity vanishes, and the verbal coincidence becomes an effective
ornament of style. It has been so used by the most successful writers,
and it is still under certain conditions approved; but more
discrimination is required in such embellishments than was anciently
necessary. And when the allusion becomes not only elegant but
iridescent, reflecting beautiful and changing lights, it rises into
poetical metaphor.

Falsity is necessary to constitu