ersons at court
flattered the great ones at inventing anagrams for them; and when the
wit of the maker proved to be as barren as the letters of the name, they
dropped or changed them, raving with the alphabet, and racking their
wits. Among the manuscripts of the grave Sir Julius Caesar, one cannot
but smile at a bundle emphatically endorsed "Trash." It is a collection
of these court-anagrams; a remarkable evidence of that ineptitude to
which mere fashionable wit can carry the frivolous.

In consigning this intellectual exercise to oblivion, we must not
confound the miserable and the happy together. A man of genius would not
consume an hour in extracting even a fortunate anagram from a name,
although on an extraordinary person or occasion its appositeness might
be worth an epigram. Much of its merit will arise from the association
of ideas; a trifler can only produce what is trifling, but an elegant
mind may delight by some elegant allusion, and a satirical one by its
causticity. We have some recent ones, which will not easily be
forgotten.

A similar contrivance, that of ECHO VERSES, may here be noticed. I have
given a specimen of these in a modern French writer, whose sportive pen
has thrown out so much wit and humour in his ECHOES.[116] Nothing ought
to be contemned which, in the hands of a man of genius, is converted
into a medium of his talents. No verses have been considered more
contemptible than these, which, with all their kindred, have been
anathematised by Butler, in his exquisite character of "a small poet" in
his "Remains," whom he describes as "tumbling through the hoop of an
anagram" and "all those gambols of wit." The philosophical critic will
be more tolerant than was the orthodox church wit of that day, who was,
indeed, alarmed at the fantastical heresies which were then prevailing.
I say not a word in favour of unmeaning ACROSTICS; but ANAGRAMS and ECHO
VERSES may be shown capable of reflecting the ingenuity of their makers.
I preserve a copy of ECHO VERSES, which exhibit a curious picture of the
state of our religious fanatics, the Roundheads of Charles I., as an
evidence, that in the hands of a wit even such things can be converted
into the instruments of wit.

At the end of a comedy presented at the entertainment of the prince, by
the scholars of Trinity College, Cambridge, in March, 1641, printed for
James Calvin, 1642, the author, Francis Cole, holds in a print a paper
in one hand, and a round