f the evening. This species of wit is the better for not being
perfect in all its parts. What it gains in completeness, it loses in
naturalness. The more exactly it satisfies the critical, the less hold
it has upon some other faculties. The puns which are most entertaining
are those which will least bear an analysis. Of this kind is the
following, recorded, with a sort of stigma, in one of Swift's
Miscellanies.

An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through
the streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question: "Prithee,
friend, is that thy own hare, or a wig?"

There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blur ten
sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who
should be laughter-proof. The quibble in itself is not considerable.
It is only a new turn given, by a little false pronunciation, to a
very common, though not very courteous inquiry. Put by one gentleman
to another at a dinner-party, it would have been vapid; to the
mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit than
rudeness. We must take in the totality of time, place, and person;
the pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the
puzzled porter; the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on
with his burthen; the innocent though rather abrupt tendency of
the first member of the question, with the utter and inextricable
irrelevancy of the second; the place--a public street, not favourable
to frivolous investigations; the affrontive quality of the primitive
inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred to the
derivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire; namely,
that few of that tribe are expected to eat of the good things which
they carry, they being in most countries considered rather as the
temporary trustees than owners of such dainties,--which the fellow was
beginning to understand; but then the _wig_ again comes in, and he can
make nothing of it: all put together constitute a picture: Hogarth
could have made it intelligible on canvass.

Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very bad pun,
because of the defectiveness in the concluding member, which is its
very beauty, and constitutes the surprise. The same persons shall
cry up for admirable the cold quibble from Virgil about the broken
Cremona;[1] because it is made out in all its parts, and leaves
nothing to the imagination. We venture to call it cold; because of
thousands who