His wit, too,
is usually pregnant and vital with force and meaning. This constitutes
the singular and peculiar worth of his verbal wit in general, and of his
puns in particular. In verbal wit he has had but few equals, and in puns
he has had none. He made the pun an instrument of power; and had his wit
been malignant, he could have pointed the pun to a sharpness that would
have left wounds as deep as thought, and could have added a poison to it
that would have kept them rankling as long as memory lasted. The secret
of his power in the pun is, that he does not rest in the analogy of
sound alone, but seeks also for analogy of significance. Generally there
is a subtile coincidence between his meaning and what the sound of the
pun signifies, and thus the pun becomes an amusing or illustrative
image, or a most emphatic and striking condensation of his thought.
"Take care of your cough," he writes to his engraver, "lest you go to
coughy-pot, as I said before; but I did _not_ say before, that nobody is
so likely as a wood-engraver to cut his stick." Speaking of his wife, he
says,--"To be sure, she still sticks to her old fault of going to sleep
while I am dictating, till I vow to change my _Woman_uensis for a
_Man_uensis." How keenly and well the pun serves him in burlesque, in
his comic imitations of the great moralist! He hits off with inimitable
ridicule the great moralist's dislike to Scotland.
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