No doubt there are here touches of execrable taste, such as the punning trick with man and manners, suggesting a false antithesis; or the opposition of the words deprave and deprive; but we have in them only an instance of how the meretricious may co-exist with the lovely.

It shows his tendency to asceticismthe fancy of forsaking God's world in order to serve him; it has besides many of the faults of the age, even to that of punning; yet it is a lovely bit of art as well as a rich embodiment of tenderness.

The punning on the fairies' names recalls Bottom's pleasantries (M.N.D. iii. 1), and the resemblance is certainly too close to be accidental.

I at once looked on the figure of the animal as a kind of punning or hieroglyphical signature.

My lord seems to have often a peculiar inclination to punning, but this was the characteristic vice of the times.

[Fr.]; hanemolia bazein [Gr.]; be absurd &c adj.. Adj. absurd, nonsensical, preposterous, egregious, senseless, inconsistent, ridiculous, extravagant, quibbling; self-annulling, self- contradictory; macaronic^, punning. foolish &c 499; sophistical &c 477; unmeaning &c 517; without rhyme or reason; fantastic.

The Punning Faculty.

One does occasionally, in manuscripts of a quite hopeless type, find the millionaire's daughter figuring as "Miss Aurea Golden," and her poor but sprightly cousin as "Miss Lalage Gay"; but the veriest tyro realizes, as a rule, that this sort of punning characterization went out with the eighteenth century, or survived into the nineteenth century only as a flagrant anachronism, like knee-breeches and hair-powder.

In his later comedies the names are admirably chosen: they are characteristic without eccentricity or punning.

He passed and repassed from stilted pathos to strained and verbal wit (often mere punning); and when a reformer like T.W. Robertson tried to come a little nearer to the truth of life, he was apt to fall into babyish simplicity or flat commonness.

T.W. Robertson, as above mentioned, attempted a return to nature, with occasional and very partial success; but wit, with a dash of fanciful sentiment, reasserted itself in James Albery; while in H.J. Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse-play.

Ariosto has hot at all exaggerated in his praise when he speaks of him in punning on his name: Michel più che mortal, Angel divino.

P. 162. 'Domini canes,' 'The Lord's hounds,' a punning sobriquet of the Dominican inquisitors, in allusion to their profession.

This punning assonance is precisely in the vein of the original.

I do not reproduce them, the humour of punning upon the name of the editor of the Literary Gazette being a little outmoded.

Still I venture to deny that even punning is incompatible with poetry, or that those who make the pun can have no deeper feeling in their bosoms which they are perhaps too shamefaced to utter.

There is no kind of false Wit which has been so recommended by the Practice of all Ages, as that which consists in a Jingle of Words, and is comprehended under the general Name of Punning.

The Seeds of Punning are in the Minds of all Men, and tho' they may be subdued by Reason, Reflection and good Sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest Genius, that is not broken and cultivated by the Rules of Art.

I must add to these great Authorities, which seem to have given a kind of Sanction to this Piece of false Wit, that all the Writers of Rhetorick have treated of Punning with very great Respect, and divided the several kinds of it into hard Names, that are reckoned among the Figures of Speech, and recommended as Ornaments in Discourse.

After this short History of Punning, one would wonder how it should be so entirely banished out of the Learned World, as it is at present, especially since it had found a Place in the Writings of the most ancient Polite Authors.

But to return to Punning.

But talking of this heroine, you have not told me anything about yourself, except apropos of punning.

Beaumont and Fletcher, in one of their plays, make a punning reference to that.

Its church has been rebuilt, and the only object of interest that it retains is a small brass (affixed to the W. wall) with an inscription in Latin and English, of a punning character, to a person called Worth.

He paraphrases David and puts into his mouth such punning conceits as "Fears are my feres," and in his "Saint Peter's Complaint" makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus.