The Bed-Book of Happiness Part 32

Till Venus saw a Suffragette Cried she, "But women should regret A broken gla.s.s!" But then, next minute, "Poor thing! she saw her image in it!"

WIT ON OCCASION

_Lamb said that the greatest pleasure in life was to do good in secret and be found out by accident_.

"_I suppose" said Lamb, "that Johnson was thinking of Shakespeare making Hector talk about Aristotle when he says,

And panting Time toils after him in vain_."

_A clergyman who had several livings was under discussion. "Why, such fellows look at a cure of souls like a cure of herrings--so much per hundred."

"Ah, but the herring cures fulfil their contract," said Jerrold.

He called clerical pluralists_ polypi, _parsons with many stomachs and no hearts_.

_A young prince had just been born and they were firing royal salutes to celebrate the occasion. A bystander exclaimed, "How they do powder these babies!_"

_In a pompous speech of self-defence the orator wound up by declaring himself the guardian of his own honour. "What a sinecure!" murmured his opponent._

"_How do you like babies, Mr. Lamb?" cried the gus.h.i.+ng mother._

"_Boi-boi-boiled," answered the stammering old bachelor._

_Foote used to say that the Irish take us in and the Scots turn us out._

_A stout duellist once said to his diminutive antagonist, "It is a perfectly unequal contest. It is almost impossible to hit any one of your size, or to miss any one of mine."_

"_I agree," said his opponent. "And I will chalk my size on your body.

We will not count the shots that go out of the ring_."

"_Ah," said Curran, noticing an Irish friend walking along absent-mindedly with his tongue out, "he is evidently trying to catch the English accent_."

_Sydney Smith was asked his opinion of Newton's portrait of Tom Moore.

"Couldn't you," he asked the painter, "put more hostility to the Established Church into the face?_"

_An intemperate duke asked Foote how he should go to a masquerade. "Go sober," said Foote._

"_I'm afraid the salad is gritty," apologised the host.

"Gritty!" mumbled the guest, "it's a gravel path with a few weeds in it_."

"_I never read a book before reviewing it" said Sydney Smith to a friend. "It is so apt to prejudice one_."

_Bentley, the publisher, said to Jerrold, "I thought of calling my magazine_ The Wits' Miscellany, _but I have decided on_ Bentley's Miscellany."

"_My dear fellow," said Jerrold, "why go to the other extreme?_"

"_What a magnificent-looking man!" said Goldsmith of a stranger; "he ought to be a Lord Chancellor."

He was, in fact, a rich baker.

"Not Chancellor," whispered a friend; "only Master of the Rolls_."

_Coleridge was dreaming of the time when he was a minister. "Ah, Charles, you never heard me preach." "My dear fellow," cried Lamb, "I never heard you do anything else_."

_Sydney Smith said that the whole of his life had been spent like a razor--in hot water or a sc.r.a.pe._

_As a means of bragging of his acquaintance, a man was remarking to the company that, although he had often dined at the Duke of Devons.h.i.+re's, there had never been any fish. "Is it not_ extraordinary?" _he asked.

Jerrold said, "Hardly. They ate it all upstairs_."

_A jealous general was abusing Wolfe to the King.

"The man is mad," he declared bitterly.