Here is one from Shakspeare that approaches it, but is intercepted by a sense of beauty:--
"These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die; like fire and powder, Which, as they kiss, consume."
And he says that, when the people saw Anne Boleyn at her coronation, such a noise arose "as the shrouds make at sea in a stiff tempest." Mr. Browning makes us smile when he paints the "poppy's red effrontery--till autumn spoils their fleering quite with rain,"
"And, turbanless, a coarse, brown, rattling crane Protrudes."
This reminds me that in the West a bald man's head is spoken of as rising above the timber-line; which is quite in the style of American similes, as when Rufus Choate, who so frequently appeared to be saying to his jury, "If you have tears, prepare to shed them now," was described to be a man who always bored for water.
Charles Lamb commenting upon the following line from Davenport's King John and Matilda,--
"And thou, Fitzwater, reflect upon thy _name_, And turn the _Son of Tears_,"--
says, "Fitzwater: son of water." A striking instance of the compatibility of the _serious pun_ with the expression of the profoundest sorrows. Grief as well as joy finds ease in thus playing with a word. Old John of Gaunt in Shakspeare thus descants on his name: "Gaunt, and gaunt, indeed;" to a long string of conceits which no one has ever yet felt to be ridiculous. The poet Wither, thus, in a mournful review of the declining estate of his family, says with deepest nature,--
But, in the following passage from John Fletcher's "Bonduca," pure poetry checks the laugh,--
"I have seen these Britons that you magnify Run as they would have outrun time, and roaring, Basely for mercy, roaring; the light shadows, That in a thought scur o'er the fields of corn, Halted on crutches to them."
That is in the finest style of an exaggeration which has been inherited by Americans and is the source of much of their wit and humor. Here is a coarser specimen, but perfectly witty. A person, remarking to a famous criminal lawyer that his client would certainly go to hell, had for a reply, "Go to hell! he ought to be thankful that there is a hell he _can_ go to."
This characteristic will recur under the head of Falstaff.