It is witty when the author of the "Maid of Sker," describing a dinner, makes the mouth water with smiles when he particularizes "a little pig for roasting, too young to object to it, yet with his character formed enough to make his brains delicious."
Wit can depend, like punning, upon the felicitous use of some well-known verse or sentiment, which suddenly is made to adapt itself to a new idea; as when Henry Clapp, speaking of an intolerable bore, inverted the famous sentence which is associated with Shakspeare, and said, "He is not for a time, but for all day."
In the same vein, on the strength of Laurence Sterne's[2] assertion that "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," a Boston wit, finding himself in the powerful blast which sweeps across the Common and makes a tunnel of Winter Street, remarked that he wished there was a shorn lamb tied at the head of that street.
Walter Scott tells an anecdote of the same special character. "So deep was the thirst of vengeance impressed on the minds of the Highlanders that, when a clergyman informed a dying chief of the unlawfulness of the sentiment, urged the necessity of forgiving an inveterate enemy, and quoted, 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,' the acquiescing penitent said, with a deep sigh, 'To be sure! it is too sweet a morsel for a mortal.'"
Wit can be blundered into as well as a pun. The unmerited praise of it can be earned by mental awkwardness and want of tact. A widower, who had loved a lady previous to his marriage to another, approached his first love after the death of his wife, and sought to renew the old attachment. After he had made his offer, at a juncture more critical than the turning-point of Waterloo, he was permitted to add, "And I know that all my children will follow you to the grave with the same affection that they showed when their mother died." This is certainly the _pallida mors_ of Horace beating _æquo pede_ at the door.
Wit can also be enhanced by a droll incompetence of understanding on the part of the listener. Sydney Smith, complaining of the heat, told a lady that he wished he could take off his flesh and sit in his bones. The wit consists in extending the congruity of taking clothes off to the flesh, and there is an electric instant of mental possibility. But it is enhanced to us when we recollect the shocked and puzzled look of the lady, who saw only an indelicacy in a remark which was really delicate to the pitch of ghastliness,--stripped, in fact, of every rag of that most indelicate of all things, prudery. Thus the raillery of Falstaff owes half its excellence to Dame Quickly's consistent misinterpretation, for this reflects back upon it the color of wit. She is a duenna who blunders into being a go-between and making a capital match. "Go to! you are a woman: go." "Who, I? No! I defy thee. God's light! I was never called so in mine own house before." "You are a thing to thank God on." "I am no thing to thank God on, I would thou should'st know it." And the grim irony of Hamlet, who, after killing Polonius, replies to the king that the old man is at supper, has grown upon us through the slow perception of the courtiers, who know he is killed as well as we do, and have been sent to find the body, but cannot take the point of Hamlet's answers.