The Sun.
London, England, 1864-05-13 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Jest Book. Selected and arranged by Mark
Lemon. One Vol. Pp. 361. Macmillan.
A wiser and a wittier Joe Miller has had com-
mitted to his charge the pleasant task of making
this very delightful compilation. Quips and cranks
are here in abundance. Nods and becks come out
upon us plentifully in the shape of apt italics and
emphasising notes of exclamation. The pith and
marrow of a joke is alone for the most part given
by the collector and collator of these witticisms
and whimsicalities. We don't 'light, hardly any-
where, upon one of those dreary circumlocutory pre-
ambles to a joke that so effectually take the favour
off it, beforehand. As—" oae morning when Sydney
Smith was walking down the right-hand side of St.
James's-street, bet ween seven and eight o'clock p.m.,
immediately after the rising of the Commons on a
count-cut, happening to meet H. on the threshold
of the Thatched House Tavern at the moment a
shower of rain was beginning to fall, upon H. re-
marking "—until one gets just sick to death of the
joke (even though it is one of Sydney Smith's) long
before the joke itself comes to our knowledge.
No—here, in " The Jest Book" consisting of the
choicest anecdotes and sayings, selected and ar-
ranged by the very man who ought to have been
selected to arrange them, to " wit," Mark Lemon,
the Editor of Punch—we have none of this intoler-
able jabbering garnish of empty small talk by
way of preliminary to a pun, a sarcasm, a
humorous innendo, or any other sort or kind of
sudden facetiousness. Mr. Lemon, one might say,
has apparently taken Punch's nose and chin for his
nutcrackers—and has, with the aid of those same
comical nippers,cracked all his appetizing little nuts
of fun, nuts of all sorts, filberts, walnuts, barcelona
nuts, pistuchio nuts, cherry stones, peach stones,
apricot stones, nectarine stones, and so forth, and has
ranged them all before us on his ample board, each
with its flavouring (more or less as the case
may be) of Attic salt —so that we can
devour them at once, without any more ado, and
with a relish. Of course there are several old
friends who thus come to light here in this motley
concourse of witticisms and whimsicalities. But
most of them are such merry old friends that
we are right glad to meet with them again among
our new acquaintance. Once or twice, in his way
of telling an old joke, we detect Mr. Lemon,
to our great amazement, spoiling it 1 As, in
the one (23) where Sheridan threatens to
cut his toe off with a shilling—the true
reading is to the effect that Tom plumps out
at once, "You don't happen to have it about
with you now, sir, do you ?" Our younger Joe
Miller, however, having a very dim remembrance of
this, and of Tom Sheridan's other reply to his father
when the latter was urging him to take a wife—
" Whose, sir ?" Mark Lemon, we say, here
mixes the two good jokes together into
one very indifferent one. So also is it with
his report of Regers'e venturesome question
about Junius, addressed by the old Banker
Poet to Sir Philip Francis—That (50) ought to
have been given rather thus: 11.—" There's
one question I should very much like to ask you,
Sir Philip." Sir P. F. (severely)—" You'd better
not, sir !" In (103) surely by a misprint Grinling
Gibbons is mentioned—facetiously perhaps—as
Grinly ! Where possibly oan the jest lie agai❑ in
(368) when Lord Ellenborough is related as
having stopped his carriage on his way home
from Hone's Trial, at Charing Cross, saying
"It occurs to me that they sell the best
herrings in London at that shop; Buy six." Can
anybody see the joke there ? For the life of us we
can't. On the very same page, too, there is a morsel
of fatuous stupidity is the shape of a little doggrel
epigram in four lines, upon " Charles Kean, the
actor"—that, when perpetuated thus in a book,
almost reads like a mean malignity. Another very
old joke with a new variation is the story told
about Quin and the John Dories here (493)
transformed for once into mullets. Severel
of the droll things thus collected together are
capitally good, some of them being rather
new to us. Tho Quaker (to a man violently
abusing him) "Have a care friend, thou may'st
run thy face against my fist." The gentleman
(with two wretched candles, at an inn), "Here,
waiter, let me have a couple of decent candles to
see how these others burn." The other gentleman,
at the other inn (to the boy who had been a long
while getting him another cut of beef), "Are you the
same boy I gave the order to ? " Yes, sir." " Dear
me, how you've grown !" Lord Norbury (to the
man who had been boasting of shooting thirty-three
hares before breakfast)—" Thirty-three hairs!
Zounds, sir, then you must have been firing at a
wig!" Doctor Johnson's well■remembered growl
(in reference to a long piece of music just played
before him, and which had been spoken of as diffi-
cult)—" Difficulty ? Would to God, sir, it had been
impossible !" Sir William Cheere, the possessor of
a very long nose—playing backgammon with an
irritated player who was losing, and who (incom-
moded perhaps by the long nose of Sir Wil-
liam) had exclaimed, " Blow your nose"—" Blow
it yourself," being thereupon Sir William's im-
perturbable rejoinder "it's as near you as me."
The Highlander to his friend, who had been
complaining of having passed an indifferent
night at a wayside inn where they were stopping,
thereupon asking his friend about his might—
" Troth, man, nae vera weal, either ; bat I was
muckle better aff than the bugs, for de'il ane of
them closed an e'e the hale night !" Sydney Smith's
famous inquiry at the dinner table (from a person
who had immediately before dinner been announcing
himself to be a materialist—" Very good soup this,
sir," says Smith. " Oui, Monsieur, &est excel-
lente," is the reply. "Pray, sir," says Sydney,
"Do you believe in the cook ?" Jerrold, to the
very thin, dull man—" Sir, you are like a pin, but
without the heed or the point." The pretty
quakeress to the young fellow who had threatened
to kiss her—" Friend, thee must not do it." " Oh,
by Jove, but I must," says the youth." " Well,
friend, as thou haat sworn, thee may do it, but thee
must not make a practice of it," Enough, however,
surely has been said here of and from Mark Lemon's
" Jest Book" to tickle the appetite for more of these
good things among those who not only love a
laugh, but who can appreciate a good thing when
they hear it or read it. If we could weed out a mere
sprinkling of what appear to us very indifferent
j ests,one, by way of example, we have already given,
—and if we could then add in their places others
that we wot of and yet fait to find in this ample
repertory of tan—we should pronounce this now
" Jest Book" as among all kinds and descriptions of
jest-books, from Joe Miller downwards, or upwards
ought we to say ? the ne plus ultra of facetiousness.
As it is—it is a triumphant defiance of that result
of blue devilment, ennui—delightfully misspelt in
Charles Reade's Christie Johnstone, "Yawn-we !"
It is one of the merriest table books that has for
a long while past made its appearance.

Popular Edition of the Noctes Ambrosianee. By
Professor Wilson. Vol. IV. Blackwood and

Sons.

With this fourth volume the popular edition of
the immortal Nodes Ambrosiance is completed. As
a frontispiece to it—we have Sir John Watson
Gordon's life-like portraiture of Thomas De Quincey,
most eloquent of Opium-eaters. Noctes, from the
thirty •third to the thirty-ninth inclusively, are
here given in their entirety—the thirty ninth,
which appeared in the February number of
Maga 1835, closing the renowned serial in which
among others (each in turn,facile princeps), North
Tickler and the Shepherd had been the interlocu-
tors. Perhaps the lion's share of talk over the board
of Ambrose fell to the lot of the Ettrick Shepherd—
the latter thus in other words, we suppose we may
say, going the whole Hogg. But here, happily for
the perfected completeness of the four•volumed edi-
tion now squared up by the Messrs. Blackwood, we
find at the end of volume four not merely an amplc
glossary from the Scoticisms, with a copious index
to the immense variety of topics touched upon in
these discursive conversations and soliloquys, but be
sides that a reprint in its entirety from Blackwood's
Magaztne for October 1817 of the renowned •' Chal-
dee Manuscript." It will hardly surprise anyone,
therefore, we presume, if we herewith add, that