works. For the same reason it is thought, that the forelock of the horse in the antique equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, represents at a distance the shape of an owl, to intimate the country of the statuary, who in all probability, was an Athenian. This kind of wit was very much in vogue among our own countrymen about an age or two ago, who did not practise it for any oblique reason, as the ancients above mentioned, but purely for the sake of being witty. Among innumerable instances that may be given of this nature, I shall produce the device of one Mr. Newberry, as I find it mentioned by our learned Camden in his Remains. Mr. Newberry, to represent his name by a picture, hung up at his door the sign of a yew-tree, that had several berries upon it, and in the midst of them a great golden N hung upon a bough of the tree, which by the help of a little false spelling made up the word Newberry.

I shall conclude this topic with a rebus, which has been lately hewn out in freestone, and erected over two of the portals of Blenheim House, being the figure of a monstrous lion tearing to pieces a little cock. For the better understanding of which device, I must acquaint my English reader, that a cock has the misfortune to be called in Latin by the same word that signifies a Frenchman, as a lion is an emblem of the English nation. Such a device in so noble a pile of building, looks like a pun in an heroic poem; and I am very sorry the

truly ingenious architect would suffer the statuary to blemish his excellent plan with so poor a conceit. But I hope what I have said will gain quarter for the cock, and deliver him out of the lion's paw.

I find likewise in ancient times the conceit of making an echo talk sensibly, and give rational answers. If this could be excusable in any writer, it would be in Ovid, where he introduces the echo as a nymph, before she was worn away into nothing but a voice. The learned Erasmus, though a man of wit and genius, has composed a dialogue upon this silly kind of device, and made use of an echo who seems to have been a very extraordinary linguist, for she answers the person she talks with in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, according as she found the syllables which she was to repeat in any of those learned languages. Hudibras, in ridicule of this false kind of wit, has described Bruin bewailing the loss of his bear to a solitary echo, who is of great use to the poet in several distichs, as she does not only repeat after him, but helps out his verse, and furnishes him with rhymes:

"He rag'd, and kept as heavy a coil as

Stout Hercules for loss of Hylas;

Forcing the valleys to repeat

The accents of his sad regret;

He beat his breast, and tore his hair,

For loss of his dear crony bear,
That Echo from the hollow ground

His doleful wailings did resound

More wistfully by many times,
Than in small poets splay-foot rhymes,

That make her, in their rueful stories,
To answer to int❜rogatories,

And most unconscionably depose
Things of which she nothing knows;
And when she has said all she can say,
'Tis wrested to the lover's fancy,
Quoth he, O whither, wicked Bruin,
Art thou fled to my-Echo, ruin?

I thought th' hadst scorn'd to budge a step
For fear. (Quoth Echo) Marry guep.
Am I not here to take thy part?

Then what has quell'd thy stubborn heart?
Have these bones rattled, and this head
So often in thy quarrel bled?

Nor did I ever winch or grudge it,

For thy dear sake. (Quoth she) Mum budget.
Think'st thou 'twill not be laid i' th' dish,
Thou turn'st thy back? (Quoth Echo) Pish!
To run from those th' hadst overcome
Thus cowardly? (Quoth Echo) Mum.
But what a-vengeance makes thee fly
From me too as thine enemy?
Or if thou hast no thought of me,
Nor what I have endur'd for thee,
Yet shame and honour might prevail
To keep thee thus from turning tail:
For who would grudge to spend his blood in
His honour's cause? (Quoth she) A pudding!

Hoc est quod palles? Cur quis non prandeat, Hoc est ?
Pers. Sat. iii. 85.

Is it for this you gain those meager looks,
And sacrifice your dinner to your books?

SEVERAL kinds of false wit, that vanished in the refined ages of the world, discovered themselves again in the times of monkish ignorance.

As the monks were the masters of all that little learning which was then extant, and had their whole lives entirely disengaged from business, it is no wonder that several of them, who wanted genius for higher performances, employed many hours in the composition of such tricks in writing, as required much time and little capacity. I have seen half the Æneid turned into Latin rhymes by one of the beaux esprits of that dark age: who says in his preface to it, that the Æneid wanted nothing but the sweets of rhyme to make it the most perfect work in its kind. I have likewise seen an hymn in hexameters to the Virgin

Mary, which filled a whole book, though it consisted but of the eight following words:

"Tot, tibi, sunt, Virgo, dotes, quot, sidera, cœlo."

"Thou hast as many virtues, O Virgin, as there are stars in heaven."

The poet rung the changes upon these eight se veral words, and by that means made his verses almost as numerous as the virtues and the stars, which they celebrated. It is no wonder that men who had so much time upon their hands did not only restore all the antiquated pieces of false wit, but enriched the world with inventions of their own. It was to this age that we owe the produc tions of anagrams, which is nothing else but a transmutation of one word into another, or the turning of the same set of letters into different words; which may change night into day, or black into white, if Chance, who is the goddess that presides over these sorts of composition, shall so direct. I remember a witty author, in allusion to this kind of writing, calls his rival, who (it seems) was distorted, and had his limbs set in places that did not properly belong to them," the anagram of a man."

When the anagrammatist takes a name to work upon, he consides it at first as a mine not broken up, which will not show the treasure it contains, till he shall have spent many hours in the search of it; for it his business to find out one word that conceals itself in another, and to examine the letters in all the variety of stations in which they can