make anybody
fall asleep."

Johnson observes that Addison never out-steps the modesty of nature, nor
raises merriment or wonder by the violation of truth. He wrote several
essays in the "Spectator" on wit, and condemns much that commonly passes
under the name. Together with verbal humour and many absurd devices
connected with it, he especially repudiates the rebus. In the first part
of the following extract he refers to this device being used for other
objects than those of amusement, and he might have reminded us of the
alphabets of primitive times, when the picture of an animal signified
the sound with which its name commenced; but the rebus proper is merely
a bad attempt at humour--a sort of pictorial pun--

"I find likewise among the ancients that ingenious kind of conceit
which the moderns distinguish by the name of a rebus, that does not
sink a letter, but a whole word, by substituting a picture in its
place. When Caesar was one of the masters of the Roman mint, he
placed the figure of an elephant upon the reverse of the public
money; the word Caesar signifying an elephant in the Punic language.
This was artificially contrived by Caesar, because it was not lawful
for a private man to stamp his own figure upon the coin of the
Commonwealth. Cicero, so called from the founder of his family, who
was marked on the nose with a little wen like a vetch, (which is
Cicer in Latin,) instead of Marcus Tullius Cicero, ordered the
words Marcus Tullius with the figure of a vetch at the end of them,
to be inscribed on a public monument. This was done probably to
show that he was neither ashamed of his name or family,
notwithstanding the envy of his competitors had often reproached
him with both. In the same manner we read of a famous building that
was marked in several parts of it with the figures of a frog and a
lizard; these words in Greek having been the names of the
architects, who by the laws of their country were never permitted
to inscribe their own names upon their works. For the same reason,
it is thought that the forelock of the horse in the antique
equestrian statute 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 o