reader some surprise. Thus, when a poet tells us
the bosom of his mistress is as white as snow, there is no wit in the
comparison; but when he adds, with a sigh, it is as cold too, it then
grows into wit. Every reader's memory may supply him with innumerable
instances of the same nature. For this reason, the similitudes in heroic
poets, who endeavour rather to fill the mind with great conceptions than
to divert it with such as are new and surprising, have seldom anything in
them that can be called wit. Mr. Locke's account of wit, with this short
explanation, comprehends most of the species of wit, as metaphors,
similitudes, allegories, enigmas, mottoes, parables, fables, dreams,
visions, dramatic writings, burlesque, and all the methods of allusion:
as there are many other pieces of wit, how remote soever they may appear
at first sight from the foregoing description, which upon examination
will be found to agree with it.

As true wit generally consists in this resemblance and congruity of
ideas, false wit chiefly consists in the resemblance and congruity
sometimes of single letters, as in anagrams, chronograms, lipograms, and
acrostics; sometimes of syllables, as in echoes and doggrel rhymes;
sometimes of words, as in puns and quibbles; and sometimes of whole
sentences or poems, cast into the figures of eggs, axes, or altars; nay,
some carry the notion of wit so far as to ascribe it even to external
mimicry, and to look upon a man as an ingenious person that can resemble
the tone, posture, or face of another.

As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in the
resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances, there is
another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance of ideas and
partly in the resemblance of words, which for distinction sake I shall
call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds in Cowley more
than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has likewise a great deal
of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton had a genius much above
it. Spenser is in the same class with Milton. The Italians, even in
their epic poetry, are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself
upon the ancient poets, has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we
look after mixed wit among the Greek writers, we shall find it nowhere
but in the epigrammatists. There are indeed some strokes of it in the
little poem ascribed to Musaeus, which by that as well as many o