bishop Potter:

'Alack and well-a-day:
Potter himself is turned to clay!'

Horace Walpole wrote bitterly of Thomas Secker, Archbishop of
Canterbury, that 'His grace signed his own proper name--Thomas _Cant._,'
which would certainly have read better as 'Thomas Cantuar.' But the
bishops' signatures have always been regarded as fair game. What puns
have been made on the unhappy, because so obvious, 'Oxon!' In 1848,
when Bishop Hampden was accused of heresy by the party headed by the
Bishop of Oxford, the would-be satirist wrote that

'As once the Pope with fury full,
When Luther laid his heavy knocks on,
At the Reformer loosed a Bull--
So these at Hampden set an Ox-on.'

Again, when Archdeacon Hale figured prominently in the old churchyard
controversy, _Punch_ observed:

'The intramural churchyard's reeking pale
Breathes health around it, says a reverend party;
But though the spot may keep a parson Hale,
Can people who in-hale its fumes be hearty?'

Turning to the records of the other professions, one finds a good deal
of the same sort of thing. Literature affords such examples as those
which are supplied in the well-known lines by John Henley on William
Broome and by Lord Byron on Tom Moore ('Now 'tis Moore that's Little').
There were journal writers before Greville and Carlyle, and, when Lady
Bury published her 'Diary of the Times of George IV.,' Hood, no doubt,
was justified in crying, as he did:

'Oh, may I die without a Diary,
And be interred without a Bury-ing!'

In a very different spirit were James Smith's lines on Miss Edgeworth's
works:

'Good and bad join in telling the source of their birth;
The bad own their _edge_, and the good own their _worth_.'

The vocal and histrionic arts have often had their victims. Who can
possibly have forgotten Luttrell's famous compliment to Miss Tree:

'On this Tree when a nightingale settles and sings,
The Tree will return her as good as she brings.'

Here, if ever, was a pun on a name defensible. Less well known is this
quatrain on the famous actor, William Farren, who died in 1861:

'If Farren, cleverest of men,
Should go to right-about,
What part of town will he be then?
Why, "Farren-done-Without"!'

Those ladies of beauty and fashion whose names were susceptible at once
of pun and compliment have naturally inspired the wits of their
respective days. Thus, it was said of the charming sisters Gun