ndabout, and its
impression cumulative, like the poison of arsenic. As Galiani said of
Nature that her dice were always loaded, so the wit must throw sixes
every time. And what the same Galiani gave as a definition of sublime
oratory may be applied to its dexterity of phrase: "It is the art of
saying everything without being clapt in the Bastile, in a country where
it is forbidden to say anything." Wit must also have the quality of
unexpectedness. "Sometimes," says Barrow, "an affected simplicity,
sometimes a presumptuous bluntness, gives it being. Sometimes it rises
only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange, sometimes from a crafty
wresting of obvious matter to the purpose. Often it consisteth in one
knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are
unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless
rovings of fancy and windings of language."

That wit does not consist in the discovery of a merely unexpected
likeness or even contrast in word or thought, is plain if we look at
what is called a _conceit_, which has all the qualities of wit--except
wit. For example, Warner, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a long
poem called "Albion's England," which had an immense contemporary
popularity, and is not without a certain value still to the student of
language. In this I find a perfect specimen of what is called a conceit.
Queen Eleanor strikes Fair Rosamond, and Warner says,

Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled.[1]

[Footnote 1: This, and one or two of the following illustrations, were
used again by Mr. Lowell in his "Shakespeare Once More": _Works_
(Riverside edition), III, 53.]

This is bad as fancy for precisely the same reason that it would be good
as a pun. The comparison is unintentionally wanting in logic, just as a
pun is intentionally so. To make the contrast what it should have
been,--to make it coherent, if I may use that term of a contrast,--it
should read:

Hard was the _hand_ that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled,

for otherwise there is no identity of meaning in the word "hard" as
applied to the two nouns it qualifies, and accordingly the proper
logical copula is wanting. Of the same kind is the conceit which
belongs, I believe, to our countryman General Morris:

Her heart and morning broke together
In tears,

which is so preposterous that had it been intended for fun we might
almost have laughe