The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table | Page 6

rejoined, that no
man should jest so without being punished for it, and charged for the prisoner, who was
acquitted, and the pun ordered to be burned by the sheriff. The bound volume was
forfeited as a deodand, but not claimed.
People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad tracks. They
amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may upset a freight train of
conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.
I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two books, of which I will mark the places on this
slip of paper. (While he is gone, I may say that this boy, our land-lady's youngest, is

called BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, after the celebrated philosopher of that name. A highly
merited compliment.)
I wished to refer to two eminent authorities. Now be so good as to listen. The great
moralist says: "To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle of social intercourse is
to tamper with the currency of human intelligence. He who would violate the sanctities of
his mother tongue would invade the recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and
repeat the banquet of Saturn without an indigestion."
And, once more, listen to the historian. "The Puritans hated puns. The Bishops were
notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal carried them to the verge of license.
Majesty itself must have its Royal quibble. 'Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,' said
Queen Elizabeth, 'but ye shall make less stir in our realm than my Lord of Leicester.' The
gravest wisdom and the highest breeding lent their sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon
playfully declared himself a descendant of 'Og, the King of Bashan. Sir Philip Sidney,
with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought him water, for wasting a casque
full upon a dying man. A courtier, who saw Othello performed at the Globe Theatre,
remarked, that the blackamoor was a brute, and not a man. 'Thou hast reason,' replied a
great Lord, 'according to Plato his saying; for this be a two- legged animal WITH
feathers.' The fatal habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection
spread to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of verbal
double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the Cadmus who introduced
the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in the time of the Tudors grew to regicide
and revolution in the age of the Stuarts."
Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the Macaulay-flowers of
literature?--There was a dead silence.--I said calmly, I shall henceforth consider any
interruption by a pun as a hint to change my boarding-house. Do not plead my example.
If I have used any such, it has been only as a Spartan father would show up a drunken
helot. We have done with them.
- If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic?--I should say that its most
frequent work was to build a pons asinorum over chasms which shrewd people can
bestride without such a structure. You can hire logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove
anything that you want to prove. You can buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived,
and that no battle of Bunker-hill was ever fought. The great minds are those with a wide
span, which couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other. Logicians carry
the surveyor's chain over the track of which these are the true explorers. I value a man
mainly for his primary relations with truth, as I understand truth,--not for any secondary
artifice in handling his ideas. Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously
unsound in judgment. I should not trust the counsel of a smart debater, any more than that
of a good chess- player. Either may of course advise wisely, but not necessarily because
he wrangles or plays well.
The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer lifts his forefoot, at the
expression, "his relations with truth, as I understand truth," and when I had done, sniffed
audibly, and said I talked like a transcendentalist. For his part, common sense was good
enough for him.
Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, AS YOU UNDERSTAND IT. We all
have to assume a standard of judgment in our own minds, either of things or persons. A
man who is willing to take another's opinion has to exercise his judgment in the choice of

whom to follow, which is often as nice a matter as to judge of things for one's self. On the
whole, I had rather judge men's minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, than
judge of thoughts by knowing who utter them. I must do one or