48 
Butler—Phases of Witticism. 
A lady pleaded with her confessor for permission to use cos¬ 
metic rouge. He allowed her to apply it to one side of her 
face. 
A cardinal who had been painted in the pit of perdition by 
Michael Angelo, urged the Pope to make the artist take him out. 
“I would,” said the Pontiff, “were you in purgatory; those in 
the Inferno are beyond my reach.” 
When an Athenian miser had presented his sweetheart with a 
very small bottle of wine, but told her it was of the very oldest 
brand in the city, her remark was: “It seems to be rather small 
of its age.” Wit of this type is a variation of JUsop’s fable 
about a fox who served up soup to a crane on a broad platter, 
and about a crane who paid him in his own coin with soup in a 
narrow-necked bottle. Or we may style it St. Cecelia’s invita¬ 
tion to the cherubs who flitted about her new-born organ. She 
bade them be seated, tantalizing those half-made angels in 
whose make up there was no provision for sitting down at all. 
A man was boasting that he would never see another fool, for 
he would stay at home, and keep his door locked. But a wit 
told him, “You will soon see one unless you also break your look¬ 
ing-glass.” 
President Buchanan sent an army of soldiers to Utah for con¬ 
verting the Mormons. Wits said that if he had not been an old 
bachelor he would have sent a score of fashionable milliners, and 
so have turned failure into success. 
A man defended his loquacity because it was wrong to hide a 
talent in a napkin. But wits said: “What right have you to 
mistake a napkin for a talent and flirt it in our faces?” 
Tantalizing concessions thus bring out a witty unfitness. No 
less of such unfitness is shown by wits in the significance or 
combination of words. 
•A wit who gazed at a horseshoe and wondered what it was, 
when told what it was, said he had been in doubt whether it 
might not be the shoe of a mare. 
A man was praised as a pillar of the church. But as he never 
saw the inside of one, wits declared that he ought rather to be 
styled a buttress which supports but remains always an out¬ 
sider. 
