MR. HIPPY'S VAGARIES; ок, THE ABSENT MAN. "Not a sentence-not a syllable of Trismegistus shall be lost through my neglect. I am his word-banker-his storekeeper of puns and syllogisms."--Charles Lamb. MR. HIPPY-(as he was familiarly called, otherwise Harty Hippisley, Gent.)-Mr. Hippy was not a man of wit, though he sometimes approached very near to it. A Scotch friend, indeed, once called him "A man of wet" (meaning wit). "Yes," said he, turning his eye with a merry twinkle upon his flattering friend, "very wet." (And he took the hint from his friend's pronunciation to suggest this as the true reading of a couplet by Dryden which has been much disputed "Great wet to madness nearly is allied, And thin potations do their bounds divide.") He was simply a man of whim, which sometimes had blended up with it much playful pleasantry, and sometimes a spice of true humour, to season it: for he was a humorist, or I know not what humour is; an English humorist-the only humorist: and notwithstanding all his real or imagined unhappiness (and he had many good proofs to give as reasons for any momentary indulgence in complaint), he was, after all, of that happy nature, that though there was at times a savour of salt in his humour, there was no bitterness; nothing |