Bishop Heber’s College Puns
The late amiable, learned, and pious Bishop Heber was not above a pun in his day, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson’s anathema, that a man who made a pun would pick a pocket. Among the jeux des mots attributed to him are the following: he was one day dining with an Oxford party, comprises the élite of his day, and when the servant was in the act of removing the table-cloth from off the green table-covering, at the end of their meal, he exclaimed, in the words of Horace—
“Diffugere nives: redeunt jam gramina campis.”
At another time he made one of a party of Oxonians, amongst whom was a gentleman of great rotundity of person, on which account he had acquired the soubriquet of ‘heavy-a—se;’ and he was withal of very somniferous habits, frequently dozing in the midst of a conversation that would have made the very glasses tingle with delight. He had fallen fast asleep during the time a mirth-moving subject was recited by one of the party, but woke up just at the close, when all save himself were “shaking fat sides,” and on his begging to know the subject of their laughter, Heber let fly at him in pure Horatian—
“Exsomnis stupet Evias.”
The mirth-loving Dr. Barnard, late Provost of Eton, was cotemporary, at Cambridge, with