Courtly Quips & Gentry Gems, Volume I: The Best of Early English Wit, by Gayla Groom, Kindle Edition

Description

QUOTES, QUIPS, JESTS, ANECDOTES, MAXIMS, STORIES & JOKES – Kindle version.

A new, true, and valuable addition to the amount of fun and wit loose in the world! Courtly Quips & Gentry Gems, Volume I: The Best of Early English Wit, is almost three hundred pages worth of amusing, intriguing, and authentic English quips, jests, bon mots, quotations, anecdotes, maxims, etc., from the 1700s and 1800s. Many of these appear here for the first time in a modern format, having been rescued from moldy old pages, with s’s that look like f’s, brought into the digital era by Gems Press Editor Gayla Groom.

These gems of condensed wisdom and humor are the ones that aged well. The bad bits, that were begging to be forgotten, we left forgotten. At Gems Press, we save the parts worth saving and bring those to you, nicely formatted.
THE BEST OF FIVE CONTEMPORARY COLLECTIONS OF ENGLISH WIT

This volume of Courtly Quips & Gentry Gems, Volume I, includes a careful selection of the best bits, as determined by editor Gayla Groom, from five collections of English wit:

JOE MILLER’S JESTS (published 1744)
NEW FOUNDLING HOSPITAL FOR WIT (1768)
FUN FOR EVERY DAY IN THE YEAR (1810)
THE FLOWERS OF WIT (1825)
PUNCH: VOLUME 37 (1859)

Each is excellent in its way. It is interesting to watch the evolution of English wit as the various source books appear decades apart from 1744 to 1859.

After hundreds of years, these long-lost words are fresh once again, resurrected to make their charming way in the modern world.
HISTORICAL LOCAL COLOR, AUTHENTIC 18TH- AND 19TH-CENTURY LANGUAGE AND WIT

Here’s a poem (originally published in 1768) from Courtly Quips & Gentry Gems that describes London — and Courtly Quips has poems about Dublin and Paris, also.

A DESCRIPTION OF LONDON.
Houses, churches mixt together,
Streets unpleasant in all weather,
Prisons, palaces contiguous,
Gates, a bridge, the Thames irriguous.

Gaudy things enough to tempt ye,
Showy outsides, insides empty ;
Bubbles, trades, mechanic arts,
Coaches, wheelbarrows, and carts.

Warrants, bailiffs, bills unpaid,
Lords of laundresses afraid ;
Rogues that nightly rob and shoot men.
Hangmen, aldermen, and footmen.

Lawyers, poets, priests, physicians,
Noble, simple, all conditions :
Worth, beneath a thread-bare cover,
Villainy, bedawb’d all over.

Women, black, red, fair, and grey,
Prudes, and such as never pray ;
Handsome, ugly, noisy, still,
Some that will not—more that will.

Many a beau without a shilling,
Many a widow not unwilling ;
Many a bargain, if you strike it,
This is London !—How d’ye like it ?
HIGHBROW SMARTS, HISTORICAL GOSSIP, EARTHY WIT, BAWDY VERSE, FART JOKES

There is much refined content in this collection, as people strove to preserve the wisest of what they knew, but much of the content is more down to earth. For instance, there are the many bawdy jokes and poems… Here’s the first stanza of one:

ON THE LATE SALLY SALISBURY.
Here flat on her Back,
but unactive at last,
Poor Sally lies under grim Death ;
Thro’ the Course of her Vices
she gallop’d so fast,
No Wonder she’s now out of Breath.

Some of the excerpts in this collection are a joy for the sound of their language alone, for instance:

769. A PACK OF HOUNDS.
You must go to Shakspeare for a general description of a pack ; but if you want the particular names given more than one hundred years ago, here they are in couples, taken from an old song, at the service of any sportsman :

Juno and Jupiter, Tinker and Trotter,
Singwell and Merryboy, Captain and Cryer,
Gangwell and Ginglebell, Fairmaid and Fryer,
Beauty and Bonnylass, Tanner and Trouncer,
Foamer and Forrester, Bonner and Bouncer,
Gander and Gundamore, Jowler and Jumper,
Tarquin and Tarmerlane, Thunder and Thumper.

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