The Jest Book (published 1865), by the editor of Punch Magazine Mark Lemon, contains 1,711 Punch-quality humorous stories, poems, and epigrams. Here are a few…
LXV.–A LATE EDITION.
It was with as much delicacy as satire that Porson returned, with the manuscript of a friend, the answer, “That it would be read when Homer and Virgil were forgotten, but not till then.”
LXXV.–EPIGRAM.
You say, without reward or fee,
Your uncle cur’d me of a dang’rous ill;
I say he never did prescribe for me,
The proof is plain,–I’m living still.
LXXXI.–A GRAVE DOCTOR.
Counsellor Crips being on a party at Castle-Martyr, one of the company, a physician, strolled out before dinner into the churchyard. Dinner being served, and the doctor not returned, some one expressed his surprise where he could be gone to. “Oh,” says the counsellor, “he is but just stept out to pay a visit to some of his old patients.”
CXXV.–IN SUSPENSE.
The sloth, in its wild state, spends its life in trees, and never leaves them but from force or accident. The eagle to the sky, the mole to the ground, the sloth to the tree; but what is most extraordinary, he lives not upon the branches, but under them. He moves suspended, rests suspended, sleeps suspended, and passes his life in suspense,–like a young clergyman distantly related to a bishop.
See what I mean? Punch quality.