_Pun._--C. H. KENYON (Vol. iii., p. 37.) asks if Milton could have
seriously perpetrated the pun "each tome a tomb." I doubt whether he
intended it for a pun. But his Query induces me to put another. Whence and
when did the aversion to, and contempt for, a pun arise? Is it an offshoot
from the Reformation? Our Catholic fellow-countrymen surely felt no such
aversion; for the claim which they make of supremacy for {142} their church
is based upon a pun, and that a very sorry one.