[21]
There is
another similar type, which is perhaps the worst of
all, where the play upon words is combined with a
false comparison. When I was a young man I heard
a distinguished pleader, after handing a mother some
splinters of bone taken from the head of her son
(which he did merely to provide an occasion for his
epigram), cry: “Unhappiest of women, your son is
not yet dead and yet you have gathered up his
bones!”
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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