children learn their letters at school, but that they may come hereafter
to read puffs at college? Why but for the propagation of puffs do
honorary lecturers hold forth upon science, and gratuitous editors
circulate literature? Are not gas-lights chiefly used for their
illumination, and steamboats for their spread? And shall not history,
which has given to one era the name of the age of gold, and has entitled
another the age of silver, call this present nineteenth century the age
of puffs?

Take up the first thing upon your table, the newspaper for instance, or
the magazine, the decorated drawing-box, the Bramah pen, and twenty to
one but a puff more or less direct shall lurk in the patent of the one,
while a whole congeries of puffs shall swarm in bare and undisguised
effrontery between the pages of the other.

Walk into the streets;--and what meet you there? Puffs! puffs! puffs!
From the dead walls, chalked over with recommendations to purchase
Mr. Such-an-one's blacking, to the walking placard insinuating the
excellences of Mr. What-d'ye-call-him's Cream Gin*--from the bright
resplendent brass-knob, garnished with the significant words "Office
Bell," beside the door of an obscure surveyor, to the spruce carriage
of a newly arrived physician driving empty up and down the street,
everything whether movable or stationary is a puff.

* He was a genius in his line (I had almost written an evil
genius) who invented that rare epithet, that singular
combination of the sweetest and purest of all luxuries, the
most healthful and innocent of dainties, redolent of
association so rural and poetical, with the vilest
abominations of great cities, the impure and disgusting
source of misery and crime. Cream Gin! The union of such
words is really a desecration of one of nature's most genial
gifts, as well as a burlesque on the charming old pastoral
poets; a flagrant offence against morals, and against that
which in its highest sense may almost be considered a branch
of morality--taste.

But shops form, of course, the chief locality of the craft of puffing.
The getting off of goods is its grand aim and object. And of all shops
those which are devoted to the thousand and one articles of female
decoration, the few things which women do, and the many which they do
not want, stand pre-eminent in this great art of the nineteenth century.

Not to enter upon the grand manoeuvre