of Metternich concerning the
elder branch of the Bourbons, by a _cul de lampe_ in the _Morning
Chronicle_!

We have little doubt of shortly seeing announcements--standing like
tombstones in those literary cemeteries, the Saturday papers--of "A
new work upon America, from the graver of George Cruickshank;" or "A
new fashionable novel, (diamond edition,) from the accomplished pencil
of H.B." Kenny Meadows will become the Byron of the day, Leech the
Scott, Forrester the Marryatt, Phiz the Trollope; Stanfield and Turner
will be epic poets, Landseer preside over the belles-lettres, and
Webster and Stone become the epigrammatists and madrigalists of the
press.

All this will, doubtless, throw a number of deserving persons out of
employ. The writers, whose stock in trade consists of words rather
than ideas, will find their way to Basinghall Street, prose will be at
a discount, and long-windedness be accounted a distemper. A great
variety of small Sapphos must turn seamstresses*, at three-halfpence
a shirt instead of a penny a line; while the minor poets will have to
earn a livelihood by writing invoice, instead of in verse. But this
transposition of talent, and transition of gain, is no more than arose
from the substitution of railroads for turnpike roads. By that
innovation thousands of hard-working post-horses were left without
rack or manger; and by the present arrangement, Clowes, Spottiswoode,
and the authors who have served to afford matter for their types, will
be driven from the field.

*Transcriber's Note: Original "semstresses"

But the world (no longer to be called of letters, but of emblems) will
be the gainer. It will be no longer a form of speech to talk of having
"_glanced_ at the morning papers," whose city article will, of course,
be composed by artists skilled in drawing figures. The biographies of
contemporary or deceased statesmen will be limned, not by Lord
Brougham or Macaulay, but by the impartial hand of the Royal Academy;
and the catacombs at Kensal Green, like those discovered by Belzoni on
the banks of the Nile, exhibit their eulogistic inscriptions in
hieroglyphics. By this new species of shorthand we might have embodied
this very article in half a dozen sprightly etchings! But as the
hapless inventor of the first great art of printing incurred, among
his astounded contemporaries, the opprobrium of being in compact with
the evil one, (whence, probably, the familiar appellation of printers'