* * * *
PROPOSALS FOR A NEW ART OF PUFFING.
It has long been felt that all the old arts of puffing have been
exhausted, and the consequence is that some of the most renowned masters
of the arts formerly in vogue have retired from a field in which nothing
more can be gathered. The poet has departed from the Mart of MOSES, and
the Muses that once hung round the brilliant jet of WARREN have deserted
those extensive premises in the Strand where every blacking-bottle used
to be, as it were, a jet of the Fount of Castaly.
The harp that once in WARREN'S Mart
The soul of Music shed,
Now mutely lies in WARREN'S cart,
Or under WARREN'S bed.
So sleeps the source of MOSES' lays,
So ROWLANDS' puffs are o'er;
And heads once wreathed in poets' bays
Are thumped for rhymes no more.
No more by stanzas, songs, and odes,
WARREN his blacking sells;
The van alone the carman loads,
The name of WARREN tells.
Thus MOSES' muse so seldom wakes;
The only sign she gives
Is when some silly rhymes she makes,
To show that still she lives.
Poetic puffing having been blown to its utmost extent until the
over-inflated windbag has burst and collapsed, the oratorical style of
puffing having departed with the late lamented GEORGE ROBINS, and the
narrative or anecdotal order of puffing having been abandoned by ROWLAND
AND SON, of scented memory, nothing remains but to invent a novelty.
Acknowledging, as we do, that "there is nothing new under the sun," we
sit down on a day when there is no sun to be seen, and on a misty
morning in December we ask ourselves whether something new under a fog
may not be perceptible. From the huge cauldron of pea-soup, which is
emblemed in the London atmosphere, we fancy we discern something, and a
new art of puffing is revealed to us in the shape of a Proposal to
combine the Commercial with the Comic, and to establish on the ruins of
WARREN'S fitful lyre and MOSES' muse's measures a system of comic
puffing, containing a joke in every announcement. In order to show how
the thing may be done, we give--gratis--a few specimens. We will begin
with a few jokes for Royal Tradesmen.
1st. The QUEEN'S shoemaker may advertise himself as "purveyor of shoes
to the whole of HER MAJESTY'S foot," and he may also add that "the good
footing on which Royalty stands with the people in this country is
entirely due to &c. &c., who makes the QUEEN'S shoes, and who
|