"One may objeck to an immence deal of your writings, witch, betwigst you and me, contain more sham sentiment, sham morallaty and sham potry than you'd like to own; but in spite of this, there's the stuf you; you've a kind and loyal heart in your buzm, bar'net—a trifle deboshed, praps: a keen i, igspecially for what is comick (as for your tragady, it's mighty flatchulent), and a ready pleasn't pen. The man who says you're an As, is an As himself. Dont b'lieve him, bar'net: not that I suppose you will; for, if I've formed a correck opinion of you from your wuck, you think your small beear as good as most men's. Every man does—and wy not? We brew, and we love our own tap—amen; but the pint betwigst us is this steupid, absudd way of crying out because the public don't like it too. Wy should they, my dear bar'net? You may vow that they are fools, or that the critix are your enemies, or that the world should judge your poams by your critikle rules, and not by their own. You may beat your brest, and vow that you are a martyr, but you won't mend the matter."
After these general remarks, the critic-footman takes up the subject of style, and argues with a good deal of ingenuity and force in favor of simplicity and terseness, especially in his performance of The Sea-Captain:
"Sea-captings should not be eternly spowting, and invoking gods, hevn, starz, and angels, and other silestial influences. We can all do it, bar'net: no-think in life is easier. I can compare my livery buttons to the stars, or the clouds of my backr pipe to the dark vollums that ishew from Mount Hetna; or I can say that angles are looking down from them, and the tobacco-silf, like a happy soil released, is circling round and upwards, and shaking sweetness down. All this is as easy as to drink; but it's not potry, bar'net, nor natral. Pipple, when their mothers reckonise them, don't howl about the suckumambient air, and paws to think of the happy leaves a-rustling—leastways, one mistrusts them if they do...Look at the neat grammaticle twist of Lady Arundel's spitch too, who in the cors of three lines has made her son a prince, a lion with a sword and coronal, and a star. Wy gauble, and sheak up metafers in this way, bar'net? One simile is quite enuff in the best of sentences; and I preshume I need not tell you that it's as well to have it like while you are about it. Take my advice, honrabble sir: listen to an umble footman: it's genrally best in potry to understand perffickly what you mean yourself, and to igspress your meaning clearly affterward: the simpler the words the better, praps. You may, for instans, call a coronet an 'ancestral coronal,' if you like, as you might call a hat a 'swart sombrero,' a glossy four-and-nine, a 'silken helm, to storm impermeable,' and 'lightsome as a breezy gossamer;' but in the long run it's as well to call it a hat. It is a hat, and that name is quite as poeticle as another."
The remarks of Mr. Yellowplush upon some of the segregated passages are amusing enough. Take the following, for example:
Girl, beware!
The love that trifles round the charm it gilds,
Oft ruins while it shines.
Igsplane this, men and angles! I've tried every way; backards, forards, and all sorts of trancepositions:
The love that ruins round the charm it shines
Gilds while it trifles oft,