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.