THE PUFF PISCATORIAL. 205 



THE PUFF PISCATORIAL. 



WHAT an excellent article might be written on puff- 

 ing ! puffing in all its hydra-headed forms ! First, 

 there are the more refined categories of puff, such as 

 the " puff preliminary," the " puff oblique," and the 

 "puff reflective ;" then we have the puff direct as 

 when the critic assures his unfledged poetaster that 

 the bays of Homer, the spirit of Goethe, and the 

 mantle of Shakespeare, have descended upon him in 

 a heap ; the " sensational puff," the " puff political," 

 "preliminary," "poetic," "alliterative," "epigrammatic ;" 

 and winding up with the class of advertising puffs 

 which are designed, we can only suppose, to appeal 

 to the unmitigatedly gullable of this world the 

 Moses Primroses, Verdant Greens, and Young-men- 

 from-the-country strata of society and which might 

 perhaps be classified roughly as the " puff hyperboli- 

 cal," the "puff mendacious," and the "puff utterly 

 preposterous." 



What an excellent article, as we have said, might 

 be written on these manifold developments of the art 

 of puffing ! but then again it might not : and at any 

 rate we don't intend to write it. So we will leave it 



