THE PUFF PISCATORIAL. 205 
THE PUFF PISCATORIAL. 
Waar 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 
