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
Gil