* * * * *

FASHIONABLE MOVEMENTS.

COUNT D’ORSAY declares that no gentleman having the slightest pretensions to fashionable consideration can be seen out of doors except on a Sunday, as on that day bailiffs and other low people keep at home.

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EPIGRAM ON A VERY LARGE WOMAN.

    “All flesh is grass,” so do the Scriptures say;
    But grass, when cut and dried, is turned to hay;
  Then, lo; if Death to thee his scythe should take,
  God bless us! what a haycock thou wouldst make.

* * * * *

An author that lived somewhere has such a brilliant wit, that he contracted to light the parish with it, and did it.

“Our church clock,” say the editors of a down-cast paper, “keeps time so well that we get a day out of every week by it.”

A man in Kentucky has a horse which is so slow, that his hind legs always get first to his journey’s end.

* * * * *

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

VOL. 1.

FOR THE WEEK ENDING JULY 31, 1841.

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POETRY ON AN IMPROVED PRINCIPLE.

Let me earnestly implore you, good Mr. PUNCH, to give publicity to a new invention in the art of poetry, which I desire only to claim the merit of having discovered.  I am perfectly willing to permit others to improve upon it, and to bring it to that perfection of which I am delightedly aware, it is susceptible.

It is sometimes lamented that the taste for poetry is on the decline—­that it is no longer relished—­that the public will never again purchase it as a luxury.  But it must be some consolation to our modern poets to know (as no doubt they do, for it is by this time notorious) that their productions really do a vast deal of service—­that they are of a value for which they were never designed.  They—­I mean many of them—­have found their way into the pharmacopoeia, and are constantly prescribed by physicians as soporifics of rare potency.  For instance—­

  “——­ not poppy, nor mandragora,
  Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world. 
  Shall ever usher thee to that sweet sleep”

to which a man shall be conducted by a few doses of Robert Montgomery’s Devil’s Elixir, called “Satan,” or by a portion, or rather a potion, of “Oxford.”  Apollo, we know, was the god of medicine as well as of poetry.  Behold, in this our bard, his two divine functions equally mingled!