Note 37 — Chapter VI

Notes with a Poem.] Whatever merit may appear in this Poem, my friend Cockloft must own that it is entirely owing to his close adherence to his big prototype, Dr. Caustic. The rhymes are generally borrowed from the Doctor’s own works, possessing all that quaintness, cuteness, and clumsiness, for which he is remarkable. As the lesser thing should always depend upon the greater, we have rather inverted the usual title of such works, and made the poem minor. We recommend the Doctor’s mode of compiling a book to all the nums of the day—as an example, we instance his “Terrible Tractoration,” of which, as few buy, and still fewer read it (a proof that the town are not quite such fools as the Doctor would make them), we shall say little. The book was smothered in notes, like a goose in onions—some ill-natured cynics have asserted that what little whim the work contained lay entirely in the notes, which we are sorry to say were not written by the Doctor; his poem might therefore be said to resemble the leg of a stool, dressed up with savory sauce; or, as the Doctor will understand it better, that famous dish called pumpkin-pie, where, though the pumpkin gives the name to the dish, yet the great skill of the cook is to hide the twang of it as much as possible with spice and sugar.