Note 102 — CANTO IV. GRAND ATTACK!

Than Howard’s fulminating powder.

It is a long time since the public have had any reports from the honorable Mr Howard’s fulminating powder, which, three years since, made so much noise, that the world had reason to expect that the thunderiferous chymist would make no more of exploding to old Nick a whole army of Frenchmen, with Buonaparte at its head, than would a cockney sportsman of shooting a tame goose on the first of September.

Whether this mighty affair is all blown up, or what may have been the cause of the silence of those who defended a thing which so loudly proclaimed its own merits, it becomes Mr Howard to explain.

Of this he may be assured, if he do not stir his stumps in order to fulfil some of the fair promises which he and his friends have made to the Royal Society and the public, of the astonishing achievements they were about to perform, by the demi-omnipotent power of his new invented artificial thunder, I hereby give the alarming intelligence that I will apply my own superior talents to this sonorous subject. Should that happen, those laurels which were designed to decorate the brow of Mr Howard will be tied in a bow-knot round my venerable temples. For, in that case, the learned chymist’s acquisitions, in the art of intonation, will bear no better comparison to those of Dr Caustic, than the clattering wagon-wheels of Salmoneus to the world-astounding thunderbolts of Jupiter. No person can doubt my being able to accomplish all this, who is apprized, as he may be from perusing this performance, of the vast quantity of the most detonating kind of mercury which exists in my composition, and which will fulminate with greater effect, than the gold and silver that line the magnipotent purse of the honorable the heir apparent to the duke of Norfolk.