THE SQUIB ANNUAL
Is a nice little packet of satirical feux d' artifice, capitally made by an expert hand at political squibbery. No sooner is it opened than a spark of wit sets the verse fizzing away as freely and the puns exploding as smartly as at any bonfire on the Fifth of No- venaber. If the book goes off as well as the squibs do, it will run like wildfire.
The editor, we suspect, is the author of the greater part if not all of the contents. His verse flows smoothly, and even elegantly at times ; and he is at home in every variety from the Hudibrastie couplet to the ottava rima. The humour is pleasant and pointed; sarcastic, but not ill-natured : the puns, like Hoop's, are equi- yokes of ideas, not a mere play on words ; and the double rhymes are very comical. The " Epistle to Lord Brougham," "A Tale of The Times,'g and "The Learned Goose," are among the best; though there is some excellent satire in the " New Ship of Fools ; " and the ridi- cule of the "Silent System" of prison discipline, and " The Music and Dancing Bill," is successful and clever of its kind. SEYMOUR'S designs are ludicrous, and conceived in the spirit of the text they illustrate. Captain Ross's Dream is a humorous fancy. HUME and O'CONNELL as policemen seizing on the Duke of CUMBERLAND as an old orange-woman, Lord BROUGHAM as Guy Vaux going to blow up the Lords, and the Tories trying to raise the falling kite of The Times, are clever caricatures; the character of the faces is well hit off. But the best of all is "The Working of the Corporation Bill." The bloated corporations, looking like obese turtles dressed in civic robes, are placed by Lord JOHN, one by one, under an enormous chopper, worked by the Ministers, that cuts off " the bow-windows" of each body corporate. The refractory struggles of the globular beings as they are dragged up to the bill, and their shadowy thinness as they stalk away from it like a perspective array of lamp-posts, leaving their protuberances of wealth and corruption behind them, —and the intense horror of the one under the operation,—are all conceived with a gusto worthy of GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, the head master of this school.
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