These, and a thousand other little expedients, by which the arts of Quizzing and Banter flourish, practice will soon teach you.  If it should be necessary to transcribe a dull passage, not very fertile in topics of humour and raillery; you may introduce it as a “favourable specimen of the Author’s manner.”

Few people are aware of the powerful effects of what is philosophically termed Association.  Without any positive violation of truth, the whole dignity of a passage may be undermined by contriving to raise some vulgar and ridiculous notions in the mind of the reader:  and language teems with examples of words by which the same idea is expressed, with the difference only that one excites a feeling of respect, the other of contempt.  Thus you may call a fit of melancholy, “the sulks”; resentment, “a pet”; a steed, “a nag”; a feast, “a junketing”; sorrow and affliction, “whining and blubbering”.  By transferring the terms peculiar to one state of society, to analogous situations and characters in another, the same object is attained.  “A Drill Serjeant” or “a Cat and Nine Tails” in the Trojan War, “a Lesbos smack putting into the Piraeus,” “the Penny Post of Jerusalem,” and other combinations of the like nature which, when you have a little indulged in that vein of thought, will readily suggest themselves, never fail to raise a smile, if not immediately at the expense of the Author, yet entirely destructive of that frame of mind which his Poem requires in order to be relished.

I have dwelt the longer on this branch of Literature, because you are chiefly to look here for materials of fun and irony.

Voyages and Travels indeed are no barren ground; and you must seldom let a Number of your Review go abroad without an Article of this description.  The charm of this species of writing, so universally felt, arises chiefly from its uniting Narrative with Information.  The interest we take in the story can only be kept alive by minute incident and occasional detail; which puts us in possession of the traveller’s feelings, his hopes, his fears, his disappointments, and his pleasures.  At the same time the thirst for knowledge and love of novelty is gratified by continual information respecting the people and countries he visits.

If you wish therefore to run down the book, you have only to play off these two parts against each other.  When the Writer’s object is to satisfy the first inclination, you are to thank him for communicating to the World such valuable facts as, whether he lost his way in the night, or sprained his ankle, or had no appetite for his dinner.  If he is busied about describing the Mineralogy, Natural History, Agriculture, Trade, etc. of a country:  you may mention a hundred books from whence the same information may be obtained; and deprecate the practice of emptying old musty Folios into new Quartos, to gratify that sickly taste for a smattering about everything which distinguishes the present Age.