Читать книгу Terrible Tractoration, and Other Poems онлайн

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The author never would have written a syllable intended to give Metallic Tractors favorable notoriety, had he not believed in their efficacy. As conductors of what is called animal electricity, and in principle allied to Galvanic stimulants, even their modus operandi, he thought, might be in a great measure explained. Respectable English Reviews and other periodicals gave favorable notices of the Tractors, and Mr Perkins exhibited to the author testimonials in favor of those implements from several professors of universities, many regular physicians, surgeons, clergymen, and others, men of as high standing and influence as any in community.

But although the author was willing to aid the proprietor of the tractors, he did not confine himself to topics connected with those implements. He made use of Tractoration as the title, and the tractors as the apology for a poem, in which he essayed to paint

——“every idle thing

Which Fancy finds in her excursive flight.”

Although many of the subjects alluded to, or animadverted on were intended to be satirized, others were introduced merely to give them notoriety, or honorable mention in a humorous way; to laugh with rather than to laugh at the inventors, and rather to advertise than to stigmatise their inventions, &c. Persons of this description will perceive our objects, appreciate our motives, and recollect that Dr Caustic, by virtue of a figure in rhetoric, called irony, can speak one thing and mean another, without uttering falsehood.