A Century of Parody and Imitation

by Unknown

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

On the 14th of August, 1812, the following advertisement appeared in most of the daily papers:—

'Rebuilding of Drury Lane Theatre.

'The Committee are desirous of promoting a free and fair competition for an Address to be spoken upon the opening of the Theatre, which will take place on the 10th of October next. They have, therefore, thought fit to announce to the public, that they will be glad to receive any such compositions, addressed to their Secretary, at the Treasury Office, in Drury Lane, on or before the 10th of September, sealed up; with a distinguishing word, number, or motto, on the cover, corresponding with the inscription on a separate sealed paper, containing the name of the author, which will not be opened unless containing the name of the successful candidate.'

Upon the propriety of this plan, men's minds were, as they usually are upon matters of moment, much divided. Some thought it a fair promise of the future intention of the Committee to abolish that phalanx of authors who usurp the stage, to the exclusion of a large assortment of dramatic talent blushing unseen in the background; while others contended, that the scheme would prevent men of real eminence from descending into an amphitheatre in which all Grub Street (that is to say, all London and Westminster) would be arrayed against them. The event has proved both parties to be in a degree right, and in a degree wrong. One hundred and twelve 'Addresses' have been sent in, each sealed and signed, and mottoed, 'as per order,' some written by men of great, some by men of little, and some by men of no, talent.

Many of the public prints have censured the taste of the Committee, in thus contracting for 'Addresses,' as they would for nails—by the gross; but it is surprising that none should have censured their temerity. One hundred and eleven of the 'Addresses' must, of course, be unsuccessful: to each of the authors, thus infallibly classed with the genus irritabile, it would be very hard to deny six staunch friends, who consider his the best of all possible 'Addresses,' and whose tongues will be as ready to laud him, as to hiss his adversary. These, with the potent aid of the Bard himself, make seven foes per Address; and thus will be created seven hundred and seventy-seven implacable auditors, prepared to condemn the strains of Apollo himself—a band of adversaries which no prudent manager would think of exasperating.

But, leaving the Committee to encounter the responsibility they have incurred, the public have at least to thank them for ascertaining and establishing one point, which might otherwise have admitted of controversy. When it is considered that many amateur writers have been discouraged from becoming competitors, and that few, if any, of the professional authors can afford to write for nothing, and, of course, have not been candidates for the honorary prize at Drury Lane, we may confidently pronounce that, as far as regards NUMBER, the present is undoubtedly the Augustan age of English poetry. Whether or not this distinction will be extended to the QUALITY of its productions, must be decided at the tribunal of posterity; though the natural anxiety of our authors on this score ought to be considerably diminished when they reflect how few will, in all probability, be had up for judgement.

It is not necessary for the Editor to mention the manner in which he became possessed of this 'fair sample of the present state of poetry in Great Britain.' It was his first intention to publish the whole; but a little reflection convinced him that, by so doing, he might depress the good, without elevating the bad. He has therefore culled what had the appearance of flowers, from what possessed the reality of weeds, and is extremely sorry that, in so doing, he has diminished his collection to twenty-one. Those which he has rejected may possibly make their appearance in a separate volume, or they may be admitted as volunteers in the files of some of the Newspapers; or, at all events, they are sure of being received among the awkward squad of the Magazines. In general, they bear a close resemblance to each other; thirty of them contain extravagant compliments to the immortal Wellington and the indefatigable Whitbread; and, as the last-mentioned gentleman is said to dislike praise in the exact proportion in which he deserves it, these laudatory writers may have been only building a wall against which they might run their own heads.

The Editor here begs leave to advance a few words in behalf of that useful and much abused bird the Phœnix; and in so doing he is biased by no partiality, as he assures the reader he not only never saw one, but (mirabile dictu!) never caged one in a simile in the whole course of his life. Not less than sixty-nine of the competitors have invoked the aid of this native of Arabia; but as, from their manner of using him after they had caught him, he does not by any means appear to have been a native of Arabia Felix, the Editor has left the proprietors to treat with Mr. Polito, and refused to receive this rara avis, or black swan, into the present collection. One exception occurs, in which the admirable treatment of this feathered incombustible, entitles the author to great praise; that address has been preserved, and was thought worthy of taking the lead.

Perhaps the reason why several of the subjoined productions of the Musæ Londinenses have failed of selection, may be discovered in their being penned in a metre unusual upon occasions of this sort, and in their not being written with that attention to stage effect, the want of which, like want of manners in the concerns of life, is more prejudicial than a deficiency of talent. There is an art of writing for the Theatre, technically called touch and go, which is indispensable when we consider the small quantum of patience which so motley an assemblage as a London audience can be expected to afford. All the contributors have been very exact in sending their initials and mottoes. Those belonging to the present collection have been carefully preserved, and each has been affixed to its respective poem. The letters that accompanied the Addresses having been honourably destroyed unopened, it is impossible to state the real authors with any certainty; but the ingenious reader, after comparing the initials with the motto, and both with the poem will form his own conclusions.

We do not anticipate any disapprobation from thus giving publicity to a small portion of the Rejected Addresses; for unless we are widely mistaken in assigning the respective authors, the fame of each Individual is established on much too firm a basis to be shaken by so trifling and evanescent a publication as the present:

——neque ego illi detrahere ausim

Hærentem capiti multa cum laude coronam.

Of the numerous pieces already sent to the Committee for performance, we have only availed ourselves of three vocal Travesties, which we have selected, not for their merit, but simply for their brevity. Above one hundred spectacles, melodramas, operas, and pantomimes have been transmitted, besides the two first acts of one legitimate comedy. Some of these evince considerable smartness of manual dialogue, and several brilliant repartees of chairs, tables, and other inanimate wits; but the authors seem to have forgotten that in the new Drury Lane the audience can hear as well as see. Of late our theatres have been so constructed, that John Bull has been compelled to have very long ears, or none at all; to keep them dangling about his skull like discarded servants, while his eyes were gazing at piebalds and elephants, or else to stretch them out to an asinine length to catch the congenial sound of braying trumpets. An auricular revolution is, we trust, about to take place; and as many people have been much puzzled to define the meaning of the new era, of which we have heard so much, we venture to pronounce, that as far as regards Drury Lane Theatre, the new era means the reign of ears. If the past affords any pledge for the future, we may confidently expect from the Committee of that House everything that can be accomplished by the union of taste and assiduity.

The text of the Rejected Addresses here given is that of the eighteenth edition with Horace Smith's annotations. The footnotes from the Edinburgh Review were taken from an article by Lord Jeffrey in the number for November, 1812. It may be mentioned that the actual addresses sent in to the Drury Lane Committee are preserved with their covering letters in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum, and that on the immediate success of the Smiths' parodies an enterprising publisher issued a volume of Genuine Rejected Addresses from the forty-three competitors who responded to his appeal for such.

The following is from the Preface to the eighteenth edition:

Our first difficulty, that of selection, was by no means a light one. Some of our most eminent poets, such, for instance, as Rogers and Campbell, presented so much beauty, harmony, and proportion in their writings, both as to style and sentiment, that if we had attempted to caricature them, nobody would have recognized the likeness; and if we had endeavoured to give a servile copy of their manner, it would only have amounted, at best, to a tame and unamusing portrait, which it was not our object to present. Although fully aware that their names would, in the theatrical phrase, have conferred great strength upon our bill, we were reluctantly compelled to forgo them, and to confine ourselves to writers whose style and habit of thought, being more marked and peculiar, was more capable of exaggeration and distortion. To avoid politics and personality, to imitate the turn of mind, as well as the phraseology of our originals, and, at all events, to raise a harmless laugh, were our main objects: in the attainment of which united aims, we were sometimes hurried into extravagance, by attaching much more importance to the last than to the two first. In no instance were we thus betrayed into a greater injustice than in the case of Mr. Wordsworth—the touching sentiment, profound wisdom, and copious harmony of whose loftier writings we left unnoticed, in the desire of burlesquing them; while we pounced upon his popular ballads, and exerted ourselves to push their simplicity into puerility and silliness. With pride and pleasure do we now claim to be ranked among the most ardent admirers of this true poet; and if he himself could see the state of his works, which are ever at our right hand, he would, perhaps, receive the manifest evidences they exhibit of constant reference, and delighted re-perusal, as some sort of amende honorable for the unfairness of which we were guilty, when we were less conversant with the higher inspirations of his muse. To Mr. Coleridge, and others of our originals, we must also do a tardy act of justice, by declaring that our burlesque of their peculiarities, has never blinded us to those beauties and talents which are beyond the reach of all ridicule.

One of us had written a genuine Address for the occasion, which was sent to the Committee, and shared the fate it merited, in being rejected. To swell the bulk, or rather to diminish the tenuity of our little work, we added it to the Imitations; and prefixing the initials of S. T. P. for the purpose of puzzling the critics, were not a little amused, in the sequel, by the many guesses and conjectures into which we had ensnared some of our readers. We could even enjoy the mysticism, qualified as it was by the poor compliment, that our carefully written Address exhibited no 'very prominent trait of absurdity,' when we saw it thus noticed in the Edinburgh Review for November, 1812. 'An Address by S. T. P. we can make nothing of; and professing our ignorance of the author designated by these letters, we can only add, that the Address, though a little affected, and not very full of meaning, has no very prominent trait of absurdity, that we can detect; and might have been adopted and spoken, so far as we can perceive, without any hazard of ridicule. In our simplicity we consider it as a very decent, mellifluous, occasional prologue; and do not understand how it has found its way into its present company.'

Urged forward by hurry, and trusting to chance, two very bad coadjutors in any enterprise, we at length congratulated ourselves on having completed our task in time to have it printed and published by the opening of the theatre. But, alas! our difficulties, so far from being surmounted, seemed only to be beginning. Strangers to the arcana of the bookseller's trade, and unacquainted with their almost invincible objection to single volumes of low price, especially when tendered by writers who have acquired no previous name, we little anticipated that they would refuse to publish our Rejected Addresses, even although we asked nothing for the copyright. Such however, proved to be the case. Our manuscript was perused and returned to us by several of the most eminent publishers. Well do we remember betaking ourselves to one of the craft in Bond Street, whom we found in a back parlour, with his gouty leg propped upon a cushion, in spite of which warning he diluted his luncheon with frequent glasses of Madeira. 'What have you already written?' was his first question, an interrogatory to which we had been subjected in almost every instance. 'Nothing by which we can be known.' 'Then I am afraid to undertake the publication.' We presumed timidly to suggest that every writer must have a beginning, and that to refuse to publish for him until he had acquired a name, was to imitate the sapient mother who cautioned her son against going into the water until he could swim. 'An old joke—a regular Joe!' exclaimed our companion, tossing off another bumper. 'Still older than Joe Miller,' was our reply; 'for, if we mistake not, it is the very first anecdote in the facetiæ of Hierocles.' 'Ha, sirs!' resumed the bibliopolist, 'you are learned, are you? So, soh!—Well, leave your manuscript with me; I will look it over to-night, and give you an answer to-morrow.' Punctual as the clock we presented ourselves at his door on the following morning, when our papers were returned to us with the observation—'These trifles are really not deficient in smartness; they are well, vastly well for beginners; but they will never do—never. They would not pay for advertising, and without it I should not sell fifty copies.'

This was discouraging enough. If the most experienced publishers feared to be out of pocket by the work, it was manifest, a fortiori, that its writers ran a risk of being still more heavy losers, should they undertake the publication on their own account. We had no objection to raise a laugh at the expense of others; but to do it at our own cost, uncertain as we were to what extent we might be involved, had never entered into our contemplation. In this dilemma, our Addresses, now in every sense rejected, might probably have never seen the light, had not some good angel whispered us to betake ourselves to Mr. John Miller, a dramatic publisher, then residing in Bow Street, Covent Garden. No sooner had this gentleman looked over our manuscript, than he immediately offered to take upon himself all the risk of publication, and to give us half the profits, should there be any; a liberal proposition, with which we gladly closed. So rapid and decided was its success, at which none were more unfeignedly astonished than its authors, that Mr. Miller advised us to collect some Imitations of Horace, which had appeared anonymously in the Monthly Mirror, offering to publish them upon the same terms. We did so accordingly; and as new editions of the Rejected Addresses were called for in quick succession, we were shortly enabled to sell our half copyright in the two works to Mr. Miller, for one thousand pounds!! We have entered into this unimportant detail, not to gratify any vanity of our own, but to encourage such literary beginners as may be placed in similar circumstances; as well as to impress upon publishers the propriety of giving more consideration to the possible merit of the works submitted to them, than to the mere magic of a name.

To the credit of the genus irritabile be it recorded, that not one of those whom we had parodied or burlesqued ever betrayed the least soreness on the occasion, or refused to join in the laugh that we had occasioned. With most of them we subsequently formed acquaintanceship; while some honoured us with an intimacy which still continues, where it has not been severed by the rude hand of Death. Alas! it is painful to reflect, that of the twelve writers whom we presumed to imitate, five are now no more; the list of the deceased being unhappily swelled by the most illustrious of all, the clarum et venerabile nomen of Sir Walter Scott! From that distinguished writer, whose transcendent talents were only to be equalled by his virtues and his amiability, we received favours and notice, both public and private, which it will be difficult to forget, because we had not the smallest claim upon his kindness. 'I certainly must have written this myself!' said that fine-tempered man to one of the authors, pointing to the description of the Fire, 'although I forget upon what occasion.' Lydia White, a literary lady, who was prone to feed the lions of the day, invited one of us to dinner; but, recollecting afterwards that William Spencer formed one of the party, wrote to the latter to put him off; telling him that a man was to be at her table whom he 'would not like to meet.' 'Pray who is this whom I should not like to meet?' inquired the poet. 'Oh!' answered the lady, 'one of those men who have made that shameful attack upon you!' 'The very man upon earth I should like to know!' rejoined the lively and careless bard. The two individuals accordingly met, and have continued fast friends, ever since. Lord Byron, too, wrote thus to Mr. Murray from Italy—'Tell him we forgive him, were he twenty times our satirist.'

It may not be amiss to notice, in this place, one criticism of a Leicestershire clergyman, which may be pronounced unique: 'I do not see why they should have been rejected,' observed the matter-of-fact annotator; 'I think some of them very good!'

[P. 1.] Loyal Effusion. By Horace Smith. Fitzgerald (1759?-1829) was a ready versifier who was self-appointed laureate of public events for a number of years. He was especially notable for his persistent recital of patriotic lines at the annual dinners of the Royal Literary Fund. The piece of his which Smith possibly had more particularly in mind was the 'Address to every Loyal Briton on the Threatened Invasion of his Country.'

[P. 2.] By Wyatt's trowel. James Wyatt (1746-1813) was the architect of the rebuilt Drury Lane Theatre.

Let hoarse Fitzgerald bawl. Byron (English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, line 1) wrote 'shall,' not 'let.'

[P. 4.] The Baby's Debut. By James Smith.

[P. 6.] the Young Betty mania. William Henry West Betty (1791-1874) first appeared on the stage in his twelfth year, and retired with a fortune in his seventeenth. Though he occasionally reappeared on the boards in manhood, he never repeated his early success.

[P. 7.] An Address without a Phœnix. This was the genuine address which Horace Smith had sent in for competition (see p. 397).

[P. 9.] Cui Bono. The opening stanza by James, the rest by Horace Smith.

[P. 13.] The Tradesman duns. Originally, 'The plaintiff calls.'

[P. 15.] To the Secretary and a Hampshire Farmer. By James Smith. William Cobbett (1762-1835) became Member of Parliament for Oldham in 1832.

[P. 16.] Mr. Whitbread. Samuel Whitbread (1758-1815), brewer and politician, Member of Parliament for Bedford, was Chairman of the Committee for the rebuilding of Drury Lane Theatre.

[P. 19.] The Living Lustres. By Horace Smith.

The following three stanzas were originally included:—between the third and fourth:

Each pillar that opens our stage to the circle is

Verdant antique, like Ninon de l'Enclos;

I'd ramble from them to the pillars of Hercules,

Give me but Rosa wherever I go.

Between the fourth and fifth:

Attun'd to the scene when the pale yellow moon is on

Tower and tree they'd look sober and sage.

And when they all winked their dear peepers in unison,

Night, pitchy night would envelop the stage.

Ah! could I some girl from yon box for her youth pick,

I'd love her as long as she blossomed in youth;

Oh! white is the ivory case of her toothpick,

But when beauty smiles how much whiter the tooth!

[P. 21.] The Rebuilding. By James Smith.

[P. 29.] Laura Matilda. Horace Smith, the author of Drury's Dirge, wrote that 'the authors, as in gallantly bound, wish this lady to continue anonymous,' and as a consequence there have been several attempts to pierce the veil of anonymity. One annotator boldly 'assumes the lady to have been' Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802-1836), who was ten years of age when the Rejected Addresses were published. The motto from The Baviad which stands at the head of the parody is sufficient indication that the original was to be found among the 'Della Cruscans,' whose 'namby-pamby' verses, after appearing in the World, were published in two volumes as The British Album in 1790 (see the note on p. 405). The chief lady among those sentimentals was 'Anna Matilda,' otherwise Hannah Cowley (1743-1809), a dramatist of considerable, and a poet of but little, ability. As Mrs. Cowley had died three years before the Addresses were sent in, it is probable either that the parodists did not know of her death or that they merely meant to make fun of the school of which she was a leader. The passage from Gifford's Baviad given by way of motto is taken from that part of the satire in which the writers of The British Album are more particularly castigated.

[P. 32.] A Tale of Drury Lane. By Horace Smith.

[P. 38.] Johnson's Ghost. By Horace Smith.

[P. 42.] The Beautiful Incendiary. By Horace Smith. Spencer's best-remembered work is the tragic ballad of Beth Gelert.

[P. 46.] Fire and Ale. By Horace Smith.

[P. 49.] Playhouse Musings. By James Smith.

[P. 52.] Drury Lane Hustings. By James Smith. The 'Pic-Nic Poet,' in parodying the popular songs of the day, seems a very good imitation of the improvisings for which Theodore Hook came to be famous. The description suggests, however, that no particular writer was aimed at in the parody. Both James and Horace Smith had ten years before been contributors to a short-lived magazine entitled the Pic-Nic.

[P. 54.] Architectural Atoms. By Horace Smith. Thomas Busby (1755-1838), organist, musical composer, and man of letters. By way of supplement to the authors' note it may be said that the Address printed in the newspapers at the time as that sent in by Dr. Busby, and parodied by Lord Byron (see p. 174), was not the Address actually sent in, for that (preserved in the British Museum) begins:

Ye social Energies! that link mankind

In golden bonds—as potent as refined!

Byron used quotation effectively in Don Juan, Canto I, ccxxii.:

'Go, little book, from this my solitude!

I cast thee on the waters—go thy ways!

And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,

The world will find thee after many days.'

When Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood,

I can't help putting in my claim to praise—

The four first rhymes are Southey's, every line:

For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine!

Byron: Don Juan, Canto I., ccxxii.

[P. 62.] Theatrical Alarm Bell. By James Smith.

committee of O.P.'s, etc. Referring to the tumultuous scenes at Covent Garden Theatre in 1809, when for sixty-seven successive nights there was uproar due to the attempt of the management to raise the prices of admission. Both James and Horace Smith appear to have written verse contributions to the newspaper warfare which accompanied, and served to stimulate, the disturbance in the theatre in favour of Old Prices.

[P. 64.] The Theatre. By James Smith. Spencer, referred to in the footnote, is the writer of society verse parodied in The Beautiful Incendiary (p. 42).

[P. 69.] To the Managing Committee, etc. By James Smith.

The Hamlet Travestie. By John Poole. Was published in 1810, and acted at Drury Lane in 1813.

The Stranger, translated by Benjamin Thompson from Menschenhass und Reue, by August von Kotzebue (1761-1819)—one line is remembered: 'There is another and a better world'—and George Barnwell, by George Lillo (1693-1739), based on the ballad in Percy's Reliques, were sensational plays that enjoyed considerable popularity in the early part of the nineteenth century.

[P. 72.] Mrs. Haller. One of the principal characters in The Stranger.

[P. 76.] Punch's Apotheosis. By Horace Smith. Theodore Hook wrote a number of light plays and farces before he was out of his teens, and was long notable for the way in which he could improvise such false gallop of verses as is parodied in Punch's Apotheosis.

[P. 82.] Can Bartolozzi's... Could Grignion's. The work of the engravers, Francesco Bartolozzi (1725-1815) and Charles Grignion (1717-1810), was much in use for sumptuously illustrated books.

The epic rage of Blackmore. Sir Richard Blackmore (d. 1729), a physician-poet, who wrote Prince Arthur, an Heroick Poem; Eliza, an Epic Poem; Alfred, an Epic Poem; and various other works which the world has willingly let die.

[P. 83.] With Griffiths, Langhorne, Kenrick, etc. Ralph Griffiths (1720-1803) was founder, proprietor, publisher, and sometime editor of The Monthly Review, the contributors to which included John Langhorne (1735-1779), the translator of Plutarch, and William Kenrick (1725?-1779).

[P. 86.] The first lines are an imitation of Pope's Dunciad:

The mighty Mother, and her son, who brings

The Smithfield Muses to the ears of Kings, etc.

Lo! the poor toper is imitated from Pope's Essay on Man:

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind

Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind, etc.

[P. 87.] Catherine Fanshawe. The parody on Gray was sent by Miss Fanshawe to her friend, Miss Berry (one of Walpole's Misses Berry), with a letter purporting to be a letter of thanks to her for permission to read the verses, which, it was pretended, had been sent by Miss Berry, their author, to Miss Fanshawe for approval. The reference to Sydney Smith is to his lectures on 'Moral Philosophy' delivered at the Royal Institution, 1804-1806. Payne was a fashionable milliner of the period.

[P. 92.] A Fable. Dryden's The Hind and the Panther:

A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,

Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged.

The Course of Time. Robert Pollok's poem, despite this parody, was so popular that from its first publication in 1827 to 1868 it attained a sale of 78,000 copies.

[P. 93.] Canning and Frere. The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, 1852 and 1854, has been followed in attributing the authorship of the various parodies to Canning and others. The authority consists of Canning's own copy of the Anti-Jacobin, that of Lord Burghersh, that of Wright the publisher, and information given by Upcott.

Inscription. Southey's poem was an 'inscription for the apartment in Chepstow Castle where Henry Marten, the regicide, was imprisoned for thirty years.'

For thirty years secluded from mankind,

Here Marten linger'd.

It was written in 1795, but Southey excluded it from later editions of his works issued when he was no longer in sympathy with the French Revolution. Mrs. Brownrigg, the wife of a house-painter, was hanged at Tyburn for murder.

[P. 94.] The Soldier's Wife. Southey's The Soldier's Wife:

Weary way-wanderer, languid and sick at heart,

Travelling painfully over the rugged road;

Wild-visaged wanderer! Ah, for thy heavy chance.

Coleridge wrote the third stanza, indicated by asterisks in the second imitation. Southey finally suppressed this poem also.

Dilworth and Dyche. A reference to Thomas Dilworth's Guide to the English Tongue (1761) and Thomas Dyche's Guide to the English Tongue (1709).

[P. 95.] Sapphics. Southey's The Widow:

Cold was the night wind, drifting fast the snow fell;

Wide were the downs and shelterless and naked,

When a poor wanderer struggled on her journey,

Weary and way-sore.

George Tierney was the 'Friend of Humanity.' The original shared the fate of the other two poems in being finally suppressed.

[P. 97.] The Loves of the Triangles. Darwin's Loves of the Plants. Frere wrote the first lines to 'And liveried lizards wait upon her call' ([p. 99]); Ellis from that point to 'Twine round his struggling heart, and bind with endless chain' ([p. 101]); Canning, Ellis, and Frere were the joint-authors of the portion from 'Thus, happy France' to 'And folds the parent-monarch to her breast' ([p. 102]), Canning alone being responsible for the following twelve lines; and the trio finished the parody together. As a rule only portions of this masterpiece sui generis have hitherto been reprinted.

[P. 104.] Lodi's blood-stained Bridge. Napoleon beat the Austrians at Lodi on May 10, 1796.

[P. 105.] Muir, Ashley, etc. Thomas Muir (1765-1798) was a Parliamentary reformer; Thomas Paine (1737-1809), author of the Rights of Man; Archibald Hamilton Rowan (1751-1834), a prominent United Irishman; Ashley and Barlow evade identification.

[P. 107.] Song by Rogero. The Rovers, or the Double Arrangement, was a travesty of German drama, in particular of Schiller's Robbers, Kotzebue's The Stranger, and Goethe's Stella, and it was performed at the Haymarket Theatre in 1811. It is the work of Canning, Ellis, and Frere, but only the first two wrote this 'song' (according to some authorities Pitt is credited with the last verse), having in mind Pitt's friend, Sir Robert Adair, who was educated at Göttingen. The editors of the Anti-Jacobin say: 'The song of Rogero with which the first act concludes is admitted on almost all hands to be in the very first taste, and if no German original is to be found for it, so much the worse for the credit of German literature.' This parody has itself often been parodied—by, among others, R. H. Barham, whose topic was the newly established London University.

[P. 109.] James Hogg. The Ettrick Shepherd's Poetic Mirror, or the Living Bards of Great Britain, was published anonymously in 1816, and it is generally admitted that his parodies of style are among the finest in the language. They are, however, overlong, and we have been obliged to be content with the 'song' alone from the parody of Scott, which, complete, would occupy more than seventy pages.

[P. 115.] The light-heel'd author of the Isle of Palms. John Wilson ('Christopher North') who published The Isle of Palms and other Poems in 1812.

[P. 124.] Joan I chose. Southey's Joan of Arc was published in 1796.

The next, a son, I bred a Mussulman. Thalaba the Destroyer, 1801.

A tiny thing... from the north... with vengeful spite was probably meant for the Edinburgh Review.

[P. 125.] My third, a Christian and a warrior true. Madoc, 1805.

And next, his brother, a supreme Hindu. The Curse of Kehama, 1810.

[P. 128.] The Curse. The closing lines are a faithful imitation of 'the Curse' in The Curse of Kehama, which ends:

Thou shalt live in thy pain

While Kehama shall reign,

With a fire in thy heart,

And a fire in thy brain;

And Sleep shall obey me,

And visit thee never

And the Curse shall be on thee

For ever and ever.

[P. 128.] And C—t—e shun thee. Possibly Cottle, the publisher and friend of Southey.

[P. 129.] The Gude Greye Katt. A parody of Hogg's own narrative, The Witch of Fyfe.

[P. 142.] Sonnets Attempted, etc. These appeared originally in the second number of the Monthly Magazine in November, 1797, with the signature of 'Nehemiah Higginbottom.' Coleridge described them as written—

'in ridicule of my own Poems, and Charles Lloyd's and Lamb's, etc., etc., exposing that affectation of unaffectedness, of jumping and misplaced accent in commonplace epithets, flat lines forced into poetry by italics (signifying how well and mouthishly the author would read them), puny pathos, etc., etc. The instances were almost all taken from myself and Lloyd and Lamb.'

The first sonnet, Coleridge said,

had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double object of being at once trite and licentious. The second was on low creeping language and thoughts under the pretence of simplicity. [Lamb had written some months earlier, 'Cultivate simplicity, Coleridge.'] The third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery.... So general at that time and so decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style that a celebrated physician (now, alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness to a gentleman who was about to meet me at a dinner-party could not, however, resist giving him a hint not to mention The House that Jack Built in my presence, for that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet, he not knowing that I was myself the author of it. (See the Oxford Coleridge.)

[P. 144.] Amatory Poems. It is curious that Southey, who had taken offence at Coleridge's sonnet To Simplicity, signed 'Nehemiah Higginbottom,' believing it directed against himself, should himself have turned parodist and adopted the similar name of 'Abel Shufflebottom' a couple of years later. Coleridge wrote, so he declared, that he might do the young poets good; Southey, it may be believed, merely to make fun of that band of vain and foolish versifiers who came to be known as 'the Della Cruscans.' Haunters of the book-stalls may yet occasionally light upon two small volumes entitled The British Album, containing the Poems of Della Crusca, Anna Matilda, Arley, Benedict, the Bard, etc., etc. Which were originally published under the Title of the Poetry of the World, revised and corrected by the Respective Authors. The second edition was dated 1790, and the work was still current when the brothers Smith gave their Laura Matilda parody in the Rejected Addresses (see p. 29). A few stanzas of one of 'Della Crusca's' poems addressed to 'Anna Matilda' will suffice to indicate the stuff which Southey was satirising:

While the dear Songstress had melodious stole

O'er ev'ry sense, and charm'd each nerve to rest,

Thy Bard in silent ecstasy of soul,

Had strain'd the dearer Woman to his breast.

Or had she said, that War's the worthiest grave,

He would have felt his proud heart burn the while,

Have dar'd, perhaps, to rush among the brave,

Have gain'd, perhaps, the glory—of a smile.

And 'tis most true, while Time's relentless hand,

With sickly grasp drags others to the tomb,

The Soldier scorns to wait the dull command,

But springs impatient to a nobler doom.

Tho' on the plain he lies, outstretch'd, and pale,

Without one friend his steadfast eyes to close,

Yet on his honour'd corse shall many a gale,

Waft the moist fragrance of the weeping rose.

O'er that dread spot, the melancholy Moon

Shall pause a while, a sadder beam to shed,

And starry Night, amidst her awful noon,

Sprinkle light dews upon his hallow'd head.

There too the solitary Bird shall swell

With long-drawn melody her plaintive throat,

While distant echo from responsive cell,

Shall oft with fading force return the note.

Such recompense be Valour's due alone!

To me, no proffer'd meed must e'er belong.

To me, who trod the vale of life unknown,

Whose proudest boast was but an idle song.

'Della Crusca,' the chief of the band, was Robert Merry (1755-1798). The 'Della Cruscans' may be said to have been killed by ridicule by Gifford's Baviad and Maeviad.

[P. 151.] Epicedium. This appeared originally under the title 'Gone or Going' in Hone's Table Book (1827), and was reprinted by Lamb in his Album Verses. It is an echo rather than a close parody of Michael Drayton's Ballad of Agincourt, of which the fifth stanza runs:

And for myself (quoth he)

This my full rest shall be,

England ne'er mourn for me,

Nor more esteem me.

Victor I will remain,

Or on this earth lie slain,

Never shall she sustain

Loss to redeem me.

[P. 153.] Hypochondriacus. This formed part of some imitations (mostly prose) which Lamb described as Curious Fragments extracted from a Commonplace Book which belonged to Robert Burton, the famous Author of the Anatomy of Melancholy (1801). Though it is parody of matter more than of manner, it has echoes of Burton's Abstract of Melancholy, which prefaces the Anatomy.

[P. 154.] Nonsense Verses. Here Lamb parodies the sentiment which had inspired his own poem, Angel Help, written on a picture showing a girl who had been spinning so long for the support of a bed-ridden mother that she had fallen asleep, while angels were shown finishing her work and watering a lily.

[P. 155.] The Numbering of the Clergy. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams's—

Come, Chloe, and give me sweet kisses,

For sweeter sure never girl gave;

But why, in the midst of my blisses,

Do you ask me how many I'd have?

[P. 156.] Peacock. All these parodies but the last (the Byron) are from Peacock's Paper Money Lyrics published in 1837, but written ten or twelve years earlier 'during the prevalence of an influenza to which the beautiful fabric of paper-credit is periodically subject.'

[P. 160.] Prœmium of an Epic. Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer: 'How beautiful is night!'

[P. 165.] Song by Mr. Cypress. The quintessence of Byron as distilled by Peacock into what Swinburne calls 'the two consummate stanzas which utter or exhale the lyric agony of Mr. Cypress.' The lines occur in Nightmare Abbey.

[P. 166.] The Patriot's Progress. Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II., Scene 7.

[P. 167.] Our Parodies are Ended. The Tempest, Act. IV., Sc. 1.

[P. 167.] Fashion. Milton's L'Allegro.

[P. 171.] Verses. The 'Editor' was Leigh Hunt, editor of the Examiner, imprisoned for two years (1814-15) in Surrey Gaol for libelling the Prince Regent. The authorship of this parody is often wrongfully attributed.

Never hear Mr. Br——m make a speech. Henry, afterwards Lord, Brougham.

Law. Edward Law Baron Ellenborough, Lord Chief Justice.

[P. 172.] But Cobbett has got his discharge. William Cobbett had been imprisoned for two years (1810-12) for his strictures on the Government of the day.

To Mr. Murray. John Murray was 'Bookseller to the Admiralty and the Board of Longitude.' He had possessed, and parted with, a share in Blackwood's Magazine.

Strahan, Tonson, Lintot, the publishers and booksellers of the eighteenth century.

[P. 174.] Busby. Dr. Busby had been one of the unsuccessful writers of an Address for the opening of Drury Lane (see p. 54 and note). The lines and words in inverted commas were from the Address which Busby printed as having been sent in, not from the one that he did send in, which is preserved in the British Museum.

As if Sir Fretful. Sir Fretful Plagiary, of course, from Sheridan's The Critic.

[P. 176.] Margate. Two stanzas, complete in themselves, from Mr. Peters's story, 'The Bagman's Dog,' in the Ingoldsby Legends. Byron's Childe Harold, Canto IV.

[P. 177.] Not a sous had he got. Barham notes that during the controversy in 1824 as to the authorship of 'The Burial of Sir John Moore,' a—

claimant started up in the person of a soi-disant 'Dr. Marshall,' who turned out to be a Durham blacksmith and his pretensions a hoax. It was then that a certain 'Doctor Peppercorn' put forth his pretensions, to what he averred was the 'true and original' version—the somewhat vulgar parody reprinted from The Ingoldsby Legends.

Hos ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores.—Virgil.

I wrote these lines—... owned them—he told stories!

Thomas Ingoldsby.

[P. 178.] The Demolished Farce. Bayly's own popular song:

Oh no, we never mention her,

Her name is never heard.

See also Andrew Lang's parody, [p. 353.]

[P. 179.] Peter Bell the Third. Mrs. Shelley felt constrained to note that—

nothing personal to the author of Peter Bell is intended in this poem. No man ever admired Wordsworth's poetry more;—he read it perpetually, and taught others to appreciate its beauties.... His idea was that a man gifted, even as transcendently as the author of Peter Bell, with the highest qualities of genius, must, if he fostered such errors, be infected with dullness. This poem was written as a warning—not as a narration of reality. He was unacquainted personally with Wordsworth, or with Coleridge (to whom he alludes in the fifth part of the poem), and therefore, I repeat, his poem is purely ideal;—it contains something of criticism on the compositions of those great poets, but nothing injurious to the men themselves.

[P. 186.] * * * Mr. H. Buxton Forman says: 'All seems to me to point to Eldon as the name left out here.'

(See note to [p. 219].)

Byron was less respectful:

There's something in a stupid ass,

And something in a heavy dunce,

But never since I went to school

I heard or saw so damned a fool

As William Wordsworth is for once.

And now I've seen so great a fool

As William Wordsworth is for once,

I really wish that Peter Bell

And he who wrote it, were in hell,

For writing nonsense for the nonce.

[P. 201.] A long poem in blank verse. This reference in the note is to Wordsworth's Excursion, the lines indicated being:

And, verily, the silent creatures made

A splendid sight, together thus exposed;

Dead—but not sullied or deformed by death,

That seemed to pity what he could not spare.

Book VIII., lines 568-571.

[P. 202.] As the Prince Regent did with Sherry—i.e., Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

'Twould make George Colman melancholy. George Colman was author of Broad Grins and other humorous work.

[P. 203.] May Carnage and slaughter. The reference here is to lines in Wordsworth's Thanksgiving Ode on the Battle of Waterloo (later Ode, 1815), as originally published:

But Thy most dreaded instrument

In working out a pure intent,

Is Man—arrayed for mutual slaughter.

—Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!

[P. 205.] The immortal Described by Swift. Presumably a reference to the undying Struldbrugs of Gulliver's Travels, 'despised and hated by all sorts of people.'

[P. 206.] 'Twould have made Guatimozin doze. Guatimozin or Cuauhtemoc was the last of the Aztec emperors, executed with circumstances of great cruelty by Cortes.

[P. 206.] Like those famed Seven who slept three ages—i.e., the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus who, according to a Syrian legend, hid themselves in a cave during the Decian persecution (A.D. 250), fell asleep and awakened miraculously nearly two hundred years later.

[P. 215.] '&c.' This ending is in accord with the original text.

[P. 218.] He lived amidst th' untrodden ways. Mr. Walter Hamilton, whose large collection of parodies is well known, attributes this parody to Hartley Coleridge, but efforts to trace it have failed.

[P. 219.] Peter Bell: a Lyrical Ballad. When Wordsworth's Peter Bell was announced in 1819, John Hamilton Reynolds wrote—it is said in a single day—this Lyrical Ballad and hurried it out before Wordsworth's poem was issued. The fact that Reynolds used Wordsworth's measure suggests that he had seen a copy of the original. It was a criticism by Leigh Hunt of Wordsworth's Peter Bell and Reynolds' parody that moved Shelley to the writing of Peter Bell the Third. To his Peter Bell Reynolds attached a Preface and a short Supplementary Essay, also purporting to be written by W. W.

'It is now (the Preface began) a period of one-and-twenty years since I first wrote some of the most perfect compositions (except certain pieces I have written in my later days) that ever dropped from poetical pen.... It has been my aim and my achievement to deduce moral thunder from buttercups, daisies, celandines, and (as a poet scarcely inferior to myself, hath it) "such small deer." Out of sparrows' eggs I have hatched great truths, and with sextons' barrows have I wheeled into human hearts piles of the weightiest philosophy.... Of Peter Bell I have only thus much to say: It completes the simple system of natural narrative, which I began so early as 1798. It is written in that pure unlaboured style, which can only be met with among labourers.... I commit my Ballad confidently to posterity. I love to read my own poetry: it does my heart good.'

In the Supplementary Essay 'W. W.' was made to declare that he proposed 'in the course of a few years to write laborious lives of all the old people who enjoy sinecures in the text or are pensioned off in the notes of my Poetry.'

[P. 221.] As clustering a relationship. See The Critic, Act II., Scene 2:

And thou, my Whiskerandos, shouldst be father

And mother, brother, cousin, uncle, aunt,

And friend to me!

[P. 228.] Blue Bonnets over the Border. Scott's 'ditty to the ancient air of "Blue Bonnets over the Border,"' The Monastery, chap. xxv:

March, march, Ettrick and Teviotdale,

Why the deil dinna ye march forward in order?

[P. 231.] As Spencer had ere he composed his Tales. This probably refers to the Hon. W. R. Spencer, author of Beth Gelert, as well as to the one-time fashionable tailless coat known as a 'spencer.'

[P. 232.] This shall a Carder... Whiteboy... Rock's murderous commands. The reference is to the secret associations which were responsible for much agrarian crime in Ireland during the early part of the nineteenth century.

[P. 235.] If English corn should grow abroad.. Thus in fourth edition of Whims and Oddities (1829), but 'go' in some reprints. The bull is probably intentional.

[P. 237.] Huggins and Duggins. Hood appears to have had Pope's first Pastoral, Spring, especially in mind. In it Strephon and Daphnis alternately sing the praises of Delia and Sylvia:

In Spring the fields, in Autumn hills I love,

At morn the plains, at noon the shady grove,

But Delia always; absent from her sight,

Nor plains at morn, nor grove at noon delight.

[P. 237.] All things by turns, and nothing long. 'Was everything by starts, and nothing long.'—Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel.

[P. 240.] We met. T. H. Bayly's—

We met—'twas in a crowd,

And I thought he would shun me,

He came—I could not breathe,

For his eyes were upon me.

[P. 241.] Those Evening Bells. Moore's song begins:

Those evening bells! those evening bells!

How many a tale their music tells

Of youth, and home, and that sweet time

When last I heard their soothing chime.

[P. 241.] The Water Peri's Song. Moore's Lalla Rookh;

Farewell—farewell to thee, Araby's daughter!

(Thus warbled a Peri beneath the dark sea,)

No pearl ever lay, under Oman's green water,

More pure in its shell than thy Spirit in thee.

[P. 242.] Cabbages. The first verse of Violets, by L. E. L., runs:

Violets! deep blue violets!

April's loveliest coronets:

There are no flowers grow in the vale,

Kissed by the sun, wooed by the gale,

None with the dew of the twilight wet,

So sweet as the deep blue violet.

[P. 243.] Larry O'Toole. Charles Lever: 'Did ye hear of the Widow Malone?'

[P. 243.] The Willow Tree. In this Thackeray was parodying his own earlier treatment of the same theme, as Charles Lamb had parodied himself in the Nonsense Verses (see [p. 154]). Thackeray's serious version begins:

Know ye the willow-tree,

Whose grey leaves quiver,

Whispering gloomily

To yon pale river?

[P. 245.] Dear Jack. In O'Keeffe's opera, The Poor Soldier, is the often-parodied song imitated from the Latin:

Dear Tom, this brown jug that foams with mild ale,

Out of which I now drink to sweet Nan of the Vale,

Was once Toby Filpot, etc.

The Rev. Francis Fawkes, famous in his day as a translator of the classics, is the reputed author of the song.

[P. 248.] The Almack's Adieu and The Knightly Guerdon. These are varied parodies of a one-time popular song:

Your Molly has never been false, she declares,

Since the last time we parted at Wapping Old Stairs;

When I vowed I would ever continue the same,

And gave you the 'Bacco Box marked with my name.

When I passed a whole fortnight between decks with you,

Did I e'er give a kiss, Tom, to one of the crew?

To be useful and kind with my Thomas I stayed,—

For his trousers I washed, and his grog, too, I made.

[P. 250.] W. E. Aytoun. The contributions of Aytoun to the Book of Ballads, edited by 'Bon Gaultier,' that are here given are those which, on the authority of Sir Theodore Martin, were solely his own composition. Several of the Ballads had appeared in periodicals before they were collected and published in book form in 1845.

[P. 252.] A Midnight Meditation. Six poets are parodied in the 'Bon Gaultier' Ballads under the general heading, 'The Laureates' Tourney'—Wordsworth, the Hon. T— B— M'A—, the Hon. G— S— S—, T— M—RE, Esq., A— T—, and Sir E— B— L—, the last of which, by Aytoun only, is here given. The parodists, remembering Rejected Addresses, profess that the poems were sent to the Home Secretary when the Laureateship became vacant on the death of Southey.

[P. 252.] These mute inglorious Miltons. Hood had already used this pun connecting the poet and the oysters in his ballad of the blind Tim Turpin:

A surgeon oped his Milton eyes.

Like oysters, with a knife.

[P. 254.] The Husband's Petition. In this Aytoun was using to a ludicrous end the measure he had employed in The Execution of Montrose:

Come hither, Evan Cameron!

Come, stand beside my knee—

I hear the river roaring down

Towards the wintry sea.

[P. 256.] Sonnet CCCI. Martin Farquhar Tupper published a volume of Three Hundred Sonnets in 1860. Punch professed to have made an arrangement with him to continue the series, and boldly put the initials M. F. T. to this parody in the number for May 26, 1860.

[P. 257.] You see yon prater called a Beales. Edmond Beales (1803-1881) was President of the Reform League at the time of the Hyde Park riots. He thus figures in Punch in lines written apropos of tears shed by Walpole, Home Secretary, when he learnt of the riots:

Tears at the thought of that Hyde Park affair

Rise in the eye and trickle down the nose,

In looking on the haughty Edmond Beales,

And thinking of the shrubs that are no more.

[P. 258.] The Lay of the Lovelorn. This is one of the 'Bon Gaultier' Ballads, and is included by permission of Messrs. William Blackwood and Sons. Aytoun had no part in this parody. It was solely Sir Theodore Martin's, and in its author's opinion is the best he contributed to the collection. In the Book of Ballads Sir Theodore was at pains to explain that—

it was precisely the poets whom we most admired that we imitated the most frequently. This was certainly not from any want of reverence, but rather out of the fullness of our admiration, just as the excess of a lover's fondness often runs over into raillery of the very qualities that are dearest to his heart. 'Let no one,' says Heine, 'ridicule mankind unless he loves them.' With no less truth may it be said, Let no one parody a poet unless he loves him. He must first be penetrated by his spirit, and have steeped his ear in the music of his verse, before he can reflect these under a humorous aspect with success.

Some excellent parodists have succeeded very well in dissembling their love.

[P. 266.] The Laureates Bust at Trinity. Parody of part of Guinevere in the Idylls of the King:

So the stately Queen abode

For many a week, unknown, among the nuns....

'Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill!

Late, late, so late! but we can enter still.

Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now.'

The parody is from Punch, November 12, 1859.

[P. 268.] Unfortunate Miss Bailey. Tennyson's The Lord of Burleigh.

In her ear he whispers gaily,

'If my heart by signs can tell,

Maiden, I have watched thee daily,

And I think thou lov'st me well.'

[P. 270.] Cary. Phoebe Cary wrote many parodies. One entitled The Wife is sometimes said to be a burlesque of Wordsworth:

Her washing ended with the day,

Yet lived she at its close,

And passed the long, long night away

In darning ragged hose.

But when the sun in all his state

Illumed the eastern skies,

She passed about the kitchen grate

And went to making pies.

As a matter of fact this only differs by the use of a few turns from

Her suffering ended with the day,

by James Aldrich (1810-1856).

[P. 271.] That very time I saw, etc. See Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II., Sc. 1.

[P. 272.] On a Toasted Muffin, Sir E. L. B. L. B. L. B. Little was Edward Lytton Bulwer Lytton, afterwards Lord Lytton, who had written an anonymous satire, The New Timon.

[P. 273.] In Immemoriam. In connexion with these quatrains it may be noted that Whewell (1794-1866), in one of his treatises, published before In Memoriam, dropped into the following sentence: 'No power on earth, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight.'

[P. 274.] Bayard Taylor. The Diversions of the Echo Club first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, 1872, and in book form in 1876. The poems here reprinted are given by permission of the Houghton, Mifflin Company.

Taylor, writing to T. B. Aldrich, March 29, 1873, says:

Story told me that Browning sent him the Echo Club last summer, with a note saying it was the best thing of the kind he had ever seen, and that if he had found the imitations of himself in a volume of his poems he would have believed that he actually wrote them.

Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor.

[P. 281.] All or Nothing. While parodying Emerson's poetry generally Bayard Taylor had probably chiefly in mind The Sphinx:

The Sphinx is drowsy,

Her wings are furled:

Her ear is heavy,

She broods on the world.

Most of Bayard Taylor's parodies are obviously rather of the poets' general styles than of particular poems.

[P. 286.] If life were never bitter. Parody of Swinburne's A Match:

If love were what the rose is

And I were like the leaf.

[P. 286.] Salad. From The British Birds (1872):

Enter three Poets, all handsome. One hath redundant hair, a second redundant beard, a third redundant brow. They present a letter of introduction from an eminent London publisher, stating that they are candidates for the important post of Poet Laureate to the New Municipality which the Birds are about to create.

[P. 289.] I'm a Shrimp.

I'm afloat! I'm afloat! On the fierce rolling tide—

The ocean's my home and my bark is my bride.

Up, up, with my flag, let it wave o'er the sea,—

I'm afloat! I'm afloat! and the Rover is free.

[P. 290.] Dante Rossetti. These poems are taken, by permission, from The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti—the single-volume edition of 1911. 'MacCracken' is a close parody of one of Tennyson's early poems, 'The Kraken':

Below the thunders of the upper deep;

Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

The Kraken sleepeth.

Mr. Francis MacCracken, of Belfast, was the purchaser of early works by the pre-Raphaelite artists.

[P. 290.] The Brothers. Another poem by Tennyson, 'The Sisters,' tells of the tragic love of twin girls for one man, and this duality suggested the verses to Rossetti when he found that the 'Thomas Maitland' who had attacked his work in the Contemporary Review ('The Fleshly School of Poetry') was really Robert Buchanan.

[P. 292.] Ode to Tobacco. This is in the Draytonian metre, 'Fair stood the wind for France,' but Calverley evidently had Longfellow in mind. Compare the second stanza of his Ode with the third stanza of Longfellow's Skeleton in Armour:

I was a Viking old!

My deeds, though manifold,

No Skald in song has told,

No Saga taught thee!

[P. 294.] The real beverage for feasting gods on. The allusion in the seventh stanza is to Jupiter and the Indian Ale:

'Bring it!' quoth the Cloud-Compeller,

And the wine-god brought the beer—

'Port and Claret are like water

To the noble stuff that's here.'

Calverley also parodied Byron in Arcades Ambo.

[P. 297.] Wanderers. Tennyson's 'The Brook,' with the song of the brook:

I come from haunts of coot and hern,

I make a sudden sally,

but ending in a parody of Tennysonian blank verse. In his Collections and Recollections, Mr. G. W. E. Russell has quoted the last six lines, 'which even appreciative critics generally overlook.... Will any one stake his literary reputation on the assertion that these lines are not really Tennyson's?' (The poem is from Fly-Leaves, 1872, by permission of Messrs. George Bell and Sons.)

[P. 298.] Proverbial Philosophy. Here are some typical lines by Martin Tupper:

A man too careful of danger liveth in continual torment,

But a cheerful expecter of the best hath a fountain of joy within him:

Yea, though the breath of disappointment should chill the sanguine heart,

Speedily gloweth it again, warmed by the live embers of hope;

Though the black and heavy surge close above the head for a moment,

Yet the happy buoyancy of Confidence riseth superior to Despair.

[P. 300.] Read incessantly thy Burke—i.e., Burke's Peerage. The Prince of Modern Romance—i.e., Lord Lytton.

[P. 301.] The Cock and the Bull. As Mr. Seaman truly remarks, this is a recognized masterpiece of the higher stage of parody, when an author's literary methods—in this case Browning's The Ring and the Book—are imitated. (From Fly-Leaves.)

[P. 304.] Lovers, and a Reflection. Calverley may have had in mind William Morris's 'Two Red Roses across the Moon,' which begins 'There was a lady lived in a hall,' but undoubtedly the source of his inspiration was Jean Ingelow's 'The Apple-Woman's Song,' from Mopsa the Fairy, the second line of which recurs: 'Feathers and moss, and a wisp of hay.' (From Fly-Leaves.)

[P. 306.] Ballad. Another burlesque of the same poet. Miss Ingelow attempted to retaliate in Fated to be Free, with feeble lines intended to pour scorn on 'Gifford Crayshaw'—i.e., Calverley. (From Fly-Leaves.)

[P. 309.] You are old, Father William. An example of a parody known to everybody, although the original is known to few. The poem imitated is Southey's 'The Old Man's Comforts, and how he gained them,' beginning:

You are old, Father William, the young man cried,

and ending:

In the days of my youth I remember'd my God!

And He hath not forgotten my age.

[P. 314.] The Three Voices. Tennyson's The Two Voices:

A still small voice spake unto me.

[P. 322.] Beautiful Soup. The authorship of 'Beautiful Snow,' which was immensely popular in this country as well as in its native America, cannot be verified. It has been attributed to an unhappy woman, to Major W. A. Sigourney, who was said to have written the verses in 1852, and who died in 1871, and to a James W. Watson.

[P. 323.] Ravings. Parodying Poe's Ulalume:

The skies they were ashen and sober;

The leaves they were crisped and sere—

The leaves they were withering and sere;

It was night in the lonesome October

Of my most immemorial year;

It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,

In the misty mid region of Weir—

It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,

In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

[P. 324.] The Wedding. The name, 'Owing Merrythief' (i.e., Owen Meredith), invented by Hood the Younger, sufficiently explains the Tennysonian fragrance of these lines.

[P. 327.] A Clerk ther was. The seventy-fifth birthday of that distinguished scholar and oarsman, the late Dr. F. J. Furnivall, was celebrated by the publication by the Oxford University Press of a Festschrift, An English Miscellany. Professor Skeat's contribution was received too late for inclusion among the other tributes in this volume, and it was first published in The Periodical, the organ of the Oxford Press.

[P. 330.] A Reminiscence of 'David Garrick,' etc. T. W. Robertson's David Garrick was produced in 1864.

[P. 330.] Lord Dundreary. A farcical stage character in Tom Taylor's play, Our American Cousin, in which Edward A. Sothern created something of a furore in 1861-62.

[P. 330.] Mr. Buckstone's playhouse—i.e., The Haymarket Theatre.

[P. 331.] But at last a lady entered. Nelly Moore (d. 1869), an actress whose chief success was gained at the Haymarket with Sothern.

[Pp. 336-41.] From Specimens of Modern Poets | The Heptalogia | or | The Seven against Sense.| a Cap with Seven Bells: by permission of Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton and Messrs. Chatto and Windus. The poets parodied are Tennyson, Robert and Mrs. Browning, Coventry Patmore, 'Owen Meredith,' D. G. Rossetti, and Swinburne himself. The Specimens were published anonymously in 1880. The 'Owen Meredith' is particularly severe, and strikes the same note as that of Hood the Younger (p. 324). Swinburne's parody of himself is one of the rare successes of its kind. 'The Kid' Idyll is the third part of a parody of The Angel in the House.

The Poet and the Woodlouse is presumably suggested by Lady Geraldine's Courtship.

[P. 342.] Bret Harte. The Bret Harte poems are taken from his Complete Works by permission of Messrs. Chatto and Windus and the Houghton, Mifflin Company.

[P. 342.] A Geological Madrigal. Shenstone's verses beginning

I have found out a gift for my fair;

I have found where the wood-pigeons breed,

are in Hope, the second part of his Pastoral Ballad in Four Parts. The inspiration of Bret Harte's verses is sometimes ridiculously attributed to Herrick.

[P. 347.] Vers de Société. This might have been classed as a parody of Praed, but was printed originally as by 'Fritteric Lacquer.' It is here reprinted, with the two following parodies, from Traill's Recaptured Rhymes, by permission of Messrs. Blackwood.

[P. 348.] The Puss and the Boots. This may be compared with Calverley's 'The Cock and the Bull' (see p. 301).

[P. 350.] After Dilettante Concetti. See Rossetti's Sister Helen, which commences:

'Why did you melt your waxen man,

Sister Helen?

To-day is the third since you began.'

'The time was long, yet the time ran,

Little Brother!'

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)

The sonnet with which Traill closes is a parody of Sonnet XCVII. of The House of Life, beginning:

'Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;

I am also called No-More, Too-Late, Farewell.'

[Pp. 353-7.] Andrew Lang. The parodies on the Rossetti and Morris styles are taken from Andrew Lang's essay on Thomas Haynes Bayly in Essays in Little. 'Bayly,' Mr. Lang wrote, in discussing 'Oh, no, we never mention her,' 'had now struck the note, the sweet sentimental note, of the early, innocent, Victorian age.... We should do the trick quite differently now, more like this.' Here follows 'Love spake to me,' of which its author says at the end:

I declare I nearly weep over these lines; for, though they are only Bayly's sentiment hastily recast in a modern manner, there is something so very affecting, mouldy, and unwholesome about them that they sound as if they had been 'written up to' a sketch by a disciple of Mr. Rossetti's.

So, of—

Gaily the Troubadour

Touched his guitar,

Mr. Lang says, 'Any one of us could get in more local colour for the money, and give the crusader a cithern or citole instead of a guitar,' and in proof gives the 'romantic, esoteric, old French poem, "Sir Ralph."'

The two Swinburne parodies are from Rhymes à la Mode, 1895. An earlier Ballade, of which that on p. 35 'is an improved version, was printed in the St. James's Gazette in 1881. The original of this is Swinburne's 'A Ballad of Burdens'; of 'The Palace of Bric-a-brac,' 'The Garden of Proserpine':

Here, where the world is quiet,

Here, where all trouble seems

Dead winds' and spent waves' riot

In doubtful dreams of dreams.

[P. 355.] Brahma. Emerson's 'If the red slayer think he slays.' This parody is said to have been an impromptu. It is taken from New Collected Rhymes. All the Lang parodies here are given by permission of Messrs. Longman.

[Pp. 358-64.] A. C. Hilton. The parodies by Hilton appeared in the two numbers of The Light Green. They are reprinted here by permission of Messrs. Metcalfe, Cambridge.

The original of 'Octopus' was clearly 'Dolores,' which appeared in Poems and Ballads, First Series, 1866. The fourth stanza of this, with which may be compared the fifth stanza of 'Octopus,' runs:

O lips full of lust and of laughter,

Curled snakes that are fed from my breast,

Bite hard lest remembrance come after

And press with new lips where you pressed.

For my heart, too, springs up at the pressure,

Mine eyelids, too, moisten and burn;

Ah, feed me and fill me with pleasure,

Ere pain come in turn.

[P. 365.] Home, Sweet Home. This Fantasia is taken from Airs from Arcady, 1885, by permission of Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons.

[P. 374.] Ode on a Retrospect. This Ode was put into the mouth of an Eton master named Joynes. Being a Liberal with Nationalist sympathies, he visited a disturbed district in the North of Ireland (presumably in the summer of 1882), and contrived to get himself arrested, and imprisoned for a short time. He then wrote a book or pamphlet on the subject, with the result indicated in the verses, which seem to point to his having withdrawn his work rather than resign his appointment. Mr. Joynes still held his mastership when the Retrospect was published in November, 1882, and the popularity of the piece at Eton was prodigious, especially the admirable line, 'They snatched a fearful Joynes.'

[P. 378.] To A. T. M. 'The K.' was the 'A. T. M.' to whom the piece is addressed—A. T. Myers (Arthur, a physician of some eminence), the youngest brother of the poet parodied. Sir Herbert Stephen (by whose permission his brother's parodies, from Lapsus Calami, are given) states that in the early days of the Society for Psychical Research, founded by F. W. H. Myers, and of the study of the newly-named 'telepathy,' such experiments were frequently tried by the members, and he thinks it highly probable that the incident of Arthur Myers taking peppermint in order to test the ability of an alleged telepathist 'in quite another room' to say what it was, took place in fact as described. 'The K.' was a nickname by which A. T. M. was very generally known among his friends and relations: the reason is obscure.

[P. 379.] Wake! for the Ruddy Ball. This imitation by Francis Thompson of the Rubaiyat was first printed in Mr. E. V. Lucas's One Day with Another. It is here given by permission of Mr. Wilfrid Meynell and of Messrs. Burns and Oates.

[P. 382.] Robert Fuller Murray. 'The Poet's Hat' and 'Andrew M'Crie' are taken, by permission of Messrs. MacLehose and Sons, from The Scarlet Gown, 1891, the parodies in which, according to Andrew Lang, are not inferior to Calverley. 'Andrew M'Crie' is an improved edition of the verses originally contributed to the University News-Sheet (St. Andrews) in 1886, entitled 'Albert McGee.'

[P. 384.] A 'semi' is an undergraduate of the second, a 'tertian' of the third, year.

[P. 387.] Fish have their times to bite. This parody of Mrs. Hemans, by an unknown author, is taken from College Rhymes, 1861. The original begins:

Leaves have their time to fall,

And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,

And stars to set—but all,

Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death.

[P. 390.] A Girtonian Funeral. This parody of 'A Grammarian's Funeral' first appeared in the Journal of Education, May 1, 1886, from which it is here reprinted by the permission of the editor. The authorship is unknown.

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