"'She jumps like a flea,' said Dick, 'and as for galloping, she can go from anywhere to everywhere in forty minutes—and back again.'"
We may also mention his description of an old-fashioned doctor.
"At first sight we were in doubt whether to set him down as a doctor or a pedagogue, for his dress presented one very characteristic appendage of the latter, namely a square cut black coat, which never was, never would be, and probably never had been, in fashion. A profusion of cambric frills, huge silver shoe-buckles, a snuff-box of the same metal, and a gold-headed cane belonging rather to the costume of the physician of the period. He wore a very precise wig of a very decided brown, regularly crisped at the top like a bunch of endive, and in front, following the exact curves of the arches of two bushy eyebrows. He had dark eyes, a prominent nose, and a wide mouth—the corners of which in smiling were drawn towards his double chin. A florid colour on his face hinted a plethoric habit, while a portly body and a very short thick neck bespoke an apoplectic tendency. Warned by these indications, prudence had made him a strict water-drinker, and abstemious in his diet—a mode of treatment which he applied to all his patients short or tall, stout or thin, with whom whatever their disease, he invariably began by reducing them, as an arithmetician would say, to their lowest terms. This mode of treatment raised him much in the estimation of the parish authorities."
The humour in the following is of a lighter and more tricksy kind—
Written in a Young Lady's Album.
"Upon your cheek I may not speak,
Nor on your lip be warm,
I must be wise about your eyes,
And formal with your form;
Of all that sort of thing, in short,
On T. H. Bayly's plan,
I must not twine a single line,
I'm not a single man."
On hearing that Grimaldi had left the stage, he enumerates his funny performances—
"Oh, who like thee could ever drink,
Or eat—smile—swallow—bolt—and choke,
Nod, weep, and hiccup—sneeze and wink?
Thy very gown was quite a joke!
Though Joseph Junior acts not ill,
'There's no fool like the old fool still.'"
His felicity in playing with words is well exhibited in the stanzas on "John Trot."
"John Trot he was as tall a lad
As York did ever rear,
As his dear granny used to say,
He'd make a Grenadier.
"A serjeant soon came down to York
With ribbons and a frill;
My lad, said he, let broadcast be,
And come away to drill.
"But when he wanted John to 'list,
In war he saw no fun,
Where what is call'd a raw recruit,
Gets often over-done.
"Let others carry guns, said he,
And go to war's alarms,
But I have got a shoulder-knot
Imposed upon my arms.
"For John he had a footman's place,
To wait on Lady Wye,
She was a dumpy woman, tho'
Her family was high.
"Now when two years had passed away
Her lord took very ill,
And left her to her widowhood,
Of course, more dumpy still.
"Said John, I am a proper man,
And very tall to see,
Who knows, but now her lord is low
She may look up to me?
"'A cunning woman told me once
Such fortune would turn up,
She was a kind of sorceress,
But studied in a cup.'
"So he walked up to Lady Wye,
And took her quite amazed,
She thought though John was tall enough
He wanted to be raised.
"But John—for why? she was a dame
Of such a dwarfish sort—
Had only come to bid her make
Her mourning very short.
"Said he, 'your lord is dead and cold,
You only cry in vain,
Not all the cries of London now,
Could call him back again.
"'You'll soon have many a noble beau,
To dry your noble tears,
But just consider this that I
Have followed you for years.
"'And tho' you are above me far,
What matters high degree,
When you are only four foot nine,
And I am six foot three?
"'For though you are of lofty race,
And I'm a low-born elf,
Yet none among your friends could say,
You matched beneath yourself.'
"Said she, 'such insolence as this
Can be no common case;
Though you are in my service, Sir,
Your love is out of place.'
"'O Lady Wye! O Lady Wye!
Consider what you do;
How can you be so short with me,
I am not so with you!'
"Then ringing for her serving-men,
They show'd him to the door;
Said they, 'you turn out better now,
Why didn't you before?'
"They stripp'd his coat, and gave him kicks
For all his wages due,
And off instead of green and gold
He went in black and blue.
"No family would take him in
Because of this discharge,
So he made up his mind to serve
The country all at large.
"'Huzza!' the serjeant cried, and put
The money in his hand,
And with a shilling cut him off
From his paternal land.
"For when his regiment went to fight
At Saragossa town,
A Frenchman thought he look'd too tall,
And so he cut him down."
Barham's humour, as seen in his "Ingoldsby Legends," is of a lower character, but shows that the author possessed a great natural facility. He had keen observation, but his taste did not prevent his employing it on what was coarse and puerile. Common slang abounds, as in "The Vulgar Little Boy;" he talks of "the devil's cow's tail," and is little afraid of extravagances. His metre often assists him, and we have often comic rhyming as where "Mephistopheles" answers to "Coffee lees," and he says:—