There was a poor poet named Clough;
Poet Swinburne declares he wrote stuff—
Ah, well, he is dead!
'Tis the living are fed,
By log-rollers on butter and puff!
Parodies and "Limericks"
Of Punch's relations with Ruskin we speak in another place. The most detailed notice of Meredith grew out of a real incident, the calling of the illustrious novelist as a witness in a libel action in the year 1891. Punch professes to give a full report of his evidence, in which Judge and Counsel are overwhelmed in a deluge of Meredithyrambics. It is a perfectly friendly and by no means inexpert parody of the contortions and obscurities which induced Tennyson to declare that reading Meredith was like wading through glue. Punch's friendly irreverence to his old friend of thirty years' standing prompts me to add that, throughout this period, parody was continually and increasingly employed, not like the bladder with which the Fool belabours bystanders, but as a weapon of genuine criticism. Here is a list, though not a complete list, of the authors who were subjected to this method in the period under review. Rhoda Broughton (for her emotional sentimentality) in Gone Wrong; Captain Hawley Smart, the sporting novelist; "Ouida"; Trollope; Disraeli, the florid magnificence and aristocratic atmosphere of whose Endymion is amusingly travestied in 1880; J. C. Harris, the author of Uncle Remus; Rider Haggard; Lord Lytton ("Owen Meredith") in "Fitzdotterel," a parody of Glenaveril; Stevenson; F. C. Philips, the author of As in a Looking Glass; Oscar Wilde; Barrie; Kipling; Hardy; Henley and Maeterlinck (in the style of Ollendorff).
Burnand was not a parodist of the class of Calverley or Sir Owen Seaman, Max Beerbohm or Mr. J. C. Squire; but what he lacked in literary felicity and scholarship and in that impersonation which assumes the habit of mind of the author travestied, he made up in his unfailing sense of the ludicrous, his high spirits and audacious burlesque. He confined himself mainly to prose. At the end of this period Mr. Anstey was a veritable tower of strength to the paper. His Voces Populi and his burlesques of recitations and music-hall songs are masterpieces of close observation and high-spirited fun. The extravagances of the æsthetic poets engaged other pens, but the best literary parodies belong to a rather later date. There is, however, a good specimen in the "domestic threnody" on Oleo-Margarine in the manner of Swinburne, which appears in 1881, and opens impressively:—
I am she whose nameless naked name to utter
The strong are weak;