Alas, poor Jumbo! Here's the fruit
Of faithless Barnum's greed of gain;
How sad that so well-trained a brute
Should owe his exit to a train!
The elegy on Charles Jamrach, the celebrated naturalist and menagerie-keeper of St. George's-in-the-East, who died in September, 1891, at the age of seventy-six, was better deserved. Charles Jamrach, the most notable of the dynasty which for three-quarters of a century enjoyed a practical monopoly of the trade in wild animals in this country, was a "stout fellow": Frank Buckland describes his single-handed struggle with a runaway tiger in 1857; he appears in the D.N.B.; and Punch, in his lines on "The King of the Beasts," after describing the lamentations of the animals at the Zoo, ends up on a note of genuine regret:—
O Jamrach! O Jamrach! Woe's stretched on no sham rack
Of metre that mourns you sincerely;
E'en that hard nut o' natur, the great Alligator,
Has eyes that look red, and blink queerly.
Mere "crocodile's tears," some may snigger, but jeers