and in lines that almost must have been written by Wordsworth exclaims:
I want to hear the porters cry,
“Change here for Ennerdale!”
And I must be forgiven, since so few know the poem, for quoting the postscript to his parody of Browning, sufficient surely to make the poet, for whom Jim Stephen had an immense reverence, turn in his grave in order to laugh more easily. As follows:
P.S.
There’s a Me Society down at Cambridge
Where my works, cum notis variorum
Are talked about: well, I require the same bridge
As Euclid took toll at as Asinorum.
And as they have got through several ditties
I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall
I’ve composed the above, and a stiff one it is,
A bridge to stop asses at, once for all.
If the art of parody can go further, I do not know who has conducted it there. The kindly ghost of Robert Browning might perhaps shrug his shoulders at “The Cock and the Bull,” and say, “Very amusing”: but reading Jim Stephen’s R.B. he must surely have winced and frowned first, and thereafter broken into a roar of his most genial laughter.
Often (when not indebted to C.S.C.) Jim Stephen’s most apt and biting parodies would be written or spouted extempore: I remember for instance someone reading a rather lamentable verse from F. W. Myers in which he delicately alludes to the godly procreation of children in the following lines:
Lo! when a man magnanimous and tender,
Lo! when a woman desperate and true,
Make the irrevocable sweet surrender,
Show to each other what the Lord can do.
upon which Jim Stephen without a moment’s pause exclaimed: