I will not suppose my readers so oblivious of an elderly joke, as not to recognize the face of that which is about to greet them; but, having found a version of it “turned to numbers,” I present it—a little “rubbed up” for the occasion—to the indulgent attention of those who have only met with it in prosaic statement:
A blind man, fed by fiddling, Was known through many a street; His “style,” far short of “middling,” With some did pass for sweet. He priz’d his fiddle greatly; The case had fainter praise— The case by “wife” made lately, With half a yard of baize. One day, when, led by Rover, He had a bridge to pass, His fiddle tumbled over, Stick, case, and all, alas! He straight set up a roaring, And added such grimace, That folks around came pouring, And pitied his sad case. “Sad case! Psha! twiddle diddle!” Cried he, with scornful face; “Could I but get my fiddle D’ye think I’d mind the case?”
Having thus made ourselves familiar with the street fiddler, and thereby, as it were, “sounded the very base-string of humility,” may we not be fairly supposed to have reached the fag-end of our subject? Whilst on this lower level, however—or, in what may be termed the Vale of Cacophony—I cannot conclude, without offering to the patience of my kind readers two more scraps of verse, wherein I have sought to exhibit a pair of specimens that belong, equally with the poor street fiddler, to the class of—those that might be dispensed with:
EPIGRAM ON AN UNFORTUNATE MAN, AND BAD FIDDLER. Though Dibble is feeble in all that he’s at, Few fools ever fondled a failure before, so. In love, as in music, he stands for a flat— (For his Fanny is false, and his fiddle is more so), While he still ignoreth—what none can dispute— That his suit’s out of tune, and his tune doesn’t suit!
ANOTHER, ON ANOTHER BAD FIDDLER. When Screechley on that noise-box harshly grates, What, what’s the supposition that must follow? This—that by some odd shifting of the Fates, ’Tis Marsyas’ turn to flay alive Apollo!
