XXVIII.
PARODIES IN VERSE—continued.
When I embarked upon the subject of metrical parody I said that it was a shoreless sea. For my own part, I enjoy sailing over these rippling waters, and cannot be induced to hurry. Let us put in for a moment at Belfast. There in 1874 the British Association held its annual meeting; and Professor Tyndall delivered an inaugural address in which he revived and glorified the Atomic Theory of the Universe. His glowing peroration ran as follows: "Here I must quit a theme too great for me to handle, but which will be handled by the loftiest minds ages after you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past." Shortly afterwards Blackwood's Magazine, always famous for its humorous and satiric verse, published a rhymed abstract of Tyndall's address, of which I quote (from memory) the concluding lines:—
"Let us greatly honour the Atom, so lively, so wise, and so small;
The Atomists, too, let us honour—Epicurus, Lucretius, and all.
Let us damn with faint praise Bishop Butler, in whom many atoms combined
To form that remarkable structure which it pleased him to call his mind.
Next praise we the noble body to which, for the time, we belong
(Ere yet the swift course of the Atom hath hurried us breathless along)—
The BRITISH ASSOCIATION—like Leviathan worshipped by Hobbes,