The incarnation of wisdom built up of our witless nobs;
Which will carry on endless discussion till I, and probably you,
Have melted in infinite azure—and, in short, till all is blue."
Surely this translation of the Professor's misplaced dithyrambics into the homeliest of colloquialisms is both good parody and just criticism.
In 1876 there appeared a clever little book (attributed to Sir Frederick Pollock) which was styled Leading Cases done into English, by an Apprentice of Lincoln's Inn. It appealed only to a limited public, for it is actually a collection of sixteen important law-cases set forth, with explanatory notes, in excellent verse imitated from poets great and small. Chaucer, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Clough, Rossetti, and James Rhoades supply the models, and I have been credibly informed that the law is as good as the versification. Mr. Swinburne was in those days the favourite butt of young parodists, and the gem of the book is the dedication to "J.S." or "John Stiles," a mythical person, nearly related to John Doe and Richard Roe, with whom all budding jurists had in old days to make acquaintance. The disappearance of the venerated initials from modern law-books inspired the following:—
"When waters are rent with commotion
Of storms, or with sunlight made whole,
The river still pours to the ocean
The stream of its effluent soul;
You, too, from all lips of all living,