Who wouldn't care a d---- were Davie dead."
The Ingoldsby Legends—long since, I believe, deposed from their position in public favour—were published in 1840. Their principal merits are a vein of humour, rollicking and often coarse, but genuine and infectious; great command over unusual metres; and an unequalled ingenuity in making double and treble rhymes: for example—
"The poor little Page, too, himself got no quarter, but
Was served the same way, And was found the next day,
With his heels in the air, and his head in the water-butt."
There is a general flavour of parody about most of the ballads. It does not as a rule amount to more than a rather clumsy mockery of mediaevalism, but the verses prefixed to the Lay of St. Gengulphus are really rather like a fragment of a black-letter ballad. The book contains only one absolute parody, borrowed from Samuel Lover's Lyrics of Ireland, and then the result is truly offensive, for the poem chosen for the experiment is one of the most beautiful in the language—the Burial of Sir John Moore, which is transmuted into a stupid story of vulgar debauch. Of much the same date as the Ingoldsby Legends was the Old Curiosity Shop, and no one who has a really scholarly acquaintance with Dickens will forget the delightful scraps of Tom Moore's amatory ditties with which, slightly adapted to current circumstances, Dick Swiveller used to console himself when Destiny seemed too strong for him. And it will be remembered that Mr. Slum composed some very telling parodies of the same popular author as advertisements for Mrs. Jarley's Waxworks; but I forbear to quote here what is so easily accessible.
By way of tracing the development of the Art of Parody, I am taking my samples in chronological order. In 1845 the Newdigate Prize for an English poem at Oxford was won by J.W. Burgon, afterwards Dean of Chichester. The subject was Petra. The successful poem was, on the whole, not much better and not much worse than the general run of such compositions; but it contained one couplet which Dean Stanley regarded as an absolute gem—a volume of description condensed into two lines:—
"Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime—
A rose-red city, half as old as time."
The couplet was universally praised and quoted, and, as a natural consequence, parodied. There resided then (and long after) at Trinity College, Oxford, an extraordinarily old don called Short.[[31]] When I was an undergraduate he was still tottering about, and we looked at him with interest because he had been Newman's tutor. To his case the parodist of the period, in a moment of inspiration, adapted Burgon's beautiful couplet, saying or singing:—