What have we to do with the times? We cannot cure 'em:
Let them go on: when they are swoln with surfeits
They'll burst and stink: Then all the world shall smell 'em.
BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.
Once more Reader I commence with
Aballiboozobanganorribo;
Do not suppose that I am about to let thee into the mysteries of that great decasyllabon! Questo è bene uno de' piu profondi segreti ch' abbia tutto il mondo, e quasi nessuno il sa; e sia certo che ad altri nol direi giammai.1 No Reader! not if I were before the High Court of Parliament, and the House of Commons should exert all its inquisitorial and tyrannical powers to extort it from me, would I let the secret pass that ἐρκος ὀδοντῶν within which my little trowel of speech has learnt not to be an unruly member. I would behave as magnanimously as Sir Abraham Bradley King did upon a not-altogether-dissimilar occasion. Sir Abraham might have said of his secret as Henry More says of the Epicurean Philosophy, “Truly it is a very venerable secret; and not to be uttered or communicated but by some old Silenus lying in his obscure grot or cave; nor that neither but upon due circumstances, and in a right humour, when one may find him with his veins swelled out with wine, and his garland fallen off from his head through his heedless drowsiness. Then if some young Chromis and Mnasylus, especially assisted by a fair and forward Ægle, that by way of a love-frolic will leave the tracts of their fingers in the blood of mulberries on the temples and forehead of this aged Satyr, while he sleeps dog-sleep, and will not seem to see for fear he forfeit the pleasure of his feeling,—then I say, if these young lads importune him enough,—he will utter it in a higher strain than ever.”
1 BIBBIENA.
But by no such means can the knowledge of my profounder mystery be attained. I will tell thee however, good reader, that the word itself, apart from all considerations of its mystical meaning, serves me for the same purpose to which the old tune of Lilliburlero was applied by our dear Uncle Toby,—our dear Uncle I say, for is he not your Uncle Toby, gentle Reader? yours as well as mine, if you are worthy to hold him in such relationship; and so by that relationship, you and I are Cousins.
The Doctor had learnt something from his Uncle William, which he used to the same effect, tho' not in the same way. William Dove in that capacious memory of his, into which every thing that he heard was stored, and out of which nothing was lost, had among the fragments of old songs and ballads which he had picked up, sundry burdens or chorusses, as unmeaning as those which O'Keeffe used to introduce in some of the songs of his farces, always with good farcical effect. Uncle Toby's favourite was one of them;
Lilli burlero bullen a-la;
Lero lero, lilli burlero, lero lero, bullen a-la;
Lero lero, lilli burlero, lero lero, bullen a-la.