A Century of Parody and Imitation

by Unknown

Make this dull world a business of delight,

Are all combined in Horace Smith.

How the Rejected Addresses came to be written is told in the authors' prefaces:

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

On the 14th of August, 1812, the following advertisement appeared in most of the daily papers:—

'Rebuilding of Drury Lane Theatre.

'The Committee are desirous of promoting a free and fair competition for an Address to be spoken upon the opening of the Theatre, which will take place on the 10th of October next. They have, therefore, thought fit to announce to the public, that they will be glad to receive any such compositions, addressed to their Secretary, at the Treasury Office, in Drury Lane, on or before the 10th of September, sealed up; with a distinguishing word, number, or motto, on the cover, corresponding with the inscription on a separate sealed paper, containing the name of the author, which will not be opened unless containing the name of the successful candidate.'

Upon the propriety of this plan, men's minds were, as they usually are upon matters of moment, much divided. Some thought it a fair promise of the future intention of the Committee to abolish that phalanx of authors who usurp the stage, to the exclusion of a large assortment of dramatic talent blushing unseen in the background; while others contended, that the scheme would prevent men of real eminence from descending into an amphitheatre in which all Grub Street (that is to say, all London and Westminster) would be arrayed against them. The event has proved both parties to be in a degree right, and in a degree wrong. One hundred and twelve 'Addresses' have been sent in, each sealed and signed, and mottoed, 'as per order,' some written by men of great, some by men of little, and some by men of no, talent.

Many of the public prints have censured the taste of the Committee, in thus contracting for 'Addresses,' as they would for nails—by the gross; but it is surprising that none should have censured their temerity. One hundred and eleven of the 'Addresses' must, of course, be unsuccessful: to each of the authors, thus infallibly classed with the genus irritabile, it would be very hard to deny six staunch friends, who consider his the best of all possible 'Addresses,' and whose tongues will be as ready to laud him, as to hiss his adversary. These, with the potent aid of the Bard himself, make seven foes per Address; and thus will be created seven hundred and seventy-seven implacable auditors, prepared to condemn the strains of Apollo himself—a band of adversaries which no prudent manager would think of exasperating.

But, leaving the Committee to encounter the responsibility they have incurred, the public have at least to thank them for ascertaining and establishing one point, which might otherwise have admitted of controversy. When it is considered that many amateur writers have been discouraged from becoming competitors, and that few, if any, of the professional authors can afford to write for nothing, and, of course, have not been candidates for the honorary prize at Drury Lane, we may confidently pronounce that, as far as regards NUMBER, the present is undoubtedly the Augustan age of English poetry. Whether or not this distinction will be extended to the QUALITY of its productions, must be decided at the tribunal of posterity; though the natural anxiety of our authors on this score ought to be considerably diminished when they reflect how few will, in all probability, be had up for judgement.

It is not necessary for the Editor to mention the manner in which he became possessed of this 'fair sample of the present state of poetry in Great Britain.' It was his first intention to publish the whole; but a little reflection convinced him that, by so doing, he might depress the good, without elevating the bad. He has therefore culled what had the appearance of flowers, from what possessed the reality of weeds, and is extremely sorry that, in so doing, he has diminished his collection to twenty-one. Those which he has rejected may possibly make their appearance in a separate volume, or they may be admitted as volunteers in the files of some of the Newspapers; or, at all events, they are sure of being received among the awkward squad of the Magazines. In general, they bear a close resemblance to each other; thirty of them contain extravagant compliments to the immortal Wellington and the indefatigable Whitbread; and, as the last-mentioned gentleman is said to dislike praise in the exact proportion in which he deserves it, these laudatory writers may have been only building a wall against which they might run their own heads.

The Editor here begs leave to advance a few words in behalf of that useful and much abused bird the Phœnix; and in so doing he is biased by no partiality, as he assures the reader he not only never saw one, but (mirabile dictu!) never caged one in a simile in the whole course of his life. Not less than sixty-nine of the competitors have invoked the aid of this native of Arabia; but as, from their manner of using him after they had caught him, he does not by any means appear to have been a native of Arabia Felix, the Editor has left the proprietors to treat with Mr. Polito, and refused to receive this rara avis, or black swan, into the present collection. One exception occurs, in which the admirable treatment of this feathered incombustible, entitles the author to great praise; that address has been preserved, and was thought worthy of taking the lead.

Perhaps the reason why several of the subjoined productions of the Musæ Londinenses have failed of selection, may be discovered in their being penned in a metre unusual upon occasions of this sort, and in their not being written with that attention to stage effect, the want of which, like want of manners in the concerns of life, is more prejudicial than a deficiency of talent. There is an art of writing for the Theatre, technically called touch and go, which is indispensable when we consider the small quantum of patience which so motley an assemblage as a London audience can be expected to afford. All the contributors have been very exact in sending their initials and mottoes. Those belonging to the present collection have been carefully preserved, and each has been affixed to its respective poem. The letters that accompanied the Addresses having been honourably destroyed unopened, it is impossible to state the real authors with any certainty; but the ingenious reader, after comparing the initials with the motto, and both with the poem will form his own conclusions.

We do not anticipate any disapprobation from thus giving publicity to a small portion of the Rejected Addresses; for unless we are widely mistaken in assigning the respective authors, the fame of each Individual is established on much too firm a basis to be shaken by so trifling and evanescent a publication as the present:

——neque ego illi detrahere ausim

Hærentem capiti multa cum laude coronam.

Of the numerous pieces already sent to the Committee for performance, we have only availed ourselves of three vocal Travesties, which we have selected, not for their merit, but simply for their brevity. Above one hundred spectacles, melodramas, operas, and pantomimes have been transmitted, besides the two first acts of one legitimate comedy. Some of these evince considerable smartness of manual dialogue, and several brilliant repartees of chairs, tables, and other inanimate wits; but the authors seem to have forgotten that in the new Drury Lane the audience can hear as well as see. Of late our theatres have been so constructed, that John Bull has been compelled to have very long ears, or none at all; to keep them dangling about his skull like discarded servants, while his eyes were gazing at piebalds and elephants, or else to stretch them out to an asinine length to catch the congenial sound of braying trumpets. An auricular revolution is, we trust, about to take place; and as many people have been much puzzled to define the meaning of the new era, of which we have heard so much, we venture to pronounce, that as far as regards Drury Lane Theatre, the new era means the reign of ears. If the past affords any pledge for the future, we may confidently expect from the Committee of that House everything that can be accomplished by the union of taste and assiduity.

The text of the Rejected Addresses here given is that of the eighteenth edition with Horace Smith's annotations. The footnotes from the Edinburgh Review were taken from an article by Lord Jeffrey in the number for November, 1812. It may be mentioned that the actual addresses sent in to the Drury Lane Committee are preserved with their covering letters in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum, and that on the immediate success of the Smiths' parodies an enterprising publisher issued a volume of Genuine Rejected Addresses from the forty-three competitors who responded to his appeal for such.

The following is from the Preface to the eighteenth edition:

Our first difficulty, that of selection, was by no means a light one. Some of our most eminent poets, such, for instance, as Rogers and Campbell, presented so much beauty, harmony, and proportion in their writings, both as to style and sentiment, that if we had attempted to caricature them, nobody would have recognized the likeness; and if we had endeavoured to give a servile copy of their manner, it would only have amounted, at best, to a tame and unamusing portrait, which it was not our object to present. Although fully aware that their names would, in the theatrical phrase, have conferred great strength upon our bill, we were reluctantly compelled to forgo them, and to confine ourselves to writers whose style and habit of thought, being more marked and peculiar, was more capable of exaggeration and distortion. To avoid politics and personality, to imitate the turn of mind, as well as the phraseology of our originals, and, at all events, to raise a harmless laugh, were our main objects: in the attainment of which united aims, we were sometimes hurried into extravagance, by attaching much more importance to the last than to the two first. In no instance were we thus betrayed into a greater injustice than in the case of Mr. Wordsworth—the touching sentiment, profound wisdom, and copious harmony of whose loftier writings we left unnoticed, in the desire of burlesquing them; while we pounced upon his popular ballads, and exerted ourselves to push their simplicity into puerility and silliness. With pride and pleasure do we now claim to be ranked among the most ardent admirers of this true poet; and if he himself could see the state of his works, which are ever at our right hand, he would, perhaps, receive the manifest evidences they exhibit of constant reference, and delighted re-perusal, as some sort of amende honorable for the unfairness of which we were guilty, when we were less conversant with the higher inspirations of his muse. To Mr. Coleridge, and others of our originals, we must also do a tardy act of justice, by declaring that our burlesque of their peculiarities, has never blinded us to those beauties and talents which are beyond the reach of all ridicule.

One of us had written a genuine Address for the occasion, which was sent to the Committee, and shared the fate it merited, in being rejected. To swell the bulk, or rather to diminish the tenuity of our little work, we added it to the Imitations; and prefixing the initials of S. T. P. for the purpose of puzzling the critics, were not a little amused, in the sequel, by the many guesses and conjectures into which we had ensnared some of our readers. We could even enjoy the mysticism, qualified as it was by the poor compliment, that our carefully written Address exhibited no 'very prominent trait of absurdity,' when we saw it thus noticed in the Edinburgh Review for November, 1812. 'An Address by S. T. P. we can make nothing of; and professing our ignorance of the author designated by these letters, we can only add, that the Address, though a little affected, and not very full of meaning, has no very prominent trait of absurdity, that we can detect; and might have been adopted and spoken, so far as we can perceive, without any hazard of ridicule. In our simplicity we consider it as a very decent, mellifluous, occasional prologue; and do not understand how it has found its way into its present company.'

Urged forward by hurry, and trusting to chance, two very bad coadjutors in any enterprise, we at length congratulated ourselves on having completed our task in time to have it printed and published by the opening of the theatre. But, alas! our difficulties, so far from being surmounted, seemed only to be beginning. Strangers to the arcana of the bookseller's trade, and unacquainted with their almost invincible objection to single volumes of low price, especially when tendered by writers who have acquired no previous name, we little anticipated that they would refuse to publish our Rejected Addresses, even although we asked nothing for the copyright. Such however, proved to be the case. Our manuscript was perused and returned to us by several of the most eminent publishers. Well do we remember betaking ourselves to one of the craft in Bond Street, whom we found in a back parlour, with his gouty leg propped upon a cushion, in spite of which warning he diluted his luncheon with frequent glasses of Madeira. 'What have you already written?' was his first question, an interrogatory to which we had been subjected in almost every instance. 'Nothing by which we can be known.' 'Then I am afraid to undertake the publication.' We presumed timidly to suggest that every writer must have a beginning, and that to refuse to publish for him until he had acquired a name, was to imitate the sapient mother who cautioned her son against going into the water until he could swim. 'An old joke—a regular Joe!' exclaimed our companion, tossing off another bumper. 'Still older than Joe Miller,' was our reply; 'for, if we mistake not, it is the very first anecdote in the facetiæ of Hierocles.' 'Ha, sirs!' resumed the bibliopolist, 'you are learned, are you? So, soh!—Well, leave your manuscript with me; I will look it over to-night, and give you an answer to-morrow.' Punctual as the clock we presented ourselves at his door on the following morning, when our papers were returned to us with the observation—'These trifles are really not deficient in smartness; they are well, vastly well for beginners; but they will never do—never. They would not pay for advertising, and without it I should not sell fifty copies.'

This was discouraging enough. If the most experienced publishers feared to be out of pocket by the work, it was manifest, a fortiori, that its writers ran a risk of being still more heavy losers, should they undertake the publication on their own account. We had no objection to raise a laugh at the expense of others; but to do it at our own cost, uncertain as we were to what extent we might be involved, had never entered into our contemplation. In this dilemma, our Addresses, now in every sense rejected, might probably have never seen the light, had not some good angel whispered us to betake ourselves to Mr. John Miller, a dramatic publisher, then residing in Bow Street, Covent Garden. No sooner had this gentleman looked over our manuscript, than he immediately offered to take upon himself all the risk of publication, and to give us half the profits, should there be any; a liberal proposition, with which we gladly closed. So rapid and decided was its success, at which none were more unfeignedly astonished than its authors, that Mr. Miller advised us to collect some Imitations of Horace, which had appeared anonymously in the Monthly Mirror, offering to publish them upon the same terms. We did so accordingly; and as new editions of the Rejected Addresses were called for in quick succession, we were shortly enabled to sell our half copyright in the two works to Mr. Miller, for one thousand pounds!! We have entered into this unimportant detail, not to gratify any vanity of our own, but to encourage such literary beginners as may be placed in similar circumstances; as well as to impress upon publishers the propriety of giving more consideration to the possible merit of the works submitted to them, than to the mere magic of a name.

To the credit of the genus irritabile be it recorded, that not one of those whom we had parodied or burlesqued ever betrayed the least soreness on the occasion, or refused to join in the laugh that we had occasioned. With most of them we subsequently formed acquaintanceship; while some honoured us with an intimacy which still continues, where it has not been severed by the rude hand of Death. Alas! it is painful to reflect, that of the twelve writers whom we presumed to imitate, five are now no more; the list of the deceased being unhappily swelled by the most illustrious of all, the clarum et venerabile nomen of Sir Walter Scott! From that distinguished writer, whose transcendent talents were only to be equalled by his virtues and his amiability, we received favours and notice, both public and private, which it will be difficult to forget, because we had not the smallest claim upon his kindness. 'I certainly must have written this myself!' said that fine-tempered man to one of the authors, pointing to the description of the Fire, 'although I forget upon what occasion.' Lydia White, a literary lady, who was prone to feed the lions of the day, invited one of us to dinner; but, recollecting afterwards that William Spencer formed one of the party, wrote to the latter to put him off; telling him that a man was to be at her table whom he 'would not like to meet.' 'Pray who is this whom I should not like to meet?' inquired the poet. 'Oh!' answered the lady, 'one of those men who have made that shameful attack upon you!' 'The very man upon earth I should like to know!' rejoined the lively and careless bard. The two individuals accordingly met, and have continued fast friends, ever since. Lord Byron, too, wrote thus to Mr. Murray from Italy—'Tell him we forgive him, were he twenty times our satirist.'

It may not be amiss to notice, in this place, one criticism of a Leicestershire clergyman, which may be pronounced unique: 'I do not see why they should have been rejected,' observed the matter-of-fact annotator; 'I think some of them very good!'

[P. 1.] Loyal Effusion. By Horace Smith. Fitzgerald (1759?-1829) was a ready versifier who was self-appointed laureate of public events for a number of years. He was especially notable for his persistent recital of patriotic lines at the annual dinners of the Royal Literary Fund. The piece of his which Smith possibly had more particularly in mind was the 'Address to every Loyal Briton on the Threatened Invasion of his Country.'