A Century of Parody and Imitation

by Unknown

To-day is the third since you began.'

'The time was long, yet the time ran,

Little Brother!'

(O Mother, Mary Mother,

Three days to-day, between Hell and Heaven!)

The sonnet with which Traill closes is a parody of Sonnet XCVII. of The House of Life, beginning:

'Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;

I am also called No-More, Too-Late, Farewell.'

[Pp. 353-7.] Andrew Lang. The parodies on the Rossetti and Morris styles are taken from Andrew Lang's essay on Thomas Haynes Bayly in Essays in Little. 'Bayly,' Mr. Lang wrote, in discussing 'Oh, no, we never mention her,' 'had now struck the note, the sweet sentimental note, of the early, innocent, Victorian age.... We should do the trick quite differently now, more like this.' Here follows 'Love spake to me,' of which its author says at the end:

I declare I nearly weep over these lines; for, though they are only Bayly's sentiment hastily recast in a modern manner, there is something so very affecting, mouldy, and unwholesome about them that they sound as if they had been 'written up to' a sketch by a disciple of Mr. Rossetti's.