He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus:
“If this should stay to dine,” he said,
“There won’t be much for us!”
Edward Lear, contemporary of Lewis Carroll, is the only peer of the great writer of nonsense.
Lear’s nonsense is in different vein, but his verses are equally facile and felicitous and his prose quite as delightfully extravagant.
If Carroll’s imagination was more exquisitely fanciful, Lear’s had a broader scope, and both writers are masters of that peculiar combination of paradox and reasoning that makes for delightful surprise.
Lear was the first to make popular the style of stanza since called a Limerick, though the derivation of this name has never been satisfactorily determined.
There was an old man of Thermopylæ,
Who never did anything properly;