A. C. Hilton (1851-1877)
This extraordinarily clever parody of Swinburne’s “Dolores” was written by Arthur Clement Hilton, when he was an undergraduate at St. John’s, Cambridge. It appeared in The Light Green, a clever but short-lived magazine published in Cambridge in the early seventies as a rival to The Dark Blue, published in London by Oxford men. Hilton was the main contributor to The Light Green. He died when only twenty-six years of age. This brilliant young author is not included in The Dictionary of National Biography.
“The Octopus” is one of the best of English parodies. I had not seen it for forty years, until I recently found it in Adam and White’s Parodies and Imitations (1912). In that book, although the authors presumably had The Light Green to print from, the punctuation is inferior to that in my copy, and the word “Dispose” instead of “Dispense” in the third last line must be a misprint.
He seemed to me to be one of those men who have not very extended minds, but who know what they know very well—shallow streams, and clear because they are shallow.
S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).
To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
R. L. Stevenson (Virginibus Puerisque).