And now you’ve nailed them to the mast,
The Whigs will grow more active.
Keep up the stride—press home those “points”
That rankle in the foe,
And leave the polls to do the rest,
Joe Chamberlain, our Joe.
Funny Folks, October 17, 1885.
——:o:——
Many short Parodies of Burns’s poems are scattered about in various old periodicals, but comparatively few are worthy of preservation, whilst some of the best, which have appeared in Scotch newspapers, are so broad in their dialect that few English readers would understand them. Trading on this ignorance of the northern dialect, some authors have composed poems, in imitation of Burns, which, whilst retaining some of the sound, contain none of the sense of the original.
A good example of this style of Parody is to be found in Cruikshank’s Comic Almanac for 1846, it is entitled:—