Chorus—
Yet Giles’s lads are bold and gay,
The pride of Dyott Street;
And ever true and merry they,
Within their snug retreat.
Jokeby went through many editions, although to a modern reader it seems almost destitute of humour or talent. It has been attributed to John Roby, and also to Thomas Tegg, its publisher, whilst the Editor of Parodies copied the following note from a copy of Jokeby, which had belonged to the late Shirley Brooks, Editor of Punch:—“This was written by the Brothers Smith (of Rejected Addresses). I picked it up at a bookstall near Baker Street. The work is not good for much, but I suppose is now scarce, so this may as well be kept.—Shirley Brooks, 17th October, 1873.” But it seems most improbable that this poor imitation should have been the work of either of the Smiths, whose admirable parody of Scott in the Rejected Addresses, which was given on page 72, shows what they could do in that way.
There was also Smokeby a Parody of the same poem, which appeared in an early number of the Ephemerides, a literary serial, published in Edinburgh in 1813. Rokeby the Second is the title of a long, and rather dull, parody which appeared in The Satirist, of March. 1813. The events recounted in the poem are supposed to have occurred immediately after the dreadful fight between Tom Cribb and Molineux. The chief aim of this production was to ridicule Scott for the inordinate length of the notes to his poems, for in a preface entitled “An Essay on the Art of Book Making,” the author remarks: “It must be known to everyone, that in modern bookmaking, little depends on the poetry of a poem. The notes are the thing on which success depends. In these, difficult as it may seem to come up to the authors of Childe Harold and Rokeby, I am vain enough to think I shall not be found wanting.” Accordingly, the notes are very long (as well as rather broad), and have very little connection indeed with the parody itself.
The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor (London), first appeared on October 1, 1807, and was discontinued in 1814. It contained numerous political parodies, and with each number there was a large coloured folding cartoon. The tone of the Satirist was decidedly Tory, and both in its cartoons and its letterpress the Whigs were roundly abused and ridiculed.
The parts published December, 1808, and January, 1809, contained two articles entitled “Second Sight,” which professed to be a review of a new poem entitled “MacArthur, an Epic Poem, in six Cantos, by Walter Scott, Esq.” This review not only gave the plot of the supposed work, but also quoted several extracts from it, such as the following:—
“And every eye was turn’d to see