This is the age of shams, you know.
Ho, ho!
Funny Folks. June 5, 1886.
Thackeray’s translations, or imitations, of some of Beranger’s songs are well known, it is interesting to compare them with the versions written by Father Prout (the Rev. Francis Mahony), who has not only followed the originals more closely, but seems also to have preserved more of their light-hearted gaiety, than did Thackeray. When Thackeray projected “The Cornhill Magazine” Father Prout sent an “Inaugurative Ode to the author of Vanity Fair.” Thackeray was too fastidious to allow it to appear exactly in the form in which it was written, but having considerably altered it, and added two stanzas, it was printed in the first number of the Cornhill, January, 1860. The two versions will be found in the appendix to The Maclise Portrait Gallery by William Bates, B.A. (London Chatto and Windus, 1883.) The version given in The Works of Father Prout, published by Messrs. Routledge, London, is simply a reprint of the Ode as it appeared after it had been altered, and cut about, by Thackeray.
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In his “Memoirs of C. Jeames de la Pluche, Esq.,” and “The Ballads of Policeman X” Thackeray allowed his fondness for eccentric orthography to become somewhat tedious, but they contain many gems of humour, such as the song of the love sick Jeames:—
When moonlike ore the hazure seas
In soft effulgence swells,
When silver jews and balmy breaze
Bend down the Lily’s bells;