The Prussian Eagle laid aside,
We’ll keep it for next year!”
This ballad shows that the Queen had a reputation for parsimony as long ago as 1842, the moral it enforces is similar to that contained in the old Nursery Rhyme the ballad parodies, concerning the famous plum Pudding of King Arthur:—
“The King and Queen ate of the same,
And all the Court beside;
And what they could not eat that night,
The Queen next morning fried.”
It is somewhat curious that Poets should so often select incidents in the lives of Royal personages as topics for their poems, considering how ephemeral is the interest they excite.
The above ballad was, of course, only a burlesque, and had no claim to longevity, but of all the serious adulatory poems written about the Queen, and her family, during the last fifty years how many have survived? With the exception of some few lines in Tennyson’s Dedications and Odes, the present generation knows nothing of them.
Where is Leigh Hunt’s poem on the birth of the Princess Royal? Where is Professor Aytoun’s Ode on the Marriage of the Prince of Wales? Where, oh, where is Mr. Lewis Morris’s Ode for the Opening of the Imperial Institute? Forgotten, all forgotten, and nearly as obsolete as the Birthday Odes of the Poets-Laureate Eusden, Warton, and Pye.