“If life were never bitter,
And love were always sweet,
Then who would care to borrow
A moral from to-morrow?
If Thames would always glitter,
And joy would ne’er retreat,
If life were never bitter,
And love were always sweet.

If care were not the waiter,
Behind a fellow’s chair,
When easy-going sinners
Sit down to Richmond dinners,
And life’s swift stream goes straighter—
By Jove, it would be rare,
If care were not the waiter
Behind a fellow’s chair.
If wit were always radiant,
And wine were always iced,
And bores were kicked out straightway
Through a convenient gateway:
Then down the year’s long gradient
’Twere sad to be enticed,
If wit were always radiant;
And wine were always iced.”

The next instance, by the same author, is another good imitation of Mr. Swinburne’s style. It is a recipe for

Salad.

“Oh, cool in the summer is salad,
And warm in the winter is love;
And a poet shall sing you a ballad
Delicious thereon and thereof.
A singer am I, if no sinner,
My muse has a marvellous wing,
And I willingly worship at dinner
The sirens of spring.

Take endive—like love it is bitter,
Take beet—for like love it is red;
Crisp leaf of the lettuce shall glitter
And cress from the rivulet’s bed;
Anchovies, foam-born, like the lady
Whose beauty has maddened this bard;
And olives, from groves that are shady,
And eggs—boil ’em hard.”

The “Shootover Papers,” by members of the Oxford University, contains this parody, written upon the “Procuratores,” a kind of university police:

“Oh, vestment of velvet and virtue,
Oh, venomous victors of vice,
Who hurt men who never hurt you,
Oh, calm, cold, crueller than ice.
Why wilfully wage you this war, is
All pity purged out of your breast?
Oh, purse-prigging procuratores,
Oh, pitiless pest!
We had smote and made redder than roses,
With juice not of fruit nor of bud,
The truculent townspeople’s noses,
And bathed brutal butchers in blood;
And we all aglow in our glories,
Heard you not in the deafening din;
And ye came, oh ye procuratores,
And ran us all in!”

In the same book a certain school of poets has been hit at in the following lines:

“Mingled, aye, with fragrant yearnings,
Throbbing in the mellow glow,
Glint the silvery spirit burnings,
Pearly blandishments of woe.
Ay! for ever and for ever,
While the love-lorn censers sweep;
While the jasper winds dissever,
Amber-like, the crystal deep;
Shall the soul’s delicious slumber,
Sea-green vengeance of a kiss,
Reach despairing crags to number
Blue infinities of bliss.”

The “Diversions of the Echo Club,” by Bayard Taylor, contains many parodies, principally upon American poets, and gives this admirable rendering of Edgar A. Poe’s style:

The Promissory Note.