“Feathers a-flying all—bonnets untying all—
Crinolines rapping and flapping and slapping all,
Balmorals dancing and glancing entrancing all,—
Feats of activity—
Nymphs on declivity—
Sweethearts in ecstasies—
Mothers in vextasies—
Lady-loves whisking and frisking and clinging on,
True lovers puffing and blowing and springing on,
Flushing and blushing and wriggling and giggling on,
Teasing and pleasing and wheezing and squeezing on,
Everlastingly falling and bawling and sprawling on,
Flurrying and worrying and hurrying and skurrying on,
Tottering and staggering and lumbering and slithering on,
Any fine afternoon
About July or June—
That’s just how the Daughters
Come down at Dunoon!”

“Twas ever thus,” the well-known lines of Moore, has also been travestied by Mr. H. C. Pennell:

“Wus! ever wus! By freak of Puck’s
My most exciting hopes are dashed;
I never wore my spotless ducks
But madly—wildly—they were splashed!
I never roved by Cynthia’s beam,
To gaze upon the starry sky;
But some old stiff-backed beetle came,
And charged into my pensive eye:
And oh! I never did the swell
In Regent Street, amongst the beaus,
But smuts the most prodigious fell,
And always settled on my nose!”

Moore’s lines have evidently been tempting to the parodists, for Mr. Calverley and Mr. H. S. Leigh have also written versions: Mr. Leigh’s begins thus—

“I never reared a young gazelle
(Because, you see, I never tried),
But had it known and loved me well,
No doubt the creature would have died.
My sick and aged Uncle John
Has known me long and loves me well,
But still persists in living on—
I would he were a young gazelle.”

Shakespeare’s soliloquy in Hamlet has been frequently selected as a subject for parody; the first we give being the work of Mr. F. C. Burnand in “Happy Thoughts”:

“To sniggle or to dibble, that’s the question!
Whether to bait a hook with worm or bumble,
Or to take up arms of any sea, some trouble
To fish, and then home send ’em. To fly—to whip—
To moor and tie my boat up by the end
To any wooden post, or natural rock
We may be near to, on a Preservation
Devoutly to be fished. To fly—to whip—
To whip! perchance two bream;—and there’s the chub!”

Cremation.

“To Urn, or not to Urn? That is the question:
Whether ’tis better in our frames to suffer
The shows and follies of outrageous custom,
Or to take fire against a sea of zealots,
And, by consuming, end them? To Urn—to keep—
No more: and while we keep, to say we end
Contagion, and the thousand graveyard ills
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consume-ation
Devoutly to be wished! To burn—to keep—
To keep! Perchance to lose—ay, there’s the rub!
For in the course of things what duns may come,
Or who may shuffle off our Dresden urn,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes inter-i-ment of so long use;
For who would have the pall and plumes of hire,
The tradesman’s prize—a proud man’s obsequies,
The chaffering for graves, the legal fee,
The cemetery beadle, and the rest,
When he himself might his few ashes make
With a mere furnace? Who would tombstones bear,
And lie beneath a lying epitaph,
But that the dread of simmering after death—
That uncongenial furnace from whose burn
No incremate returns—weakens the will,
And makes us rather bear the graves we have
Than fly to ovens that we know not of?”

The next, on the same subject, is from an American source, where it is introduced by the remark: