With fury dumb—with nail and thumb—they struggled and they thrust—
The red blood ran from Dollar’s side, like rain upon the dust;
He nerved his might for one last spring, and as he sunk and died,
Reft of an eye, his enemy fell groaning at his side.
Thus did he fall within the hall of Congress, that brave youth;
The bowie-knife hath quenched his life of valor and of truth;
And still among the statesmen throng at Washington they tell,
How nobly Dollar gouged his man—how gallantly he fell.
The miscellaneous ballads in the volume are very numerous, and in all varieties of the ballad style. Moore, Bulwer, Macaulay, Tennyson, Hunt, and other poets of the day, have some of their most popular lays felicitously parodied. Bon Gaultier must be a poet, or he could not so completely catch the very spirit and movement of the poets he caricatures. Among the best of these ballads are those which exhibit the contest for the laureatship, and the mockery of Tennyson’s style is especially ludicrous. “A Midnight Meditation,” purporting to be by Bulwer, represents that fascinating novelist as admitting, in soliloquy, the essential falsehood of sentiment which characterizes so many of his writings. He is exhibited as drinking in inspiration from London porter, and holding sweet coloquy with himself on the success of his numerous shams. “I know,” he says,
“I know a grace is seated on my brow,