‘Hic aderunt Geordy Akinhedius and little Johnus,
Et Jamy Richæus, et stout Michel Hendersonus,
Qui jolly tryppas ante alios dansare solebat,
Et bobbare bene, et lassas kissare boneas.’
But though this is not wholly unamusing, it is hardly, as nonsense, up to the standard instituted for us by Mr. Lear.
The real thing is more nearly visible in Swift’s macaronic lines about Molly—‘Mollis abuti, Hasan acuti,’ etc.—another vein of fun which has been exceedingly well worked out by successive writers. But such inspirations as these have too much method in them to be quite admissible. Much better was Swift’s ‘Love Song in the Modern Taste,’ beginning:
‘Fluttering spread thy purple pinions,
Gentle Cupid, o’er my heart.’
Even this, however, has too much sense for it to pass muster. Nor can one receive Johnson’s
‘If a man who turnips cries,
Cry not when his father dies,’
and so on, as sufficiently nonsensical. It is simply a jeu de mots, and no more, though funny enough as it stands. One is better satisfied when one comes to the ‘Tom Thumb’ of Henry Fielding and the ‘Chrononhotonthologos’ of Henry Carey, though even in those diverting squibs it is rarely that the versifier surrenders himself wholly to ‘Divine Nonsensia.’ That charming goddess was saluted to more purpose in ‘The Anti-Jacobin,’ where she was invoked to make charming fun of ‘The Loves of the Plants.’ In ‘The Progress of Man’ (in the same delectable collection) occurs the inspired passage:
‘Ah, who has seen the mailèd lobster rise,
Clap her broad wings, and, soaring, claim the skies
When did the owl, descending from her bower,
Crop, ’mid the fleecy flocks, the tender flower?
Or the young heifer plunge, with pliant limb,
In the salt wave and, fish-like, strive to swim?’
But even this is too consistent in its grotesqueness to be perfect nonsense.
One becomes acquainted with better nonsense the nearer one gets to one’s own times. How clever, for instance, was that well-known ‘dream’ of Planché’s, in which he fancied that he