‘Having finished his Iliad and ceased to be busy,
Lord Derby should try and translate his Odd-Dizzy.’
The annals of the Church are no more free from jingles on names than those of any other institution. Familiar to many is the laconic epitaph on Archbishop Potter:
‘Alack and well-a-day:
Potter himself is turned to clay!’
Horace Walpole wrote bitterly of Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury, that ‘His grace signed his own proper name—Thomas Cant.,’ which would certainly have read better as ‘Thomas Cantuar.’ But the bishops’ signatures have always been regarded as fair game. What puns have been made on the unhappy, because so obvious, ‘Oxon!’ In 1848, when Bishop Hampden was accused of heresy by the party headed by the Bishop of Oxford, the would-be satirist wrote that
‘As once the Pope with fury full,
When Luther laid his heavy knocks on,
At the Reformer loosed a Bull—
So these at Hampden set an Ox-on.’
Again, when Archdeacon Hale figured prominently in the old churchyard controversy, Punch observed:
‘The intramural churchyard’s reeking pale
Breathes health around it, says a reverend party;
But though the spot may keep a parson Hale,
Can people who in-hale its fumes be hearty?’
Turning to the records of the other professions, one finds a good deal of the same sort of thing. Literature affords such examples as those which are supplied in the well-known lines by John Henley on William Broome and by Lord Byron on Tom Moore (‘Now ’tis Moore that’s Little’). There were journal writers before Greville and Carlyle, and, when Lady Bury published her ‘Diary of the Times of George IV.,’ Hood, no doubt, was justified in crying, as he did:
‘Oh, may I die without a Diary,
And be interred without a Bury-ing!’
In a very different spirit were James Smith’s lines on Miss Edgeworth’s works: