The minstrel grinds, and his victims pay;—
To his claims he's forced compliance!
To the poet's study then he takes his way—
To the men of art and science.
And cries, "My friends, in vain you'd toil
At books, at pen, or easel;
One roving vagabond your work shall spoil,"—
He plays "Pop goes the Weasel."
Elsewhere, Namouna, the Peri, gave utterance to the following reflections on the levelling power of love[53]:—
Love makes all equal—scorns of rank the rules;
Makes kings and beggars equal—equal fools.
Love brings (distinctions overboard all pitchin')
The low-born peeler to the grandee's kitchen;
Makes the proud heiress of paternal acres
Smile kindly on the young man from the baker's.
Kings will forget their state at love's dictation,
Cabmen their rank, and railway-guards their station.
Love makes the housemaid careless—masters wroth,
And makes too many cooks to spoil their broth.
In this piece Mrs. Charles Dillon was the Lalla Rookh, and Mr. Toole represented "a fabulous personage, not found in the poem," called Khorsanbad.
One, at least, of our burlesque writers—Mr. Gilbert Arthur a'Beckett—has had the courage to tackle a poem of Coleridge; to wit, his "Christabel," from which, however, Mr. A'Beckett derived only certain suggestions for his work. In his "Christabel, or the Bard Bewitched," represented at the Court in 1872, the Bard, Bracy, was played by Mr. Righton, who made a special feature of a travestie of Mr. Irving in "The Bells." He pretended that he had murdered a muffin-man, and that, consuming all he could of the muffins left in the man's basket, he had deposited the remainder in the area. Miss Nelly Bromley was the Christabel.
Scott's "Lady of the Lake" gave Mr. Reece the idea for a burlesque performed at the Royalty in 1866. In the same year Andrew Halliday brought out at the Adelphi a comic piece, happily entitled "The Mountain Dhu, or the Knight, the Lady, and the Lake." Mr. Toole was the impersonator of the Mountain Dhu, Paul Bedford the Douglas, Miss Hughes the Malcolm Graeme, Miss Woolgar (Mrs. Mellon) the Fitzjames, and Miss Furtado the Lady of the Lake. "The Lady of the Lane" was the title given by H. J. Byron to the travestie from his pen which saw the light at the Strand in 1872. In this case Mr. Edward Terry was the Roderick and Miss Kate Bishop the Ellen, Mrs. Raymond making a great hit as the demented Blanche.
Our present Laureate provoked in 1870 the satiric powers of Mr. W. S. Gilbert, whose "Princess," played at the Olympic, was described by the author as "a whimsical allegory," as well as "a respectful perversion of Mr. Tennyson's poem."[54] In this production Mr. Gilbert wrote his lyrics to the melodies of popular airs, after the manner of the time. The major portion of the travestie is familiar to present-day audiences as having formed, in the main, the text of "Princess Ida," for which Sir Arthur Sullivan composed such charming music. Nevertheless, I cannot refrain from quoting, as a happy specimen of Mr. Gilbert's later manner in burlesque,[55] the speech addressed by the Princess to her disciples—a speech marked by agreeable naïvétè and happy mock-heroics:—
In mathematics Woman leads the way!
The narrow-minded pedant still believes
That two and two make four! Why, we can prove—
We women, household drudges as we are—
That two and two make five—or three—or seven—
Or five-and-twenty, as the case demands!...
Diplomacy? The wily diplomate
Is absolutely helpless in our hands:
He wheedles monarchs—Woman wheedles him!
Logic? Why, tyrant man himself admits
It's waste of time to argue with a woman!
Then we excel in social qualities—
Though man professes that he holds our sex
In utter scorn, I'll undertake to say
If you could read the secrets of his heart,
He'd rather be alone with one of you
Than with five hundred of his fellow-men!
In all things we excel. Believing this,
Five hundred maidens here have sworn to place
Their foot upon his neck. If we succeed,
We'll treat him better than he treated us;
But if we fail—oh, then let hope fail too!
Let no one care one penny how she looks!
Let red be worn with yellow—blue with green,
Crimson with scarlet—violet with blue!
Let all your things misfit, and you yourselves
At inconvenient moments come undone!
Let hair-pins lose their virtue; let the hook
Disdain the fascination of the eye,—
The bashful button modestly evade
The soft embraces of the buttonhole!
Let old associations all dissolve,
Let Swan secede from Edgar—Grant from Gask,
Sewell from Cross—Lewis from Allenby—
In other words, let Chaos come again!
Into the region of the Ballad the comic playwrights have made comparatively few incursions. "The Babes in the Wood," "Lord Bateman," "Billy Taylor," "Villikins and his Dinah," and "Lord Lovel,"—these are the stories which have been most in favour with burlesque purveyors. R. J. Byron took up the first-named subject in 1859, when the company at the Adelphi (where the piece was produced) included Miss Woolgar (Sir Rowland Macassar), Mr. Toole and Miss Kate Kelly (the Babes), Paul Bedford (the First Ruffian), and Mrs. Billington (the Lady Macassar). Then, in 1877, there came a provincial version by Messrs. G. L. Gordon and G. W. Anson; and, next, in 1884, at Toole's Theatre, the "Babes" of Mr. Harry Paulton, in which Mr. Edouin and Miss Atherton were the central figures. The first travestie of "Lord Bateman" was made by Charles Selby at the Strand in 1839; then there was the production by R. B. Brough in 1854 at the Adelphi; and, still later, there was the piece by H. J. Byron, at the Globe (1869). Passing over the "Billy Taylor" of Buckstone (1829), we arrive at "The Military Billy Taylor" of Mr. Burnand, which came out forty years later. It is to Mr. Burnand, also, that we owe "Villikins and his Dinah," played by amateurs at Cambridge, as well as "Lord Lovel and the Lady Nancy Bell," which he wrote for the same place and performers.