[12.] Canning's critique closes with an appendix of three and a half pages alluding to the Eton Shrovetide custom of writing Latin verses, known as the "Bacchus." See H. C. Maxwell Lyte, A History of Eton College (London, 1911), pp. 146-147.
[13.] As late as the turn of the century the trick was still in a manner feasible. The anonymous author of Literary Leisure, or the Recreations of Solomon Saunter, Esq. (1799-1800) divides two numbers, VIII and XV, between other affairs and a Shandyesque argument about the nursery charm for the hiccup "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper." This author was most likely not Byron's assailant Hewson Clarke (born 1787, author of The Saunterer in 1804), as asserted in the Catalogue of the Hope Collection (Oxford, 1865), p. 128.
A historical interest may be not only retrospective but contemporary. The reader of the present volume will appreciate "How to Criticize a Poem (In the Manner of Certain Contemporary Poets)", a critique of the mnemonic rhyme "Thirty days hath September," in the New Republic, December 6, 1943.
|
A
COMMENT
UPON THE
HISTORY
OF
Tom Thumb.
——Juvat immemorata ferentem
Ingenuis oculisque legi manibusque teneri.
Hor.
LONDON,
Printed for J. Morphew near Stationers-Hall. 1711. Price 3 d. |
A
COMMENT
UPON THE
HISTORY
OF