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Page 115
That I shall be past making love
When she begins to comprehend it.
Such verse as Gay's and Prior's endures in libraries and anthologies, while doggerel dies and is reborn and transmitted in the streets and on lonely roads. By licensing plays and intimidating authors, Walpole suppressed virulent and guffawing political satire. One result was such poems as Goldsmith's on a Presbyterian minister who bound and hanged his cat for catching a mouse on Sunday, and similarly his verses on a mad dog that bit a godly, praying, comforting man"The dog it was that died." These poems express a scorn absent from Thomas Gray's ironic and richly descriptive "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes." Under threat of censorship, poets also took the stance of imitating the satires of Juvenal with current particularsas in
The Vanity of Human Wishes
by Samuel Johnson. In the 1760s ferocity returned with the rapidly fired missiles of Charles Churchill, represented in
The Faber Book of Comic Verse
by "The Pains of Education" on severe study and authorship rewarded in "vile submission."
Mark Akenside and the three Wartons (Thomas, father and son, and Joseph) were for poetry what Ann Radcliffe would become for the Gothic novel; by looking backward they account in considerable measure for the critics' now exploded category of "Pre-Romanticism." Gray made popular the legendary Welsh past, notably in "The Bard," from a base in Latin translations. In the same period James Macpherson with his Ossian and Thomas Chatterton with the Rowley poems achieved notoriety for dissimulation and earned fame for their timeliness in atavistic sensibility. Poets and artists, for at least a century, would express passionate identification with the fate of Chatterton.
As the eighteenth century approached its close, the Hudibrastic heritage allowed William Combe, greatly aided by Thomas Rowlandson's illustrations, to put "Doctor Syntax" on tour in a series of books ridiculing such fads as the picturesque. A new attention to the psychic wellbeing of children brought popularity to verses by women remembered and reprinted until the Great War of 1914. Even yet, adults who can no longer recite Jane Taylor's "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," and can no longer locate Mary Howitt's " 'Will you walk into my parlour,' said the spider to the fly," have those verses deep in their consciousness as if from an oceanic sourceregardless of help from Lewis Carroll's parodies.
 
Page 116
Ironies abound here. The generation of Anna Seward, "the Swan of Lichfield," knew of the notorious Mary Wollstonecraft and "Perdita" Robinson, but they knew not of Aemilia Lanier, who had argued in verse in 1611 Eve's innocence and Adam's guilt in a world where women's beauty brings woe through faulty men: "If
Eve
did erre, it was for knowledge sake, / The fruit being faire perswaded him to fall:""Not
Eve
, whose fault was onely too much love," leading her to offer the fruit ''whereby his knowledge might become more cleare." Nor did they know that Dorothy Wordsworth wrote verses unmentioned by her brother, but they would have thought it likely.
Although for genuine popularity verse must fulfill a condition described satirically in the century after Milton"Rhyme is the poet's pride, and people's choice"popularity comes in various forms. It might be a fad, like Ossian. It might, but need not, belong to what is called by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee in
The Stuffed Owl
"good Bad Verse." The better Good Verse can retain for centuries a large, devoted audience. Gray's Elegy, Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village," Cowper's "John Gilpin" (less, of course, than his "God moves in a mysterious way")these earned early fame that continues yet in periodicals, anthologies, the textbooks of middle schools and colleges, and in family remembrance. The name of Ambrose Philips was early lost to his enduring nickname, "Namby Pamby" (for, among others, the line "Dimply damsel, sweetly smiling"); his contemporary John Philips, author of the rarity
The Splendid Shilling
(1701)a successful parody (of Milton) in blank versewon fame and influence for a century with his Virgilian georgic
Cyder
. The convention of satire in couplets, eleva-tion in blank verse, Cowper overturned by defending Christian hope in heroic couplets against deist and priest, and by reducing his diction and tone in the blank verse of
The Task
to a conversational "divine chit-chat." Sermon rather than satire, he argues there, is "the proper engine of reformation" and of "pleasure in poetic pains."
Robert Southey's popularityexcept for "The Battle of Blenheim," the wit of Byron's attacks, and many parodieshas steadily faded almost from the moment he became poet laureate. James Hogg's verse tales of the supernatural in Scots left him, as a poet, always in the shadow of Burns; with paperback editions of individual poets replacing in colleges history-minded anthologies, Hogg sank out of sight until André Gide called attention to Hogg's best tale in prose. Catherine Maria Fanshawe lives through a delightful parody of Wordsworth and
 
Page 117
in casual references to her riddle "The Enigma on the Letter H." John Clare, who had his moment with the better-educated in London, owes his present high rank to college professors aided by psychiatrists.
College folk enjoy the witty letters of Edward FitzGerald; initially other poets, and then private and public presses, made his
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
a staple. Prolific Walter Savage Landor, who boasted that he never sought an audience and never had one, composed several epigrammatic verses of permanent worth, but his presence in bulk on library shelves is a partnership of graduate study and publishers. To please his own day, Landor should have been a fiercer satirist.
Popian political satire continued to increase its progeny. While Shelley and Keats were gaining a few admirers for lyric ascent, partisan satire sold almost as widely as sermons. Pope's unquestioned stature served as excuse for the vituperative couplets and parodies of William Gifford, acknowledged by Byron as his most immediate model. John Wolcot ("Peter Pindar") vied with Gifford in nasty wit. He could, though, reproduce George III's stammering repetitions more convincinglyfor his own time and afterthan Tom Moore could make his vernacular Fudge family speak. For Gifford's
Anti-Jacobin
, the statesmen-to-be George Canning and John Hookham Frere joined in roasting young Wordsworth and Coleridge, Erasmus Darwin, and other friends of revolution.
The oppositional pamphlets of William Hone, with parodic verses like "The Political House that Jack Built," reached an astounding portion of the population, but the verse seldom approaches the power of the accompanying caricatures by George Cruikshank. Other contemporary satirists with many readers influenced Byron, but in Albert C. Baugh,
A Literary History of England
, 1948, Samuel C. Chew described T. J. Mathiaswho altered his
Pursuits of Literature
through sixteen editionsin words that could be applied to all: "He smelt a rat in every corner and many of his corners were small and dark." That the special anxieties of an age create popularity for verse soon to lose readers by the thousands can be seen in the chapter of the present volume on Victorian religious poetrywhere versifiers have created as well the way to Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Although apt parody can live if the poetry parodied lives, the
Rejected Addresses
of James and Horace Smith has lost the luster acclaimed on its occasion, the reopening of the Drury Lane Theatre in 1812, though some of the poems acutely parodied are still read and taught. Theodore
 
Page 118
Hook, parodist, wag, and punster"a
dyer
who by
dyeing
lives, a
dire
life maintains"has continued to please, at least in anthologies, because he distorted language wittily. For Hook, each Whig rhymed with "
Ass
""
Ass
-setter," ''
Ass
-ailer," "
Ass
-ured," "
Ass
-idious," "
Ass
-sumer," and eight other "
Ass
es"; and rhymed otherwise: "Grantham"want'em"; "Granville"anvil."
J. H. Frere found a second way to impress Byron's poetry, particularly
Beppo
, through his mock epic with a long title that came to be known as
Whistlecraft
and led other light-hearted and heavy-handed parodists into similar burlesques of the Arthurian revival. The most frequently reprinted volume in this succession was
The Ingoldsby Legends of Mirth and Marvels
by Richard Harris Barham. Despite a bit of Byronized Whistlecraft to buoy the language if not the matter of the verse (there was also prose), Barham specialized in gruesome narratives that sported with decapitation, witches, arrow-tailed devils, monks nearly (and sometimes decisively) drowned in ale, and characters who pronounce "Azores" as "Eye-sores"bloody murder in flippant doggerel, with varying stanzaic forms frequently enriched by Gothic type, puns, and internal rhyme: "Oh! happy the slip from his Succubine grip!" "The Hand of Glory" (a "nurse's story") puts it for all the legends: "The prayer mutter'd backwards and said with a sneer!" Such comic verse and parody competed for the largest possible audience with Campbell, Hemans, and Scott, who, along with Longfellow and Poe, were to be taught to Betjeman at Highgate Junior School as they would continue to be in all English-speaking schoolsexcept that Betjeman's teacher was T. S. Eliot.
Close behind
Ingoldsby
in popularity and in other wayscame
The Bon Gaultier Ballads
by W. E. Aytoun and Sir Theodore Martin. Aytoun, with his burlesque
Firmilian
(1854), countered the popularity of the Spasmodic School, as Gifford had stanched the popularity of the Della Cruscans.
Gaultier
sets Victorian domesticity and commercial puffing of products against romanticized medievalism and the pseudo-oriental tales and lyrics of the gift-book annuals. "The Biter Bit" makes light of such unrequited love as Barbara Allen inflicted of yore; in "The Broken Pitcher" a Moorish maiden tips a brash Spaniard into a well. The lightly anti-Arthurian touch of Thomas Love Peacock is emulated in "The Massacre of the Macphersons"; the rhythm and very words of Kipling are anticipated in one anapest after another. "The Laureate's Tourney" of 1843 calls the roll of widely read poets:
 
Page 119
"The lists of Love are mine," said Moore, "and not the lists of Mars;"
Said Hunt, "I seek the jars of wine, but shun the combat's jars!"
''I'm old," quoth Samuel Rogers."Faith, says Campbell, "so am I!"
"And I'm in holy orders, sir!" quoth Tom of Ingoldsby.
With glances toward the spitting and whittling Americans (for killing a ferocious snapping turtle, Cullen Bryant is paid in defaulted Pennsylvania bonds) there are parodies, not of Thomas Campbell's patriotic, popular "Hohenlinden" or Rogers's travelogues or Tom Moore's Ireland-rousing melodies, but of Moore's earliest erotic poems, of Leigh Hunt's squishy diction, of Tennyson, Lytton, Elizabeth Barrett, and both James and Robert Montgomery, who together flooded the bookstalls. Of Aytoun's serious
Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, and Other Poems
the National Union Catalogue of the Library of Congress lists forty-three editions. "Edinburgh after Flodden," the opening ballad, sets the tone of Scottish patriotism:
But a rampart rose before them,
Which the boldest dared not scale;
Every stone a Scottish body,
Every step a corpse in mail!
Albert Friedman distinguishes from ballad-romances the ballad-lays of Aytoun and Macaulay, "rapid narratives full of gusto, heroic vaunts, and intrepidity," with an "adolescent zest for adventure." Such zest spills from serious into comic ballads.
Meanwhile, Prior rises again in the society verse of Winthrop Mack-worth Praed: "A little glow, a little shiver, / A rose-bud and a pair of gloves." A critic in Alfred H. Miles's anthology
George Crabbe to Edmund B. V. Christian
called Barham's rhymes "the clatter of castanets", Praed's "a chime of silver bells." Jane Taylor adds to such verse, for example in "Recreation," a perspective no man could bring and sane thrusts no man did bring:
"Their upper servant told our Jane,
She'll not see twenty-nine again."
"Indeed, so old! I wonder why
She does not marry, then," says I;
"So many thousands to bestow,
And such a beauty, too, you know."
"A beauty! O, my dear Miss B.
You must be joking now," says she.

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