 | | "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.
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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:
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| | But a rampart rose before them,
Which the boldest dared not scale;
Every stone a Scottish body,
Every step a corpse in mail!
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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.
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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:
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| | "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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