Lady Blessington's sardonic verses with a tail rhyme, "Your friend!," have survived in anthologies.
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Although it is still possible to laugh with
Ingoldsby
and
Gaultier
, most such collections have been preserved in their "Seventeenth [etc.] Edition" largely because of illustrations by Richard Doyle and other fine caricaturists. Similarly, Rogers's
Italy
and
Poems
continued to flourish because he commissioned illustrations by Turner.
Ingoldsby
parodied serious poems by Thomas Hood ("I remember, I remember"; ''I sing of a shirt that
never was
new!"), but Hoodin youth an imitator of Keats and later a castigator in
Punch
of social inequalityon his own comic ground was inimitable. Although he reveled equally with Barham and Aytoun in disaster and the physically grotesque, his transcendent puns took the sting out of dismemberment, as in the "pathetic ballad" of Faithless Nelly Gray, no longer enamored of a soldier, who had laid down his arms because he had lost his legs:
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 | | "Why, then," said she, "you've lost the feet
Of legs in war's alarms,
And now you cannot wear your shoes
Upon your feats of arms!"
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One of Hood's longer narratives, "Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg," ends when the heroine, whose family was prosperous enough to replace her lost limb with a leg of gold but less haughty when she was murdered with it, is judged by a jury to be unburiable in sacred ground because it is suicidal to be done to death by your own leg. The thirty-four lines of "A Nocturnal Sketch" challenge other zanies to match its triple rhymes: "To go and see the Drury-Lane Dane slain, / Or hear Othello's jealous doubt spout out, / Or Macbeth raving at that shade-made-blade." In one of Hood's shortest squibs, "To Minerva," the punster has tired of poetry: "Then, Pallas, take away thine Owl, / And let us have a lark instead." Collective editions of Hood include caricatures that his readersalmost uniquely for comic versetend to ignore.
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Hood gave an age of utility, industry, sexual squeamishness, and coercive corsets popular moments of caprice and whim. Three Victori-ans, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Edward Lear, and W. S. Gilbert lifted whim through the gates of propriety into sublime nonsense. Dodg-son, under his pseudonym Lewis Carroll, composed the purest nonsense of the three, not as more nonsensical but as a more orderly reversal of logic. Lear, inclined toward an almost vapid purity as an
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