 | | As we curtail the already cur-tail'd cur
(You catch the paronomasia, play 'po' words?)
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Even in travesty of Browning, Calverley maintains his own rhythm; in "The City of Dreadful Night" his contemporary James Thomson ("B. V.") displays ingenuity of structure, stanza, and rhyme, but the occasional fractures in rhythm would disqualify him almost as much as his persistent gloom from competition on Calverley's ground. A translator of Homer, Horace, and Theocritus, Calverley translated into Latin, eccentrically enough, verses of Tennyson, Keble, and Hemans.
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Calverley's rival for pure talent in the manipulation of language, J. K. Stephen, produced such telling, durable parodies that they have eclipsed the other light verse in his
Lapsus Calami
(1891). E. C. Bentley gave his middle name, Clerihew, to biographies, designed to trivialize accomplishment, in four lines of unequal length:
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| | Sir Christopher Wren
Said "I'm going to dine with some men,
"If anybody calls
"Say I'm designing St. Paul's."
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Anticlimax usually begins in the second line, as here and in "Sir Humphry Davy / Abominated gravy." Bentley's "Ballade of Plain Common Sense" laments the inability of wise versifiers to awaken in a world of political and moral wreckage the "great, long, furry ears" of common sense.
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G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and R. A. Knox, as Catholics, revived Dryden's vein of religious satire. Knox (brother of the parodist E. V. Knox) in "Absolute and Abitofhell" characteristically brought to heel the Canon of Hertford, who "Corrected 'I believe', to 'One does feel.'" Chesterton's verses go occasionally to the edge of nonsense, but return in praise of faith and stronger drink than ale. Belloc's
Cautionary Tales
(1907) created political portraits, "Godolphin Horne, Who Was Cursed with the Sin of Pride, and Became a Boot-black"; "Lord Lundy, Who Was Too Freely Moved to Tears, and Thereby Ruined His Political Career." In contrast with satiric aggression against the beliefs of others, May Kendall, in parodies and pellucid lyrics with a burden of thought, analyzed in
Dreams to Sell
(1887) the anxieties induced by discoveries in biology, astronomy, physics, and geology. When a trilobite
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