The Bon Gaultier Ballads | Page 5

manly strain is what follows."
The remainder of the poem is then given, ending with,
"Rest thee with thy yellow nabob, spider-hearted Cousin Amy!"
and the critic resumes:--
"Bravo, Smifzer! This is the right sort of thing--no wishy-washy snivelling about a wounded heart and all that kind of stuff, but savage sarcasm, the lava of a volcanic spirit. In a fine prophetic strain is that vision of Amy's feelings as the inebriated nawab stumbles hazily into the drawing-room, steaming fulsomely of chilma! And that picture of the African jungle, with Smifzer _in puris_ mounted on a high-trotting giraffe, with his twelve dusky brides around him,--Cruikshank alone could do it justice. But the triumph of the poem is in the high-toned sentiment of civilisation and moral duty, which, esteeming 'the grey barbarian' lower than the 'Christian cad,'--and that is low enough in all conscience,--tears the captivating delusions of freedom and polygamy from the poet's eyes, even when his pulse is throbbing at the wildest, and sends him from the shades of the palm and the orange tree to the advertising columns of the 'Morning Post.' This is indeed a great poem, and we need only add that the reader will find something like it in Mr Alfred Tennyson's 'Locksley Hall.' There has been pilfering somewhere; but Messieurs Smifzer and Tennyson must settle it between them."
How little did I dream, when writing this, that I should hear the parody quoted through the years up till now almost as often as the original poem! Smifzer was wiser than Tennyson, for he never spoiled the effect of his poem by admitting, like Tennyson in his "Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After," that it was a good thing that "spider-hearted" Amy threw him over as she did.
Luckily for us, not a few poets were then living whose style and manner of thought were sufficiently marked to make imitation easy, and sufficiently popular for a parody of their characteristics to be readily recognised. Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" were as familiar in the drawing-room as in the study. Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," and his two other fine ballads, were still in the freshness of their fame. Tennyson and Mrs Browning were opening up new veins. These, with Moore, Leigh Hunt, Uhland, and others of minor note, lay ready to our hands, as Scott, Byron, Crabbe, Coleridge, Moore, Wordsworth, and Southey had done to James and Horace Smith in 1812, when writing the "Rejected Addresses." Never, probably, were verses thrown off with a keener sense of enjoyment, and assuredly the poets parodied had no warmer admirers than ourselves. Very pleasant were the hours when we met, and now Aytoun and now myself would suggest the subjects for each successive article, and the verses with which they were to be illustrated. Most commonly this was done in our rambles to favourite spots in the suburbs of "our own romantic town," on Arthur Seat, or by the shores of the Forth, and at other times as we sat together of an evening, when the duties of the day were over, and joined in putting line after line together until the poem was completed. In writing thus for our own amusement we never dreamed that these "nugae literariae" would live beyond the hour. It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise when we found to what an extent they became popular, not only in England, but also in America, which had come in for no small share of severe though well-meant ridicule. In those days who could say what fate might have awaited us had we visited the States, and Aytoun been known to be the author of "The Lay of Mr Colt" and "The Fight with the Snapping Turtle," or myself as the chronicler of "The Death of Jabez Dollar" and "The Alabama Duel"? As it was, our transatlantic friends took a liberal revenge by instantly pirating the volume, and selling it by thousands with a contemptuous disregard of author's copyright.
For Aytoun the extravagances of melodrama and the feats and eccentricities of the arena at Astley's amphitheatre had always a peculiar charm. "The terrible Fitzball," the English Dumas, in quantity, not quality, of melodrama, Gomersal, one of the chief equestrians, and Widdicomb, the master of the ring at Astley's, were three of his favourite heroes. Ducrow, manager of Astley's, the most daring and graceful of equestrians, and the fair Miss Woolford, the star of his troupe, had charms irresistible for all lovers of the circus. In Aytoun's enthusiasm I fully shared. Mine found expression in "The Courtship of our Cid," Aytoun's in "Don Fernando Gomersalez," in which I recognise many of my own lines, but of which the conception and the best part of the verses were his. Years afterwards his delight in the glories of the ring broke out in the following passage in a?too-good-to-be-forgotten article