re
Mrs. Brownrigg, who murdered her apprentices, was imprisoned, is even
better. Southey, in his Radical youth, had written some lines on the
cell in Chepstow Castle where Henry Marten the Regicide was confined:--

"For thirty years secluded from mankind
Here Marten lingered ...
Dost thou ask his crime?
He had rebell'd against the King, and sate
In judgment on him."

Here is Canning's parody:--

"For one long term, or e'er her trial came,
Here Brownrigg lingered ...
Dost thou ask her crime?
She whipped two female 'prentices to death,
And hid them in a coal-hole."

The time of _Rejected Addresses_ and the _Anti-Jacobin_ was also the
heyday of parliamentary quotation, and old parliamentary hands used to
cite a happy instance of instantaneous parody by Daniel O'Connell, who,
having noticed that the speaker to whom he was replying had his speech
written out in his hat, immediately likened him to Goldsmith's village
schoolmaster, saying,--

"And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew
That one small _hat_ could carry all he knew."

Another instance of the same kind was O'Connell's extemporized
description of three ultra-Protestant members, Colonel Verner, Colonel
Vandeleur, and Colonel Sibthorp, the third of whom was conspicuous in a
closely shaven age for his profusion of facial hair.

"Three Colonels, in three different counties born,
Armagh and Clare and Lincoln did adorn.
The first in direst bigotry surpassed:
The next in impudence: in both the last.
The force of Nature could no further go--
To beard the third, she shaved the former two."

A similarly happy turn to an old quotation was given by Baron Parke,
afterwards Lord Wensleydale. His old friend and comrade at the Bar, Sir
David Dundas, had just been appointed Solicitor-General, and, in reply
to Baron Parke's invitation to dinner, he wrote that he could not accept
it, as he had been already invited by seven peers for the same evening.
He promptly received the following couplets:--

"Seven thriving cities fight for Homer dead
Through which the living Homer begged his bread."

"Seven noble Lords ask Davie to break bread
Who wouldn't care a d--were Davie dead."

The _Ingoldsby Legends_--long since, I believe, deposed from their
position in public favour--were published in 1840. Their principal
merits are a vein of humour, rollicking and ofte