s is not, in
strictness, a parody. That is true, and indeed as a parodist Sir George
Trevelyan belongs to the metrical miocene. His Horace, when serving as a
volunteer in the Republican Army, bursts into a pretty snatch of song
which has a flavour of Moore:--

"The minstrel boy from the wars is gone,
All out of breath you'll find him;
He has run some five miles, off and on,
And his shield has flung behind him."

And the Bedmaker's Song in one of the Cambridge scenes is sweetly
reminiscent of a delightful and forgotten bard:--

"I make the butler fly, all in an hour;
I put aside the preserves and cold meats,
Telling my master the cream has turned sour,
Hiding the pickles, purloining the sweets."

"I never languish for husband or dower;
I never sigh to see 'gyps' at my feet;
I make the butter fly, all in an hour,
Taking it home for my Saturday treat."

This, unless I greatly err, is a very good parody of Thomas Haynes
Bayly, author of some of the most popular songs of a sentimental cast
which were chanted in our youth and before it. But this is ground on
which I must not trench, for Mr. Andrew Lang has made it his own. The
most delightful essay in one of his books of Reprints deals with this
amazing bard, and contains some parodies so perfect that Mr. Haynes
Bayly would have rejoicingly claimed them as his own.

Charles Stuart Calverley is by common consent the king of metrical
parodists. All who went before merely adumbrated him and led up to him;
all who have come since are descended from him and reflect him. Of
course he was infinitely more than a mere imitator of rhymes and
rhythms. He was a true poet; he was one of the most graceful scholars
that Cambridge ever produced; and all his exuberant fun was based on a
broad and strong foundation of Greek, Latin, and English literature.
_Verses and Translations, by C.S.C._, which appeared in 1862, was a
young man's book, although its author had already established his
reputation as a humorist by the inimitable Examination Paper on
_Pickwick_; and, being a young man's book, it was a book of unequal
merit. The translations I leave on one side, as lying outside my present
purview, only remarking as I pass that if there is a finer rendering
than that of Ajax--645-692--I do not know where it is to be found. My
business is with the parodies. It was not till ten years later that in
_Fly Leaves_ Calverley asserted