ns had been missed at Syllabub Farm."

Will any one stake his literary reputation on the assertion that these
lines are not really Tennyson's?

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Rev. Thomas Short, 1789-1879.

XXVIII.

PARODIES IN VERSE--_continued_.

When I embarked upon the subject of metrical parody I said that it was a
shoreless sea. For my own part, I enjoy sailing over these rippling
waters, and cannot be induced to hurry. Let us put in for a moment at
Belfast. There in 1874 the British Association held its annual meeting;
and Professor Tyndall delivered an inaugural address in which he revived
and glorified the Atomic Theory of the Universe. His glowing peroration
ran as follows: "Here I must quit a theme too great for me to handle,
but which will be handled by the loftiest minds ages after you and I,
like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure
of the past." Shortly afterwards _Blackwood's Magazine_, always famous
for its humorous and satiric verse, published a rhymed abstract of
Tyndall's address, of which I quote (from memory) the concluding
lines:--

"Let us greatly honour the Atom, so lively, so wise, and so small;
The Atomists, too, let us honour--Epicurus, Lucretius, and all.
Let us damn with faint praise Bishop Butler, in whom many atoms
combined
To form that remarkable structure which it pleased him to call his
mind.
Next praise we the noble body to which, for the time, we belong
(Ere yet the swift course of the Atom hath hurried us breathless
along)--
The BRITISH ASSOCIATION--like Leviathan worshipped by Hobbes,
The incarnation of wisdom built up of our witless nobs;
Which will carry on endless discussion till I, and probably you,
Have _melted in infinite azure_--and, in short, till all is
blue."

Surely this translation of the Professor's misplaced dithyrambics into
the homeliest of colloquialisms is both good parody and just criticism.

In 1876 there appeared a clever little book (attributed to Sir Frederick
Pollock) which was styled _Leading Cases done into English, by an
Apprentice of Lincoln's Inn_. It appealed only to a limited public, for
it is actually a collection of sixteen important law-cases set forth,
with explanatory notes, in excellent verse imitated from poets great and
small. Chaucer, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Clough, Rossetti, and
James Rhoades supply the models, and I have been credibly