cal
of him, draws them continually larger and larger; and the instinct of
nonsense which, for no reason whatever, imagines what those moustaches
would look like on the present Archbishop of Canterbury if he grew
them in a fit of absence of mind. We incline to think that no age
except our own could have understood that the Quangle-Wangle meant
absolutely nothing, and the Lands of the Jumblies were absolutely
nowhere. We fancy that if the account of the knave's trial in "Alice
in Wonderland" had been published in the seventeenth century it would
have been bracketed with Bunyan's "Trial of Faithful" as a parody on
the State prosecutions of the time. We fancy that if "The Dong with
the Luminous Nose" had appeared in the same period every one would
have called it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell.

It is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from Mr. Lear's
"Nonsense Rhymes." To our mind he is both chronologically and
essentially the father of nonsense; we think him superior to Lewis
Carroll. In one sense, indeed, Lewis Carroll has a great advantage. We
know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: he was a singularly serious
and conventional don, universally respected, but very much of a pedant
and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life in earth
and in dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at the back of
nonsense--the idea of _escape_, of escape into a world where things
are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples
grow on pear-trees, and any odd man you meet may have three legs.
Lewis Carroll, living one life in which he would have thundered
morally against any one who walked on the wrong plot of grass, and
another life in which he would cheerfully call the sun green and the
moon blue, was, by his very divided nature, his one foot on both
worlds, a perfect type of the position of modern nonsense. His
Wonderland is a country populated by insane mathematicians. We feel
the whole is an escape into a world of masquerade; we feel that if we
could pierce their disguises, we might discover that Humpty Dumpty and
the March Hare were Professors and Doctors of Divinity enjoying a
mental holiday. This sense of escape is certainly less emphatic in
Edward Lear, because of the completeness of his citizenship in the
world of unreason. We do not know his prosaic biography as we know
Lewis Carroll's. We accept him as a purely fabulous figure, on his own
description of himself:

"His body is