The first Lord Lytton's verse-plays--bristling as they do with fustian and bombast--have naturally been frequently travestied. Note the number of occasions on which "The Lady of Lyons" has fallen a prey to the irreverent. Altogether there have been six notable burlesques of this drama. H. J. Byron wrote two, the first of which--"The Latest Edition of the Lady of Lyons"--was produced at the Strand in 1858. This, in the following year, was freshened up and re-presented to the public as "The Very Latest Edition" of the popular drama. In 1878, at the Gaiety, came Mr. Herman Merivale's "vaudeville," "The Lady of Lyons Married and Settled," which is not only quite the best of the travesties on this topic, but one of the cleverest ever written. It sparkles with good things from beginning to end. Claude, it seems, has "taken to philosophy, and says we are all descended from monkeys." It is not surprising, therefore, to find him singing a long song in praise of the Darwinian theory:-- Power to thine elbow, thou newest of sciences, All the old landmarks are ripe for decay; Wars are but shadows, and so are alliances, Darwin the Great is the man of the day. All other 'ologies want an apology; Bread's a mistake--Science offers a stone; Nothing is true but Anthropobiology-- Darwin the Great understands it alone. Mighty the great evolutionist teacher is, Licking Morphology clean into shape; Lord! what an ape the professor or preacher is, Ever to doubt his descent from an ape. Man's an Anthropoid--he cannot help that, you know-- First evoluted from Pongos of old; He's but a branch of the _cat-arrhine_ cat, you know-- Monkey, I mean--that's an ape with a cold. * * * * * Fast dying out are man's later Appearances, Cataclysmitic Geologies gone; Now of Creation completed the clearance is, Darwin alone you must anchor upon. Primitive Life-Organisms were chemical, "Busting" spontaneous under the sea; Purely subaqeous, panaquademical, Was the original Crystal of Me. I'm the Apostle of mighty Darwinity, Stands for Divinity--sound much the same-- Apo-theistico-Pan-Asininity Only can doubt whence the lot of us came. Down on your knees, Superstition and Flunkeydom! Won't you accept such plain doctrines instead? What is so simple as primitive Monkeydom, Born in the sea with a cold in its head? This has some claim to rank with the ditties on the same subject by Lord Neaves and Mortimer Collins. But Claude has also gone in for something less innocent than Darwinianism. He is flirting with Babette, a pretty laundry-maid, the beloved of Gaspar. Of her, Gaspar sings as follows, in a clever parody of "Sally in our Alley":--