The Queen is in the parlour; Drake’s upon the high seas; Newbolt’s in the schoolbooks and I’m there too; For singing songs of England, of her seas (and my seas); Songs about the homeland, red and white and blue: They’ve put me in the schoolbooks, green and purple schoolbooks Of England, O England (_that’s the way to sing_); While Drake’s gone with the fairies, sailing where the dreams go: _Never mind how thin they are if the verses ring_ _For we’re singing songs of England and God save the King!_ FROM A GREAT POLITICAL-BIOGRAPHICAL DRAMA, ‘BUBB BODINGTON’ NOT YET WRITTEN BY MR JOHN DRINKWATER _Two Chroniclers_: _First Chronicler_: Kinsmen who have known the Cotswold haze, You will remember April and June have thirty days, So, too, November. _Second Chronicler_: Men’s sowings and their reapings will deflow’r Each blossomed chine; Yet will a stitch prompt to occasion’s hour Give maintenance to nine. _The two together_: Circumstance brims all our years With agonies and doubts and fears, Generations that have flown Harvesting but bitter loss; Kinsmen, shall the moving stone Garner yet its little moss? _First Chronicler_: Happy the spirits that can grow In steadfastness, Yet to the end possess Their ardours. _Second Chronicler_: They alone shall know Felicity, the wages of content, Who thus transmute the vain and fleeting show Into event. _The two together_: O vision on its lonely way shall find, Kinsmen, it is an ill And evil-blowing wind That does not speak to someone of goodwill; And a poor tale, shapeless indeed and crude, Whose fragments we two cannot bind With some such smooth and pompous platitude. AN EPILOGUE TO ‘TRIVIA’ (_With apologies to Mr Logan Pearsall Smith_) I peeped in the Library of the Strange House and saw the dark figure of a man bobbing about. There was, too, such a rush of nasty cheap perfume through the door that I thought at first some of the bad portraits had come to life. Or is it, I asked myself, someone engaged in secret worship, the Baronet placating his private Mumbo-Jumbo or the Vicar turning in weariness to Sasabonsum? And I thought of monstrous African gods, of terrifying shapes and evil rites hidden in deep forests, of all the wildness and wonder of the dark untamed Universe.... But when I looked again, I saw that it was only one of our whimsical prosemen drenching his newly and meticulously written sheets with inexpensive Parma Violet and Jockey Club to hide the smell of the lamp. EPIGRAMS THE OLD MAN AND THE NEWSPAPER Daylong he seems to read, but as he peers At fading print, the sheet becomes a glass, Wherein are mirrored ghosts that smile and pass, And lovely faces, dust these forty years.