"20. And they lived long in the land; and all men said pleasant things unto them. "21. But they of Tag and of Rag that had been cast out were utterly forgotten; so that they were fain to cry aloud, saying, 'How long, O ye honest and upright in heart, shall Snobs and Nobs be rulers over us, seeing that they are but men like unto us, though they imagine us in their hearts to be otherwise?' "22. And the answer is not yet." FOOTNOTES: [30] June 1897. XXVII. PARODIES IN VERSE. Here I embark on the shoreless sea of metrical parody, and I begin my cruise by reaffirming that in this department _Rejected Addresses_, though distinctly good for their time, have been left far behind by modern achievements. The sense of style seems to have grown acuter, and the art of reproducing it has been brought to absolute perfection. The theory of development is instructively illustrated in the history of metrical parody. Of the same date as _Rejected Addresses_, and of about equal merit, is the _Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin_, which our grandfathers, if they combined literary taste with Conservative opinions, were never tired of repeating. The extraordinary brilliancy of the group of men who contributed to it guaranteed the general character of the book. Its merely satiric verse is a little beside my present mark; but as a parody the ballad of _Duke Smithson of Northumberland_, founded on _Chevy Chase_, ranks high, and the inscription for the cell in Newgate where Mrs. Brownrigg, who murdered her apprentices, was imprisoned, is even better. Southey, in his Radical youth, had written some lines on the cell in Chepstow Castle where Henry Marten the Regicide was confined:-- "For thirty years secluded from mankind Here Marten lingered ... Dost thou ask his crime? He had rebell'd against the King, and sate In judgment on him." Here is Canning's parody:-- "For one long term, or e'er her trial came, Here Brownrigg lingered ... Dost thou ask her crime? She whipped two female 'prentices to death, And hid them in a coal-hole." The time of _Rejected Addresses_ and the _Anti-Jacobin_ was also the heyday of parliamentary quotation, and old parliamentary hands used to cite a happy instance of instantaneous parody by Daniel O'Connell, who, having noticed that the speaker to whom he was replying had his speech written out in his hat, immediately likened him to Goldsmith's village schoolmaster, saying,-- "And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew That one small _hat_ could carry all he knew." Another instance of the same kind was O'Connell's extemporized description of three ultra-Protestant members, Colonel Verner, Colonel Vandeleur, and Colonel Sibthorp, the third of whom was conspicuous in a closely shaven age for his profusion of facial hair.