The miscellaneous ballads in the volume are very numerous, and in all varieties of the ballad style. Moore, Bulwer, Macaulay, Tennyson, Hunt, and other poets of the day, have some of their most popular lays felicitously parodied. Bon Gaultier must be a poet, or he could not so completely catch the very spirit and movement of the poets he caricatures. Among the best of these ballads are those which exhibit the contest for the laureatship, and the mockery of Tennyson’s style is especially ludicrous. “A Midnight Meditation,” purporting to be by Bulwer, represents that fascinating novelist as admitting, in soliloquy, the essential falsehood of sentiment which characterizes so many of his writings. He is exhibited as drinking in inspiration from London porter, and holding sweet coloquy with himself on the success of his numerous shams. “I know,” he says, “I know a grace is seated on my brow, Like young Apollo’s with his golden beams; There should Apollo’s bays be budding now:— And in my flashing eyes the radiance beams, That marks the poet in his waking dreams. When as his fancies cluster thick and thicker, He feels the trance divine of poesy and liquor. “They throng around me now, those things of air, That from my fancy took their being’s stamp: There Pelham sits and twirls his glossy hair, There Clifford lends his pals upon the tramp; There pale Zanoni, bending o’er his lamp, Roams through the starry wilderness of thought, Where all is every thing, and every thing is naught. “Yes, I am he, who sung how Aram won The gentle ear of pensive Madeline! How love and murder hand in hand may run, Cemented by philosophy serene, And kisses bless the spot where gore has been! Who breathed the melting sentiment of crime, And for the assassin waked a sympathy sublime! “Yes, I am he, who on the novel shed Obscure philosophy’s enchanting light! Until the public, wildering as they read, Believed they saw that which was not in sight— Of course ’twas not for me to set them right; For in my nether heart convinced I am, _Philosophy’s as good as any other bam._” This last line really hits the truth of the matter, and raises Bon Gaultier into the class of interpretative critics. The style of Leigh Hunt is familiarly known, and the exquisiteness of the following parody can be generally appreciated. It is worthy of Hunt himself, and might have been written by him in one of his cosiest dallyings with the “well of English undefiled.” The argument is that an impassioned pupil of Hunt met Gaultier at a ball, and thus declares the consequences: