How all our copper had gone for his service! Rags――were they purple, his heart had been proud! We that had loved him so, follow’d him, honour’d him, Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, Learn’d his great language, caught his clear accents, Made him our pattern to live and to die! * * * * * THE LATEST NEWS. [The young ladies of Girton have given up their Browning Society, and expended the funds thereof on the purchase of chocolate.] They just for a handful of chocolate left us―― Just for some sweetmeats to put in their throats: Of their sweet converse these girls have bereft us, Scorning Bard Browning, the deepest of “potes,” Once they professed they would worship the Master, And help to expound him to lit’rature clubs; But now――oh, most direful and dreadful disaster!―― Those girls have in chocolate spent all their “subs.” Just for some mouthfuls of chocolate only, Quit they the Browning Society’s fold; Leaving their male fellow-worshippers lonely, Puzzling out lines of mysterious mould. Oh! say what is sweetstuff to sentences mystic, That Girton girls should thus forsake the true “cult”? Oh, when they might pore o’er B.’s lines aphoristic, Wherein can “sweets” makes girl-graduates exult! Oh! think what they might have taught Philistine readers, Expounding, maybe, Browning’s foggiest line! Instead of which _now_ of mere worldly joys heeders, They look upon sweetmeats as something divine. Once as apostles our teaching they aided―― Even contributing cash with much glee; But now to mere chocolate-worship degraded, On Sweets, not on song, do they spend £ s. d.! _Fun._ March 31, 1886. And on April 17, 1886 _Punch_ had also a parody founded on this topic of the Girton Ladies, containing the following verses:―― A STORY OF GIRTON. Oh, the scholary girls, too blue, Who lived at Girton, down by the Cam, Just where the Cam bids the town adieu! And who would ever have thought them a sham―― These girls, and the lots they knew? Too blue, for the colour of health is red; And their eyes had the dull, boiled-gooseberry look Of maids who are meant to go to bed When down from their laps flops the out-spread book, But consume night’s oil instead. Yet I noticed, like a flowering shrub A bloom in a desert, one striking grace: They might “screw” like mad when afloat in a “tub,” And never get up the ghost of a pace, But they had a “BROWNING Club”! So, when one waxed ill, it did not seem strange That the Lady Principal sighed, and said, “A stoppage of work I must arrange; To studies recondite she’s too much wed, And from books she needs a change.”