“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.

    “Three Colonels, in three different counties born,
    Armagh and Clare and Lincoln did adorn. 
    The first in direst bigotry surpassed: 
    The next in impudence:  in both the last. 
    The force of Nature could no further go—­
    To beard the third, she shaved the former two.”

A similarly happy turn to an old quotation was given by Baron Parke, afterwards Lord Wensleydale.  His old friend and comrade at the Bar, Sir David Dundas, had just been appointed Solicitor-General, and, in reply to Baron Parke’s invitation to dinner, he wrote that he could not accept it, as he had been already invited by seven peers for the same evening.  He promptly received the following couplets:—­

    “Seven thriving cities fight for Homer dead
    Through which the living Homer begged his bread.”

    “Seven noble Lords ask Davie to break bread
    Who wouldn’t care a d—­were Davie dead.”

The Ingoldsby Legends—­long since, I believe, deposed from their position in public favour—­were published in 1840.  Their principal merits are a vein of humour, rollicking and often coarse, but genuine and infectious; great command over unusual metres; and an unequalled ingenuity in making double and treble rhymes:  for example—­

    “The poor little Page, too, himself got no quarter, but
    Was served the same way, And was found the next day,
    With his heels in the air, and his head in the water-butt.”