Charles Stuart Calverley is by common consent the king of metrical parodists.  All who went before merely adumbrated him and led up to him; all who have come since are descended from him and reflect him.  Of course he was infinitely more than a mere imitator of rhymes and rhythms.  He was a true poet; he was one of the most graceful scholars that Cambridge ever produced; and all his exuberant fun was based on a broad and strong foundation of Greek, Latin, and English literature. Verses and Translations, by C.S.C., which appeared in 1862, was a young man’s book, although its author had already established his reputation as a humorist by the inimitable Examination Paper on Pickwick; and, being a young man’s book, it was a book of unequal merit.  The translations I leave on one side, as lying outside my present purview, only remarking as I pass that if there is a finer rendering than that of Ajax—­645-692—­I do not know where it is to be found.  My business is with the parodies.  It was not till ten years later that in Fly Leaves Calverley asserted his supremacy in the art, but even in Verses and Translations he gave good promise of what was to be.

Of all poems in the world, I suppose Horatius has been most frequently and most justly parodied.  Every Public School magazine contains at least one parody of it every year.  In my Oxford days there was current an admirable version of it (attributed to the Rev. W.W.  Merry, now Rector of Lincoln College), which began,—­

    “Adolphus Smalls, of Boniface,
      By all the powers he swore
    That, though he had been ploughed three times,
      He would be ploughed no more,”

and traced with curious fidelity the successive steps in the process of preparation till the dreadful day of examination arrived:—­

    “They said he made strange quantities,
      Which none might make but he;
    And that strange things were in his Prose
      Canine to a degree: 
    But they called his Viva Voce fair,
      They said his ‘Books’ would do;
    And native cheek, where facts were weak,
      Brought him triumphant through. 
    And in each Oxford college
      In the dim November days,
    When undergraduates fresh from hall
      Are gathering round the blaze;
    When the ‘crusted port’ is opened,
      And the Moderator’s lit,
    And the weed glows in the Freshman’s mouth,
      And makes him turn to spit;
    With laughing and with chaffing
      The story they renew,
    How Smalls of Boniface went in,
      And actually got through.”

So much for the Oxford rendering of Macaulay’s famous lay.  “C.S.C.” thus adapted it to Cambridge, and to a different aspect of undergraduate life:—­

“On pinnacled St. Mary’s
Lingers the setting sun;
Into the street the blackguards
Are skulking one by one;
Butcher and Boots and Bargeman
Lay pipe and pewter down,
And with wild shout come tumbling out
To join the Town and Gown.