When I embarked upon the subject of metrical parody I said that it was a shoreless sea.  For my own part, I enjoy sailing over these rippling waters, and cannot be induced to hurry.  Let us put in for a moment at Belfast.  There in 1874 the British Association held its annual meeting; and Professor Tyndall delivered an inaugural address in which he revived and glorified the Atomic Theory of the Universe.  His glowing peroration ran as follows:  “Here I must quit a theme too great for me to handle, but which will be handled by the loftiest minds ages after you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.”  Shortly afterwards Blackwood’s Magazine, always famous for its humorous and satiric verse, published a rhymed abstract of Tyndall’s address, of which I quote (from memory) the concluding lines:—­

    “Let us greatly honour the Atom, so lively, so wise, and so small;
    The Atomists, too, let us honour—­Epicurus, Lucretius, and all. 
    Let us damn with faint praise Bishop Butler, in whom many atoms
      combined
    To form that remarkable structure which it pleased him to call his
      mind. 
    Next praise we the noble body to which, for the time, we belong
    (Ere yet the swift course of the Atom hath hurried us breathless
      along)—­
    The BRITISH ASSOCIATION—­like Leviathan worshipped by Hobbes,
    The incarnation of wisdom built up of our witless nobs;
    Which will carry on endless discussion till I, and probably you,
    Have melted in infinite azure—­and, in short, till all is
      blue.”

Surely this translation of the Professor’s misplaced dithyrambics into the homeliest of colloquialisms is both good parody and just criticism.

In 1876 there appeared a clever little book (attributed to Sir Frederick Pollock) which was styled Leading Cases done into English, by an Apprentice of Lincoln’s Inn.  It appealed only to a limited public, for it is actually a collection of sixteen important law-cases set forth, with explanatory notes, in excellent verse imitated from poets great and small.  Chaucer, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Clough, Rossetti, and James Rhoades supply the models, and I have been credibly informed that the law is as good as the versification.  Mr. Swinburne was in those days the favourite butt of young parodists, and the gem of the book is the dedication to “J.S.” or “John Stiles,” a mythical person, nearly related to John Doe and Richard Roe, with whom all budding jurists had in old days to make acquaintance.  The disappearance of the venerated initials from modern law-books inspired the following:—­

    “When waters are rent with commotion
      Of storms, or with sunlight made whole,
    The river still pours to the ocean
      The stream of its effluent soul;
    You, too, from all lips of all living,
      Of worship disthroned and discrowned,
    Shall know by these gifts of my giving
      That faith is yet found;