“’Si defunte est ma belle,
    Prenez, s’il vous plait, ma selle,
      Et ma bride, et mon cheval incomparable;
    Car il ne faut rien dire,
    Mais vite, vite m’ensevelir
      Dans un desert sec et desagreable.’

    “’Ah! mon brave, arrete-toi. 
    Je suis ton unique choix;
      La fille du sergent sans peur! 
    Pour mon trousseau, c’est modeste,
    Vous le voyez!  Pour le reste,
      Je t’epouse dans une demi-heure!’

    “Mais le jeune homme epouvante
    Sur son cheval vite remontait,
      La liberte lui etait trop chere! 
    Et la pauvre fille degoutee
    N’avait qu’a reprendre sa route, et
      Son adresse est encore Leycesster Sqvare.”

The chiefs of the Permanent Civil Service are not usually, as Swift said, “blasted with poetic fire,” but this delightful ditty is from the pen of Mr. Henry Graham, the Clerk of the Parliaments.

Of the metrical parodists of the present hour two are extremely good.  Mr. Owen Seaman is, beyond and before all his rivals, “up to date,” and pokes his lyrical fun at such songsters as Mr. Alfred Austin, Mr. William Watson, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and Mr. Richard Le Gallienne.  But “Q.” is content to try his hand on poets of more ancient standing; and he is not only of the school but of the lineage of “C.S.C.”  I have said before that I forbear, as a rule, to quote from books as easily accessible as Green Bays; but is there a branch of the famous “Omar Khayyam Club” in Manchester?  If there be, to it I offer this delicious morsel, only apologizing to the uninitiated reader for the pregnant allusiveness, which none but a sworn Khayyamite can perfectly apprehend:—­

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

     Wake! for the closed Pavilion doors have kept
     Their silence while the white-eyed Kaffir slept,
     And wailed the Nightingale with “Jug, jug, jug!”
       Whereat, for empty cup, the White Rose wept.

     Enter with me where yonder door hangs out
     Its Red Triangle to a world of drought,
       Inviting to the Palace of the Djinn,
     Where death, Aladdin, waits as Chuckerout.

     Methought, last night, that one in suit of woe
     Stood by the Tavern-door and whispered, “Lo! 
       The Pledge departed, what avails the Cup? 
     Then take the Pledge and let the Wine-cup go.”

     But I:  “For every thirsty soul that drains
     This Anodyne of Thought its rim contains—­
       Freewill the can, Necessity the must;
     Pour off the must, and see, the can remains.

    “Then, pot or glass, why label it ’With care?’
     Or why your Sheepskin with my Gourd compare? 
       Lo! here the Bar and I the only Judge:—­
     O Dog that bit me, I exact an hair!”

No versifier of the present day lends himself so readily to parody as Mr. Kipling.  His “Story of Ung” is an excellent satire on certain methods of contemporary literature:—­