· LITERARY CURIOSITIES.

There was a Young Lady of Lucca,
Whose lovers completely forsook her:

So she rushed up a tree, and said, “ Fiddle-de-dee !"
Which embarrassed the people of Lucca.

But why continue quoting? These are now a portion, and perhaps the best
portion, of the classics of the nursery. We shall add only one more, because
it has an historic interest as having inspired Mr. Gilbert with his famous
Here is Mr. Lear:
"Nonsense Rhyme in Blank Verse."

There was an Old Man in a tree,

Who was terribly bored by a bee;

When they said, " Does it buzz?" he replied, "Yes, it does!
It's a regular brute of a Bee."'

And here is Mr. Gilbert:

There was an Old Man of St. Bees,

Who was stung in the arm by a wasp;

When they asked, " Does it hurt?" he replied, "No, it doesn't;
But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet.'

""The

Mr. Lear's longer nonsense poems,-" The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,'
Quangle Wangle Gee," "The Jumblies," "The Yonghy Bonghy Bo,"-these
What can be funnier than the courtship in the "elegant
are all excellent.

pea-green boat," when

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

And sang to a small guitar,

"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are!

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

And then the wedding, after they had wandered for a year and a day in search of a ring, and the wedding feast, when

They dined on mince, with slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon,
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon!

The moon!

They danced by the light of the moon!

Mr. Lear was delighted when a friend observed to him that this couple were reviving the old law of Solon that the Athenian bride and bridegroom should eat a quince together at their wedding. But, as Hudibras says,—

Rhymes the rudders are of verses,

With which, like ships, they steer their courses,

and it was possibly the rudder of rhyme which steered the pea-green boat into that classical harbor.

Admirable, too, is the humor of the "Nonsense Botanies." The botanical names are all epigrammatic, the illustrations vividly realize the humor of the text. The Barkia Howlaloudia, like a snap-dragon of dogs' heads, Arthbroomia Rigida, a sort of thistle, Nasticreechia Krorluppia, like a stem of catkins, the Bassia Palealensis, the Shoebootia Utilis, and all the rest, are not mere grotesque distortions, but natural representations of dogs and caterpillars, hearth-brooms, bottles, and boots, severally combined into such life-like imitations of actual flowers that the botanist who would not wish to be able to add them to his herbarium must be as dry as his own hortus siccus.

In every creation of Lear's, whether of pen or pencil, some touch of art which escapes analysis makes the grotesquely impossible a living flesh-andblood reality. Like Sir Thomas Browne, we quote the Latin father and say, "Credo quia impossibile est." Tables and chairs and fire-irons, ducks and kan

garoos, and a host of nondescript creatures, such as the Quangle Wangle, the Dong, and the Yonghy Bonghy Bo, are endowed with human sentiment and moral life; and all their little hopes and fears and frailties are so natural in their absurdity that the incongruity of thoughts and images is carried to the utmost height of humor. Such, for instance, are those little touches where the friends of the Jumblies receive them back at the end of twenty years, saying,

If we only live,

We, too, will go to sea in a sieve,
To the hills of the Chankly Bore;

or where the four little children who had gone out to see the world are welcomed back "by their admiring relatives with joy tempered with contempt;" or where the coachman, evidently an old family servant, "perceives with pain" that the young people, the poker and tongs, the shovel and broom, in the carriage are quarrelling while he drives them out.

Mr. W. S. Gilbert is a greater humorist, perhaps, than either of the two we have mentioned, and his humor, even in his elaborate comic operas, is often of a very similar topsy-turvy order. But his avowed nonsense verses are only a small portion of his entire work. Here is a good example :

Sing for the garish eye,

When moonless brandlings cling!
Let the froddering crooner cry,
And the braddled sapster sing.

For never and never again

Will the tottering beechlings play,

For bratticed wrackers are singing aloud,

And the throngers croon in May!

Here, also, are three stanzas from C. S. Calverley's "Ballad of the Period," an excellent parody on some modern versifiers, in which the reductio ad absurdum is accomplished by turning their method into nonsense :

Occasionally a good bit of nonsense verse may be found elsewhere than in the pages of the masters.

The following "Ballad of Bedlam," which appeared in Punch, is not without merit :

O lady, wake! the azure moon

Is rippling in the verdant skies,
The owl is warbling his sweet tune,
Awaiting but thy snowy eyes.
The joys of future years are past,
To-morrow's hopes have fled away;
Still let us love, and e'en at last
We shall be happy yesterday.

The early beam of rosy night

Drives off the ebon moon afar,
While through the murmur of the light
The huntsman winds his mad guitar;

LITERARY CURIOSITIES.

Then, lady, wake! my brigantine

Pants, neighs, and prances to be free:
Till the creation I am thine,

To some rich desert fly with me.

The Cincinnati Commercial Gazette is responsible for the following, which it gives as an effort of the intelligent compositor to grapple with the illegible handwriting of an amateur poet :

TO MARIE.

When the breeze from the bluebottle's blustering blim
Twirls the toads in a tooroomaloo,

And the whiskery whine of the wheedlesome whim
Drowns the roll of the rattatattoo,

Then I dream in the shade of the shally-go-shee,

And the voice of the ballymolay

Brings the smell of the stale poppy-cods blummered blee
From the willy-wad over the way.

Ah, the shuddering shoe and the blinketty-blanks

When the punglung falls from the bough

In the blast of a hurricane's hicketty-hanks
O'er the hills of the hocketty-how!

Give the rigamarole to the clangery-wang,
If they care for such fiddlededee;

But the thingumbob kiss of the whangery-bang
Keeps the higgledy-piggle for me.

L'ENVOI.

It is pilly-po-doddle and aligobung

When the lollypup covers the ground,
Yet the poldiddle perishes plunkety-pung

When the heart jimmy-coggles around.

If the soul cannot snoop at the gigglesome cart
Seeking surcease in gluggety-glug,

It is useless to say to the pulsating heart,
"Yankee-doodle ker-chuggety-chug!

One of Theodore Hook's witty associates, the Rev. Edward Cannon, was the author of the following bit of fooling:

IMPROMPTU.

If down his throat a man should choose,

In fun, to jump or slide,

He'd scrape his shoes against his teeth,
Nor dirt his own inside.

Or if his teeth were lost and gone,

And not a stump to scrape upon,

He'd see at once how very pat

His tongue lay there, by way of mat,
And he would wipe his feet on that!

Mr. Charles G. Leland thinks the following lines "the finest and daintiest nonsense" he ever read:

Thy heart is like some icy lake,

Ón whose cold brink I stand;
Oh, buckle on my spirit's skate,
And lead, thou living saint, the way
To where the ice is thin,-

That it may break beneath my feet
And let a lover in!

This, from Fun, is not bad:

A CHRONICLE.

Once-but no matter when

There lived-no matter where

A man whose name-but then

I need not that declare.

He-well, he had been born,
And so he was alive;
His age-I details scorn-
Was somethingty and five.

He lived-how many years
I truly can't decide;
But this one fact appears,-
He lived-until he died.

"He died," I have averred,
But cannot prove 'twas so;
But that he was interred,
At any rate, I know.

I fancy he'd a son,

I hear he had a wife:
Perhaps he'd more than one,
I know not, on my life!

But whether he was rich,
Or whether he was poor,
Or neither-both—or which,
I cannot say,
I'm sure.

I can't recall his name,

Or what he used to do;

But then-well, such is fame!
'Twill so serve me and you.

And that is why I thus

About this unknown man
Would fain create a fuss,
To rescue, if I can,

From dark oblivion's blow

Some record of his lot;

But, ah! I do not know

Who-where-when-why-or what.

MORAL.

In this brief pedigree

A moral we should find;

But what it ought to be

Has quite escaped my mind!

The following curious verse is said to have been on a gravestone at one time in the church-yard of Homersfield, Suffolk, over the body of Robert Crytoft, who died November 17, 1810, and it is very like nonsense:

MYSELF.

As I walked by myself I talked to myself,

And thus myself said to me,

Look to thyself and take care of thyself,

For nobody cares for thee.

So I turned to myself, and I answered myself,

In the self-same revery,

Look to myself or look not to myself,

The self-same thing will it be.

In the way of prose nonsense nothing can be better than this famous farrago which Samuel Foote wrote to test the memory of one who boasted that he could learn anything by heart on hearing it once: "So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great shebear coming up the street pops its head into the shop. What! no soap? So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies and the Joblilies and the Garulilies and the Great Panjandrum himself with the little round button at top. And they all fell to playing the

game of 'catch as catch can' till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots."

The prose works of Tom Hood and of Charles Lamb, and especially their letters, frequently revel in a reckless and lawless fun which is not unlike the humor of Carroll's and Lear's prose.

For example, Hood inserts in one of his "Comic Annuals" a letter on autographs, in which he classifies them as follows:

There have been autographs written by proxy; for example, Doctor Dodd penned one for Lord Chesterfield. But to oblige a stranger in this way is very dangerous, considering how easily a few lines may be twisted into a rope.

With regard to my own particular practice, I have often traced an autograph with my walking-stick on the sea-sand. I also seem to remember writing one with my forefinger on a dusty table, and am pretty sure I could do it with the smoke of a candle on the ceiling. I have seen something like a badly-scribbled autograph made by children with a thread of treacle on a slice of suet dumpling. Then it may be done with vegetables. My little girl grew her autograph the other day in mustard and cress.

Domestic servants, I have observed, are fond of scrawling autographs on a tea-tray with the slopped milk; also of scratching them on a soft deal dresser, the lead of the sink, and, above all, the quicksilver side of a looking-glass,-a surface, by the by, quite irresistible to any one who can write and does not bite her nails.

A friend of mine possesses an autograph-REMEMBER JIM HOSKINS-done with a red-hơ poker on the back-kitchen door. This, however, is awkward to bind up.

Gentlemen in love delight in carving their autographs on the bark of trees, as other idle fellows are apt to hack and hew them on tavern benches and rustic seats. Among various modes, I have seen a shop-boy dribble his autograph from a tin of water on a dry pavement. The celebrated Miss Biffin used to distribute autographs among her visitors which she wrote with a pen grasped between her teeth. Another, a German phenomenon, held the implement with his toes.

When the sweetheart of Mr. John Junk requested his autograph and explained what it was, namely, "a couple of lines or so with his name to it,"-he replied that he would lear it to her in his will, seeing as how it was done with gunpowder on his left arm.

Doppeldickius, the learned Dutchman, wrote an autograph for a friend, which the latte published in a quarto volume.

Charles Lamb writes as follows to his friend Manning, who contemplates becoming a missionary and converting savages:

MY DEAR MANNING,-The general scope of your letter afforded no indications of insanity, but some particular points raised a scruple. For God's sake, don't think any more of Independent Tartary. What are you to do among such Ethiopians? Is there no lineal descend ant of Prester John? Is the chair empty? Is the sword unswayed? Depend upon it, they'll never make you their king as long as any branch of that great stock is remaining. I tremble for your Christianity; they will certainly circumcise you. Read Sir John Mandeville's Travels to cure you, or come over to England. There is a Tartarman now exhibiting at Exeter 'Change. Come and talk with him, and hear what he says, first. Indeed, he is no very favorable specimen of his countrymen. But perhaps the best thing you can do is to try to get the idea out of your head. For this purpose repeat to yourself every night, after you have said your prayers, the words "Independent Tartary, Independent Tartary," two or three times, and associate with them the idea of oblivion (tis Hartley's method with obstinate memories), or say, "Independent, Independent, have I not already got an independence?" That was a clever way of the old Puritans, pun-divinity. My dear friend, think what a sad pity it would be to bury such parts in heathen countries, among nasty, unconversable, horsebelching Tartar people! Some say they are cannibals; and then, conceive a Tartar fellow eating my friend, and adding the cool malignity of mustard and vinegar! I am afraid 'tis the reading of Chaucer has misled you; his foolish stories about Cambuscan, and the ring, and the horse of brass. Believe me, there are no such things,-'tis all the poet's invention; but if there were such darling things as old Chaucer sings, I would up behind you on the horse of brass, and frisk off for Prester John's country. But these are all tales; a horse of brass never flew, and a king's daughter never talked with birds! The Tartars really are a cold, insipid, smouchy set. You'll be sadly moped (if you are not eaten) among them. Pray try and cure yourself. Take hellebore (the counsel is Horace's, 'twas none of my thought originally). Shave yourself oftener. Eat no saffron, 'for saffron-eaters contract a terrible Tartar-like yellow. Pray, to avoid the fiend. Eat nothing that gives the heart-burn. Shave the upper lip. Go about like a European. Read no books of voyages (they are nothing but lies), only now and then a romance, to keep the fancy under. Above all, don't go to any sights of wild beasts. That has been your ruin. Accustom yourself to write familiar letters on common subjects to your friends in England, such as are of a moderate understanding. And think about common things more. I supped last night with Rickman, and met a merry, naturai