n 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."

There is a general flavour of parody about most of the ballads. It does
not as a rule amount to more than a rather clumsy mockery of
mediaevalism, but the verses prefixed to the _Lay of St. Gengulphus_ are
really rather like a fragment of a black-letter ballad. The book
contains only one absolute parody, borrowed from Samuel Lover's _Lyrics
of Ireland_, and then the result is truly offensive, for the poem chosen
for the experiment is one of the most beautiful in the language--the
_Burial of Sir John Moore_, which is transmuted into a stupid story of
vulgar debauch. Of much the same date as the _Ingoldsby Legends_ was the
_Old Curiosity Shop_, and no one who has a really scholarly acquaintance
with Dickens will forget the delightful scraps of Tom Moore's amatory
ditties with which, slightly adapted to current circumstances, Dick
Swiveller used to console himself when Destiny seemed too strong for
him. And it will be remembered that Mr. Slum composed some very telling
parodies of the same popular author as advertisements for Mrs. Jarley's
Waxworks; but I forbear to quote here what is so easily accessible.

By way of tracing the development of the Art of Parody, I am taking my
samples in chronological order. In 1845 the Newdigate Prize for an
English poem at Oxford was won by J.W. Burgon, afterwards Dean of
Chichester. The subject was Petra. The successful poem was, on the
whole, not much better and not much worse than the general run of such
compositions; but it contained one couplet which Dean Stanley regarded
as an absolute gem--a volume of description condensed into two lines:--

"Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime--
A rose-red city, half as old as time."

The couplet was universally praised and quoted, and, as a natural
consequence, parodied. There resided then (and long after) at Trinity
College, Oxford, an extraordinarily old don called Short.[31] When I was
an undergraduate he was still tottering about, and we looked at him with
interest because he had been Newman's tutor. To his case the parodist of
the period, in a moment of inspiration, adapted Burgon's beautiful