pect in Phyllis charms and virtues
for which he might find it difficult to show counterparts in himself. If
the lady is to be the pattern of beauty and of goodness, ought not the
gentleman to bring an equal amount of capital into the matrimonial firm?

NONSENSE VERSES.

When Bunthorne has recited his 'wild, weird, fleshly thing,' called 'Oh,
Hollow! Hollow! Hollow!' the Duke of Dunstable remarks that it seems to
him to be nonsense. 'Nonsense, perhaps,' replies the Lady Saphir, 'but
oh, what precious nonsense!' And there really is a sense in which
nonsense--genuine, diverting nonsense--is precious indeed. There is so
little of it. The late Edward Lear bubbled over with true whimsicality.
His 'Book of Nonsense' is what it professes to be--the most delightful
non-sense possible. But of how much of that sort of thing does English
literature boast? There is plenty of unconscious nonsense, of course,
but it is not of the right quality. Dryden said of Shadwell that he
reigned, 'without dispute, throughout the realms of nonsense
absolute'--he 'never deviated into sense'--and yet he was the dullest of
dull dogs. The fact is, that nothing is more difficult than to write
amusing nonsense, and it is worth noting how few people, comparatively
speaking, have ever attempted to produce it.

One of the earliest efforts of the kind in the language is a certain
passage in Udall's 'Ralph Roister Doister,' where Dame Christian
receives from the hero a letter which seems, on the face of it,
insulting:

'Sweete mistresse, where as I love you nothing at all,
Regarding your substance and richesse chief of all,
To your personage, beauty, demeanour, and wit,
I commend me unto you never a whit,'

and so on--the joke lying, of course, in the incorrectness of the
punctuation adopted. In general, the Elizabethans were too much in
earnest to write absolute nonsense. Nonsense is to be found in
Shakespeare, but usually in parody of the euphemists of his time. Some
of the _personae_ are made to talk sad stuff, but it has not the merit of
being 'precious' in the Lady Saphir's sense. It is very tedious indeed,
and one likes to think that Shakespeare, perhaps, did not write it,
after all. Drummond, in his 'Polemo-Middinia,' gave an early example of
a kind of _jeu d'esprit_ which has since been frequently imitated--a
species of dog-Latin _in extremis_:

'Hic aderunt Geordy Akinhedius and little Johnus,
Et Jamy Richaeus, et stout