'Patience,' he pictured the processes by which to manufacture a heavy
dragoon; but here, again, the design is too obvious, the incongruity a
little too apparent. The late Shirley Brooks extracted much fun out of a
mosaic of quotations from the poets, beginning:

'Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
That to be hated needs but to be seen,
Invites my lay; be present, sylvan maids,
And graceful deer reposing in the shades.'

Very good nonsense is this, if not of the best; and it leads us up
naturally to the more consummate performances of Mr. Calverley, whose
exquisite mimicry of Mr. Browning and Miss Ingelow, in their most
incomprehensible or most affected moods, is too well known to need
description. Favourable mention may also be made of a certain ballad
composed by the late Professor Palmer, in illustration of his inability
to master nautical terms, which he furbishes up in mirth-provoking
fashion.

But, putting aside Mr. Lear, the most successful, the most precious
nonsense ever written has been supplied by writers still, happily, in
our midst. And of these, of course, Mr. Lewis Carroll is obviously
_facile princeps_--not only by reason of the immortal 'Jabberwocky,' but
by reason, also, of 'The Hunting of the Snark,' in which there are some
very felicitous passages.

'They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care,
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.'

It requires genius, of a kind, to conceive and execute such lines as
these, easy as (no doubt) it seems to write them. Not that Mr. Carroll
is unapproachable. There are probably many who think that his
'Jabberwocky' is at least equalled by Mr. Gilbert's 'Sing for the Garish
Eye,' in which the invented words are truly 'Carrollian':

'Sing for the garish eye,
When moonless brandlings cling;
Let the froddering crooner cry,
And the braddled sapster sing!'--

though, to be sure, Mr. Gilbert could hardly be expected to do anything
better than that lovely quatrain of Bunthorne's about 'The dust of an
earthy to-day' and 'The earth of a dusty to-morrow.'

The example set by Mr. Lear has been followed by many versifiers, who
have sought to create their effects after a manner now sufficiently
familiar. Thus, we have had multitudinous efforts like the following:

'There was an old priest in Peru
Who dreamt he'd converted a Jew:
He wo