verley's "Fly Leaves" approach the classic of _vers de societe_.
Austin Dobson has worked in a more serious vein. Praed has written some
delightfully easy specimens of the style, while in America John G. Saxe,
Oliver Wendell Holmes and a number of contemporary writers are
responsible for an extensive output ranking well up with England's.

_The Dramatic Interlude_

The serious drama in verse nowadays is a drug on the market as far as
selling power is concerned, unless we except the plays of Stephen
Phillips. There is, however, a sort of dramatic interlude which is not
only marketable but much more easily and pleasantly written; a
composition on the general order of Dobson's "Proverbs in Porcelain." A
study of the "Proverbs" will go further for an understanding of the
subject than pages of explanation.

They are written in iambic tetrameter which is kept from singsongness by
the action of the dialogue. The characters seldom end their speeches at
the end of the line but rather in the middle, and the line is filled out
by the first words of the next speaker.

These little play fragments, built in the form of a delicate comedy, are
not long enough to exhaust either writer or reader and are even to be
met with now and then in our modern magazines. Their value for the verse
maker lies in the premium which they put upon ease and naturalness of
expression, though in addition they present a novel exercise to the
student who is tired of writing his narratives in conventional verse.
The "Proverbs" are suggested not as models to copy absolutely but rather
as the base of variations which the verse maker may devise to suit his
theme.

_Nonsense Verse_

Nonsense verse in its present development is a fairly modern growth. It
began with the limerick which first reached the public under the kindly
patronage of Mother Goose:

"There was an old man of Bombay,
Who pulled at a pipe made of clay,
But a long-legged snipe
Flew away with the pipe
Which vexed that old man of Bombay."

With this as a beginning the limerick has spread far and wide. It has
secured a place in modern nonsense verse corresponding to that of the
sonnet in more serious efforts. There are even limerick fiends who
pride themselves on their writing of limericks and others whose
collections of the form total up in the thousands.

It is very seldom that one sees a limerick now with the first and last
lines identical. As a rule the last line diff