HARVARD Copyright, 1902 BY DANA ESTES & COMPANY All rights reservea A TREASURY OF HUMOROUS POETRY Published, October, 1902 Colonial Bress Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co. 66 PREFACE 66 The great end of comedy," said Doctor Johnson, in speaking of the drama, is making an audience merry." Whatever else may or may not be true of a humorous compilation, it is certain that unless such a book is amusing, it is a failure. The aim of this "Treasury" is not that of presenting extracts illustrating the development of humorous poetry in the English language. If that were its purpose, the anthology might have greater value for historical students of literature, but for the average reader it would prove of necessity uninteresting. A sense of relative proportion would have to be observed, which would mean that Chaucer must be liberally represented; that one or more scenes from Shakespeare would have to be transplanted bodily; that the "Rape of the Lock" must needs be included, as well as much of Dryden, Prior, Gay, Samuel Butler, Swift, Southey, and other wits of a former day, and that the jesters who can really amuse a modern audience would have to be represented meagrely or not at all. The editor's first intention, he confesses, was to produce a book a little after this fashion, but upon examining a number of compilations which aim to preserve a sense of historical perspective, and discovering how uncompromisingly dull they are, viewed in the light of contemporary taste, he abandoned the scheme for one more unpretentious. The selections are almost wholly from nineteenth century writers, but in any anthology which succeeds in interesting a wide audience of readers, this is unavoidable. And yet the present book has a higher aim than that of collecting ephemeral newspaper rhymes. Although it has been the editor's purpose to include only extracts that are strictly amusing to modern readers, he has given preference to such selections as seem most likely to have something approaching permanent interest. This standard, however, is difficult to preserve, for who shall say that what entertains this generation will succeed in entertaining the next, or, indeed, that what amuses one reader to-day will be certain to amuse another! At best, any editor's choice must be personal, and all his efforts to determine the tastes of his readers experimental. The term "humorous" has been interpreted in this compilation very broadly. It has been made to include poems as widely apart as the rollicking ballads of Hood, and the refined, delicately phrased verses of Locker-Lampson, or as the grotesque comicality of Gilbert and the serious irony of Canning, Clough, and Sill. In a word, there has been no attempt to discriminate between humorous poetry in any exact or narrow sense, and society verse, epigram, or satire. The selections vary from broadly comic to merely facetious and lively. It is interesting to observe how the public taste has changed. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the dominant influence of Pope led to the substitution of pithy, satirical epigrams for the broader, comic manner which preceded, and which happily has followed. The fondness for epigram persisted well up toward the present time. In Parton's Humorous Poetry," published fifty years ago, nearly two hundred epigrams are included. The reader of to-day cannot but wonder that many of the supposedly witty couplets and quatrains by Prior, Pope, Swift, Waller, Sheridan, Hook, and others, failed to seem merely flat and vulgar. It would appear that any clever schoolboy could versify the current jests of Life or Puck with more effective results. Some of these miniature satires were, of course, exceedingly brilliant, but of the majority of the selections in Adams's "English Epigrams," for example, what can one say except that they are either pretty bad, or that our taste has so outgrown the mood which produced them that we are incapable of judging their merits impartially. But not all the wits, even in the eighteenth century, were busy in making pigmy arrows with poisoned tips. Burns, of course, was a master of humor, and Cowper and Goldsmith also carried on the great tradition begun with Chaucer and continued through Shakespeare and his successors. The early nineteenth century saw a group of real humorists |