But whether we smoke or whether we sing,

Let us be loyal and remember the King,

Let him live, and let his foes vanish thus, thus, thus,
Like, like a pipe, like a pipe of Spanish, thus, thus, thus.

The story goes that this fine scholar, architect, and musician was also so fine a smoker that an undergraduate who betted that he would find him smoking at 10 A.M., only lost his bet because Aldrich at that moment was filling his pipe.

The parodies in the Sausage range from the 'Splendid Shilling' of John Philips, written in imitation of Paradise Lost at the beginning of the century, to a parody of Warton's own serious poetry. Philips was an undergraduate of Trinity under that humorous Dr. Bathurst who, though 'his behaviour in general was inoffensive and obliging,' was once found in his garden, which ran along the east side of Balliol, throwing stones at the windows of the rival foundation with much satisfaction.

Why is it, the philosophic reader may inquire, that University wit runs so readily to Parody? If only Oxford were concerned it might be attributed to the influence of Aristotle, who lays it down in the Poetics-a treatise still read in the Schools-that the source of Poetry is imitation. But Cambridge—

where Aristotle is not read, except by Dr. Jacksonis even more addicted to parody than Oxford;1 so

The best of all modern University parodies is undoubtedly the 'Heathen Pass-ee,' from the Light Green, said by Mr. Charles Whibley, in his Cap and Gown, to have been written by an undergraduate

that this explanation will not suffice. A nearer reason seems to be that when occasion arises for a poem-when, say, Dr. A. of Magdalen makes himself absurd, and Dr. B. of Queen's wishes to hold the mirror up to nature-the poetical afflatus of scorn, or whatever the emotion be, has not, as in the case of professional poets, a choice of imaginative receptacles ready for it, and so is apt to condense itself upon the poem which the indignant Doctor had last in reading. And if this be true of the Doctor or Master, how much more true of the Bachelor, and still more of the undergraduate, whose

whole vocation

Is endless imitation.

But when, to change the figure, the new and somewhat acid wine of the University wit has been accommodated in old and creditably labelled bottles, it becomes a point of honour that the fresh liquor shall be brought into as close a resemblance to the old as artifice can contrive. And thus a new art arises. The new poem must be the same, yet not the same;

named Hilton in 1872. From a study of Mr. Whibley's book I should say that parody was of the very genius of Cambridge wit. There seems, for example, to have been a Cambridge Tatler, which followed close on the heels of the Oxford Spectator; and I notice a very clever writer-Calverley, of Christ's College—just a little later than Blayds, of Balliol, on whom he has certainly formed his style. And even when chronology affords no justification the same curious parallels occur: witness an obscurer Cambridge Jowett, also celebrated in an epigram, and a writer of vers de société called Andrew Long.

it must keep the promise to the eye and ear while it breaks it to the taste; and so the ingenuity and leisure which are, next to criticism, the chief characteristics of a University, come to the aid of the latter, and the satire is coaxed or coerced into being under a familiar form.

There are parodies, of course, which aim at ridiculing the poems they burlesque. Such are some of those in the Sausage, which attack the 'Gothick' school of Gray, Mason, and Warton himself; such, in more recent times, is Calverley's celebrated 'The Cock and the Bull;' and such are some of Mr. Swinburne's parodies in the Heptalogia. But much more often the form is caught at by the unborn ghost of an idea as an opportunity of being born at all, and then, having captured its vile body, our admiration is solicited to the grace with which it comports itself in it. Usually it is a ghastly and galvanic performance. But some few parodies there are of this sort-written by men who can, if they please, give to 'airy nothing' a local habitation of their own fashioning-which pleased once and still please. Dr. Merry's Lars Porsenna, which sings of Adolphus Smalls of Boniface,' and

Whiskered Tomkins, from the Hall
Of seedy Magdalene, [sic]

is still on sale at Shrimpton's, though Tomkins has grown a beard and Magdalen Hall is merged in

Hertford. The Shotover Papers (1874-5) contained

one good parody of Mr. Swinburne, called 'Procura

We have smote and made redder than roses

With juice not of fruit nor of bud

The truculent town's people's noses,

And bathed brutal butchers in blood.

And we, all aglow with our glories,
Heard ye not, in the deafening din ;
And ye came, O ye Procuratores,

And ran us all in.

In this last quarter of a fast-closing century the Oxford poets who have most arrided their generation by parody are those who have signed them with the easily extendable initials A. G. and Q. Their works are to be found in their own volumes, or in the Oxford Magazine, or in the in the Echoes from the Oxford Magazine, and need not be copied herebeing, indeed, copyright. A. G. delights us most

1 The author of this parody was, I believe, Mr. Iwan Müller, then of New College. Other contributors to the Shotover Papers were Mr. F. G. Stokes, of Merton; Mr. Gordon Campbell, of Exeter; Mr. G. W. E. Morrison, of Queen's; and Mr. F. S. Pulling, of Exeter, of whom the last two no longer survive.

with his Latin, Q. with his English. Both, however, begin to cry out for a commentator. Perhaps the 'Caliban upon Rudiments' is Q.'s most brilliant whole, and perhaps

The crowds that cheer, but not discriminate,

his most brilliant line.

After Parody Oxford wit displays itself most in Epigram. The epigrams recorded in our older collections are too often in a more Rabelaisian taste than, happily, prevails to-day. But some few are presentable. The following may not be well known. Our friend Mr. Hawkins Browne seems to have been a sound critic of verse as well as of tobacco, for he writes of Young's Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality

His Life is lifeless, and his Death shall die,

And mortal is his Immortality.

Dr. Abel Evans, bursar of St. John's, sometimes referred to as 'the Epigrammatist,' certainly deserved his style. He is one of the Oxford wits enumerated in the distich

Alma novem genuit celebres Rhedycina1 poetas:

Bub, Stubb, Cobb, Crabb, Trapp, Young, Carey, Tickell, Evans.

His best-known couplet is that on Sir John Vanbrugh, who built Blenheim

1 An epithet for Oxford, Latinised from Redychen, said to have been its British name.