(4) J. K. STEPHEN

[JAMES KENNETH STEPHEN, the second son of Sir James Fitz James Stephen, the Judge, was born in 1859 and educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, where he was elected a Fellow. His only published works were two small volumes of verse, Lapsus Calami and Quo Musa Tendis? (1891). He died in 1892, the ultimate cause of death being an accidental blow on the head some five years before.]

The resemblances between Calverley and "J. K. S." (James Kenneth Stephen) are so marked as to warrant a slight deviation from chronological order. Stephen was also a brilliant public school boy who had a distinguished academic career at Cambridge. He was, moreover, an avowed disciple and devoted admirer of Calverley, as may be gathered from the delightful stanzas To C. S. C. But though related by education and environment, the two men differed widely in temperament. Calverley was more freakish and irresponsible: he had greater charm, elasticity, and geniality. He was never angry, and Stephen often was, though to excellent purpose, in his diatribes against those who desecrated the river, vulgar Cockney or oversea tourists, and pretentious politicians. Stephen was less of the amused onlooker, more of the castigator. But he, too, trod the beaten way: he was neither a mystic nor a metaphysician, but a man of robust intelligence who hated cant, pretence, and sentimentality, but was capable of generous emotion and even tenderness. He called himself "a man of prose," but there are lines in the stanzas To A. H. C., when he compares the futility of abstract speculation with the things that really count, which only a poet could have written; while as a parodist he fell little short of his master.

A PARODIST'S APOLOGY

If I've dared to laugh at you, Robert Browning,
'Tis with eyes that with you have often wept:
You have oftener left me smiling or frowning,
Than any beside, one bard except.

But once you spoke to me, storm-tongued poet,
A trivial word in an idle hour;

But thrice I looked on your face and the glow it
Bore from the flame of the inward power.

But you'd many a friend you never knew of,
Your words lie hid in a hundred hearts,

And thousands of hands that you've grasped but few of
Would be raised to shield you from slander's darts.

For you lived in the sight of the land that owned you,
You faced the trial, and stood the test:

They have piled you a cairn that would fain have stoned you: You have spoken your message and earned your rest.

PARKER'S PIECE, MAY 19, 1891

To see good Tennis! what diviner joy
Can fill our leisure, or our minds employ?
Not Sylvia's self is more supremely fair,

Than balls that hurtle through the conscious air.
Not Stella's form instinct with truer grace
Than Lambert's racket poised to win the chase.
Not Chloe's harp more native to the ear,

Than the tense strings which smite the flying sphere.
When Lambert boasts the superhuman force,

Or splits the echoing grille without remorse:
When Harradine, as graceful as of yore,
Wins better than a yard, upon the floor;
When Alfred's ringing cheer proclaims success,
Or Saunders volleys in resistlessness;

When Heathcote's service makes the dedans ring
With just applause, and own its honoured king;
When Pettitt's prowess all our zeal awoke
'Till high Olympus shuddered at the stroke;
Or, when, receiving thirty and the floor,
The novice serves a dozen faults or more;
Or some plump don, perspiring and profane,
Assails the roof and breaks the exalted pane;
When vantage, five games all, the door is called,
And Europe pauses, breathless and appalled,
Till lo! the ball by cunning hand caressed
Finds in the winning gallery a nest;
These are the moments, this the bliss supreme,
Which makes the artist's joy, the poet's dream.

Let cricketers await the tardy sun,

Break one another's shins and call it fun;
Let Scotia's golfers through the affrighted land
With crooked knee and glaring eye-ball stand;
Let football rowdies show their straining thews,
And tell their triumphs to a mud-stained Muse;
Let india-rubber pellets dance on grass
Where female arts the ruder sex surpass;
Let other people play at other things;
The king of games is still the game of kings.

(5) A. C. HILTON

[ARTHUR CLEMENT HILTON was born at Banbury in 1851, and educated at Marlborough College and St. John's College, Cambridge. The Light Green, a burlesque magazine for which he was chiefly responsible, appeared at Cambridge in 1872. Ordained in 1874, he became curate at Sandwich, where he died in 1877.]

The three Cambridge poets all died young, Calverley at fiftythree, J. K. Stephen at thirty-three, and Arthur Clement Hilton at twenty-six. Hilton never reached the Sixth at Marlborough, and only took a pass degree at Cambridge, but his school and University record is not a fair index of his accomplishments. He had a genuine love of literature and archæology, wrote clever verses as a boy, and excelled as an actor. Still, his early efforts gave little inkling of the real genius for parody revealed in the Light Green, a burlesque magazine the title of which was suggested by a short-lived Oxford periodical called the Dark Blue— two numbers of which appeared in the May Term of 1872. Hilton wrote the great bulk of the contents, and all the best things are from his pen. Some of the wittiest verses-notably the delicious burlesque version of Tennyson's May Queen-are too rich in undergraduate references to appeal to the general public, but an exception must be made in favour of The Heathen Pass-ee, in which Hilton achieved the difficult task of rewriting a famous humorous poem, and equalling the humour of the original. As for the Octopus, it is generally admitted to be the best of all the innumerable parodies of Swinburne in the Dolores vein and stanza. It is a perfect caricature alike of the metrical excesses and the

violent voluptuousness of the original. Hilton wrote a few light farcical plays, including his amusing Hamlet: or Not such a Fool as he Looks-which students of burlesque may like to compare with Gilbert's admirable Rosencrantz and Guilderstern-and some graceful verses of a graver cast, but his best work is to be found in the Light Green. Like not a few humorists, he had a deep underlying vein of seriousness, and taking Orders at the earliest possible age spent the last three years of his short life as a hardworking curate at Sandwich.

Strange beauty, eight-limbed and eight-handed,
Whence camest to dazzle our eyes?
With thy bosom bespangled and banded

With the hues of the seas and the skies;

Is thy home European or Asian,

O mystical monster marine?

Part molluscous and partly crustacean,
Betwixt and between.

Wast thou born to the sound of sea trumpets?
Hast thou eaten and drunk to excess
Of the sponges-thy muffins and crumpets,
Of the seaweed-thy mustard and cress?
Wast thou nurtured in caverns of coral,

Remote from reproof or restraint?
Art thou innocent, art thou immoral,
Sinburnian or Saint?

Lithe limbs, curling free, as a creeper
That creeps in a desolate place,
To enroll and envelop the sleeper

In a silent and stealthy embrace,
Cruel beak craning forward to bite us,
Our juices to drain and to drink,
Or to whelm us in waves of Cocytus,
Indelible ink!

1 Written at the Crystal Palace Aquarium.

O breast, that 'twere rapture to writhe on!
O arms 'twere delicious to feel

Clinging close with the crush of the Python,
When she maketh her murderous meal!
In thy eight-fold embraces enfolden,

Let our empty existence escape;

Give us death that is glorious and golden,
Crushed all out of shape!

Ah! thy red lips, lascivious and luscious,
With death in their amorous kiss,
Cling round us, and clasp us, and crush us,
With bitings of agonised bliss;

We are sick with the poison of pleasure,
Dispense us the potion of pain;

Ope thy mouth to its uttermost measure
And bite us again!

(6) W. S. GILBERT

[WILLIAM SCHWENCK GILBERT was born in London in 1836, educated at London University, held a clerkship in the Privy Council Office from 1857 to 1862, and was called to the Bar in 1864. He began to write for the stage in 1866, his best-known plays being The Palace of Truth (1870), Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), The Wicked World (1873), Sweethearts (1874). To the earlier part of this period belong his Bab Ballads, many of which appeared in Fun. His famous partnership with Sir Arthur Sullivan was formed in 1875, and led to a long series of briliantly successful comic operas, beginning with Trial by Jury and including The Sorcerer, H. M. S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Patience, and The Mikado. Knighted in 1907, he died in May, 1911, from heart failure "brought on by over-exertion while saving a young lady from drowning."

W. S. Gilbert, the last of the writers of light verse who comes within our survey, was only five years younger than Calverley, but he outlived all the Cambridge poets noticed above, and was writing for at least twenty years after the death of A. C. Hilton. There is thus excuse for discussing him out of his strict order, and there are literary reasons as well. Locker compares him with the authors of Rejected Addresses, but it is not easy to see the affinity. In his feats of rhyming he recalls Barham, but he certainly owed