Possibly your name is not Brindle,
But that is of no consequence;
The great point, my dear Brindle, being
That when his Majesty Edward VII.
Landed at Flushing the other day
He was accompanied
By
You.
At least so I gather from the halfpenny papers,
And I am free to admit
That when I read the paragraph
Descriptive of your landing at Flushing
My bosom swelled with honest pride.
I am not a doggy man myself,
Dear Brindle,
And no judge of points.
Also,
When I see a dog coming towards me
I invariably
Whisper
"Bite,"
And consequently
My hair
Is apt to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine
At pretty well every canine approach.
Bulldogs especially
Affright me,
So that I can well understand
How the little foreign boy,
Assembled at Flushing
To scoff in his sleeve at the English King,
Remained to flee as it were
At the sight of you.
That, in a nutshell,
Is why my bosom swelled
When I read the paragraph
To which previous reference has been made.
It was a picturesque circumstance, my dear Brindle.
And may be taken
As one more illustration
Of his Majesty's determination
(Pray excuse the rhyme)
To do things as a king of England should.
To have alighted at Flushing
Accompanied by a Lion
Would have been a little outre,
And Unicorns, we know,
Are not obtainable--
What does his Majesty do?
Why he takes, as he always has taken,
The middle and dignified course:
He disjects himself on Flushing
With You by his side.
Next to the Lion and the Unicorn
The Bulldog may be reckoned
The truest
Exemplar and symbol
Of our great nation.
It is like this:
The Bulldog is not too beautiful,
Neither is our great nation;
But he frightens people--
So do we;
He is tenacious
And magnanimous--
Which is just our game;
He fears no foe in shining armour,
Or any other sort of armour--
That is precisely our case;
And he is kept by Lord Charles Beresford,
The Duke of Manchester,
And Mr. G. R. Sims--
Three eminently typical Britons.
In short,
The genius of the British nation,
My dear Brindle,
Is not a policeman
But a Bulldog.
TO THE _DAILY MAIL_
(_Aug._ 3, 1901)
My dear "Daily Mail,"--
To-day you attain
Your 1,650th number,
Which, for the sake of talking,
We will call your Jubilee.
Congratulations,
My dear _Daily Mail_,
Congratulations!
There are people in the world
Who,
In the time of your infancy,
Gave you the usual three months.
Most new papers
Get three months on the day of their birth.
For at the sight of a new sheet,
Your wise man invariably taps his nose,
Looks even wiser than is his wont,
And says,
"My dear Sir,
I give it
Three months."
Well,
My dear _Daily Mail_,
You have survived the sentence of the wise,
And I am given to understand
That you have long been a tremendous property.
Once again
Congratulations!
BUT
(These buts are fearful things,
Are they not?)--
But
(Pray excuse me if I appear to say "but" again)--
But--
Well, you know what I mean, don't you?
Let me put it this way.
When I come to town of a morning,
Per 'bus or Potromelitan Railway,
As the case may be,
What do I see?
Not to put too fine a point upon it,
I see a row of silk or straw hats
(According to the state of the weather),
And I see a row
Of choice trouserings,
And between the hats and the trouserings
There is spread
A row of rustling morning papers.
I can tell you the names of those papers
With my eyes shut:
Five out of six of them is called
The _Daily Mail_.
This upsets me.
It is all right for you, of course,
But it distresses me,
And I do not like being distressed.
Now, why does it distress me?
Shall I tell you?
Are you sure that you could bear the blow?
Can you pull yourself together for a moment?
Very well, then,
You distress me
Because
The price of you is one halfpenny.
I am of opinion
That in the present condition of the general purse,
Things which are sold for a halfpenny
Are really too cheap.
I will give you my reasons some other day.
Meanwhile
(To take your own case)
When I look into your pages,
Which is seldom,
What do I find?
I will be frank for the second time,
And tell you:
I find,
My dear _Daily Mail_,
Ha'pennyness
Writ in every line of you,
From the front page, "Personal Column,"
With its "Massa, me nebber leab you
While you keep So-and-So's toffee about,"
To the last line
Of your astonishing Magazine page,
You are
Ha'pennyness,
Ha'pennyness,
Ha'pennyness,
Ha'pennyness,
Ha'pennyness,
Ha'pennyness
All the time.
Of course there is no harm in that,
Especially
As you get the ha'pennies,
And far be it from me
To contemn you for it.
On the other hand,
As I have remarked previously,
I do not like it.
I have no advice to offer you,
Inasmuch
As I do not see how you can help yourself.
But I shall ask you kindly to note
That the congratulations
Expressed at the beginning of this poem
Bear reference to your attainment of your 1,650th number
And not
To another matter,
Which,
While you certainly have the right upon your side,
You appear to me to be conducting
IN
AN
UNMITIGATED
HA'PENNY
WAY.
TO EVERYBODY
My dear Everybody,--
The other day I lunched at a place
Where there was a pretty lady.
During the course of the talk
The pretty lady said to me,
"You see, Everybody is out of town
At present."
I said, "Who is Everybody?"
Whereupon the pretty lady replied,
"Well--er--Everybody."
I said, "Quite so;
But don't you think it is rather
Fortunate that Everybody is out of town?
And the pretty lady answered and said,
"No."
I conclude, therefore,
That you, Everybody,
Must, on the whole, be rather nice.
I hope you are;
For Everybody should be rather nice,
Should they not?
And when I come to think of it
The circumstance that I heard of you
The other day
Has nothing prodigiously unusual about it.
Really and truly,
One is always hearing about you.
One is, believe me.
For example, the paragraph writers assure me
That Everybody is reading
Miss So-and-So's great novel;
Also, that Everybody will join with them
In congratulating Miss So-and-So on her approaching marriage;
Also, that Everybody is in the Highlands,
That Everybody anticipates a good season,
That Everybody keeps a houseboat,
That Everybody sups at the Carlton after the theatre,
That Everybody recognises in Lord Salisbury a great statesman,
That Everybody plays golf,
That Everybody who can afford it dresses well,
That Everybody knows the King has tact,
That Everybody thinks the Queen grows younger as she grows older,
That Everybody hopes Sir Thomas Lipton
Will win the America Cup,
And so on.
Which is well.
I don't mind in the least.
Why should I?
Yet, if I were Everybody,
I imagine that I should not do things
Quite in the same way that you do them.
To my mind, your great defect is that you do things
Not because you like to do them,
But simply because
Everybody does them.
This is an excellent reason
From your point of view;
But to me it seems a trifle stupid.
Who is reading Miss So-and-So's book?
Everybody.
Why are they reading it?
Because Everybody is reading it.
Do they like Miss So-and-So's book?
They are not quite sure.
But Everybody says it is good,
And therefore Everybody must read it.
Why are frock-coats worn?
Because Everybody wears them.
Why does Everybody wear them?
Because Everybody wears them.
Why does Everybody dine at a certain restaurant?
Because Everybody dines there.
Why does Everybody dine there?
Because Everybody dines there.
Why does----
But, there,
I forbear.
Did time allow I might multiply instances
Till Everybody felt bored,
But I stay min' hand;
Enough, you know, is as good as a feast;
Likewise, better a stalled ox
Than a dinner of herbs;
Everybody says so,
Wherefore I am constrained to believe it.
By way of conclusion, let us ask ourselves
What is happening just now.
Everybody says
That nothing is happening just now,
And that everything is frightfully dull;
And
Everybody
Is
Quite
Right.
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.