_Thanks for Victory_
Mr. Punch mercilessly satirized the despatches of a great royal soldier,
a religiously minded man, as follows:
By the blessing of God, my dear Augusta,
We’ve had again an awful buster.
Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below;
Praise God from whom all blessings flow!
_Battle Prayer_
The following has been shrewdly suggested as a good form for a battle
prayer:
O God, we who are about to plunge into battle pray Thee that Thou wilt
be with us and so direct our guns that we may mow down the enemy like
chaff. May we kill hundreds outright and maim many more, thereby causing
gloom and desperation to settle upon the hearts and the hearthstones of
our enemies.
O Thou God of Battles, enable us to make many widows and orphans; let
there be hundreds of homes desolated; let there be devoted sons left to
mourn the fathers that we shall kill; let there be distracted wives and
mothers to cry unceasingly at the loss of the light of their homes and
the support of their declining years.
O God, if there be good men on the other side who pray to Thee for
success, turn Thou their prayers to empty words.
Let it be given to us to sink more skips and to cause more misery than
our enemy, with all his striving, can do; and this we ask for the sake
of Christ, who labored to bring peace and good-will to earth. Amen.
_Silly Newspaper Queries_
Those who are blessed with a keen sense of humor will appreciate the
playful ridicule in a specimen letter published in the New York _Evening
Post_:
“TO THE EDITOR:
Having for a long time been a reader of your valuable paper, I write to
ask if you will have the kindness to inform me through the columns of
the same who is the author of the following pathetic poem:
“‘Hard was he up;
And in the hardness of his upness
Stole a ham.
“‘Down on him swooped,
And swooping, up him scooped,
The minions of the law.’ NEPTUNE.”
Commenting upon this thrust at silly queries, the editor remarks: “It
shows what a newspaper has practised upon it daily in one form or
another; yet the writers of communications quite as absurd as the
foregoing wear very solemn faces, and enter long complaints against the
editors for declining to print queries which would merely make the
public laugh, or may be answered by consulting the nearest dictionary,
or are of no possible interest to anybody save the querist himself. A
bit of satire like ‘Neptune’s’ is a word to the wise; we almost despair,
however, of its producing any effect upon the foolish.”
_Puffery Extraordinary_
A manufacturer of patent medicines wrote to a friend living on a farm in
the West for a good strong recommendation for his (the manufacturer’s)
“Balsam.” In a few days he received the following:
“DEAR SIR,—The land composing my farm had hitherto been so poor that a
Scotchman could not get a living off it, and so stony that we had to
slice our potatoes and plant them edgeways, but hearing of your balsam,
I put some on a ten-acre lot surrounded by a railroad fence, and in the
morning I found that the rock had entirely disappeared, a neat stone
wall encircled the field, and the rails were split into oven wood, and
piled up systematically in my back-yard.
I put half an ounce into the middle of a huckleberry swamp; in two days
it was cleared off, planted with corn and pumpkins, and a row of
peach-trees in full blossom through the middle.
As an evidence of its tremendous strength, I would say that it drew a
striking likeness of my eldest son out of a mill-pond, drew a blister
all over his stomach, drew a load of potatoes four miles to market, and
eventually drew a prize of ninety-seven dollars in a lottery.”
_Beaconsfield_
Among the abundant political satires aimed at Beaconsfield was the
following, in which will be recognized his well-known passion for
alliteration:
“I am the Peerless Premier,
’Tis mine to speak and yours to hear.
Intelligent England! now the time has come,
As all must own
And see,
When you must rally round Me and the Throne—
Particularly Me:
Or else the random rage of ruthless Rome,
The fickle falsehood of fair fawning France,
Bismarckian braggadocia from Berlin,
The mystic Muscovite’s most monstrous maw,
Home-Rulers hoarsely howling hideous humbug, where, smug
They batten on their melancholy isle,” etc.
_Burns’s Impromptu_
A specimen of Burns’s facility in impromptu satire, when provoked by
anything which he considered mean, is one of the memories of Brownhill
Inn. It is related that he was washing at the horse-trough, having
apparently been drinking all night. Just then a black-coated parson, who
had slept at the inn, came out and ordered his horse. Before he mounted
he said to the hostler, taking fourpence out of his pocket, “You see, I
ought to give you all this fourpence, but I shall want to pay threepence
for the ferry hard by, so I can only give you a penny.” Burns, who had
been looking on all the time, roared out,—
“Black’s your coat,
Black’s your hair,
And black’s your conscience, of which you’ve damned
little to spare.”
He then gave the hostler sixpence.
_The Prince Regent_
Byron’s “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” maintains its place in the
forefront of commingled ridicule and censure, but nothing in that famous
satire, or its sequel, “Hints from Horace,” approaches in caustic
severity his castigation of that royal voluptuary, the Prince Regent,
afterwards George IV. Byron chanced to see him standing between the
coffins of Charles I. and Henry VIII., and thereupon penned the
following epigram:
“Famed for contemptuous breach of sacred ties,
By headless Charles see heartless Henry lies;
Between them stands another sceptred thing;
It moves, it reigns, in all but name a king.
Charles to his people, Henry to his wife,
In _him_ the double tyrant wakes to life.
Justice and death have mixed their dust in vain,
Each royal vampire wakes to life again:
Ah, what can tombs avail? since these disgorge
The blood and dust of both to mould a _George_.”
_The American Eagle_
Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to his daughter, Mrs. Sarah Bache,
written in the seventy-eighth year of his age, regrets, in a
characteristic passage, that the bald eagle had been preferred to the
turkey as the national emblem. “For my own part,” said he, “I wish the
bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he
is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly;
you may have seen him perched on some dead tree where, too lazy to fish
for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing-hawk; and when that
diligent has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for
the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and
takes it from him. With all this injustice he is never in good case,
but, like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is
generally poor and often very lousy. Besides, he is a rank coward; the
little king bird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and
drives him out of the district. He is, therefore, by no means a proper
emblem for the brave and honest Order of the Cincinnati of America, who
have driven all the _King birds_ from our country; though exactly fit
for that order of knights which the French call _Chevaliers
d’Industrie_. I am, on this account, not displeased that the figure is
not known as a bald eagle, but looks more like a turkey. For, in truth,
the turkey is, in comparison, a much more respectable bird, and withal,
a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all
countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours. He is besides (though a
little vain and silly, ’tis true, but none the worse for that) a bird of
courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British
guards, who should presume to invade his farm-yard with a red coat on.”
_The Drama as an Instrumentality_
The political satirical drama founded by Aristophanes was copied in
England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Greek comic
poet introduced real characters on the stage for the purpose of
satirizing them. His freedom and boldness in depicting corrupt men and
corrupt measures were prominently shown in his caricature of the coarse
and noisy Cleon, when that Athenian leader was at the height of his
power and insolence. In a similar way the first Earl of Shaftesbury was
assailed by Dryden in an opera entitled “Albion and Albanis.” “The
subject of this piece,” as Baker says, in his “Biographica Dramatica,”
“is wholly allegorical, being intended to expose Lord Shaftesbury and
his adherents.” But there is a more violent and virulent satire upon the
same individual in Otway’s play of “Venice Preserved.” In reference to
the former, Baker quotes Dr. Johnson as truly describing those portions
of the play, now never represented, and in which the leading character
was Antonio, as “despicable scenes of vile comedy.” All the vices
assigned to Antonio were intended to depict Anthony, Earl of
Shaftesbury; and it was on account of these very scenes that the play
was a favorite with Charles II. Both political parties, at that period
of English history, were merciless in their treatment of each other, and
made use of the forms of a drama to gratify their detestation of their
adversaries.
_Compliments to Boswell_
In a copy of Boswell’s “Tour to the Hebrides,” Horace Walpole wrote the
following stinging lines:
“When Boozy Bozzy belched out Johnson’s Sayings,
And half the volume filled with his own Brayings,
Scotland beheld again before her pass
A Brutal Bulldog coupled with an Ass.”
_Forbidden Fruit_