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CALVERLEY 271
alludes to some animal or Insect, In a tone of symPathy
equalled by no one except perhaps Burns, in the eighteenth
century. How much we owe our love of animals
to the poets I Blake's sentiments seem to have been
shared by very few; only by Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth,
and Shelley.
I cannot forbear a tribute to a writer of singularly
limited horizon, but a unique eombination of humour with
scholarship and perfect versification. Calverley's parodies
require to be mentioned with encomium, or they will die.
Their savour is too literary, too Latin, perhaps, to be
welcomed by the multitude ; yet if read aloud, as of
course they ought to be, many of them would soon be
in the best sense popular. The diction is so perfect for
the purpose of the poems that the rhyming skill is generally
obscured. But a test should be applied. Take any
skilful rhymester and you can nearly always detect which
of the two rhyming words is the more important, and the
other you can see has been selected to support it. But
Calverley never lets us into his secret ; for he seems to
love the right word far too well to choose any other whatever,
and lo I it is found to be in rhyme I
The exquisiteness of his scholarlike diction preparing
for a bathos is illustrated supremely in a stanza of " The
Organ Grinder," which Montagu Butler-and who better
qualified ?-pronounced to be Calverley's greatest triumph.
The subject was the hilarity of the organ music which
tempts a motley horde of. the popula.ce to dance on the
pavements:
No• with clumay .Taob and Oeorgeo:
Unprofaned by grasp of ..._
Haidena apeed tboae oimple orgiea,
Beta.r .r ..... with Bet.y Anne.
Dr. Butler, in writing about Calverley in his prefatory
note to one of the full editions of his poems, made a
characteristic slip. The delightful story turns on Calverley
at Harrow just saving himself from trouble by
having learnt by heart one ridiculous sentence only in