The Sun.
London, England, 1847-03-18 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

THE INGOLDSB.I7 LEGENDS. Third Series.
There is something inexpressibly melancholy in the
compound of biography and facetiousness in this volume.
It brings to our recollection at once the beautiful pen-
siveness of the famous " Last Lay of Thomas
Ingoldsby"—those dainty verses which are appended to
the third and final series of his inimitable "Legends;"
and it brings especially to our recollection that one
mournful and touching stanza:—
" But I lave a-thykynge, a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge,
And sadly sang the Birde as it ptrched upon a bier;
That joyous smile was gone,
And the
.face was white told teas,
As the downe upon the Swan
Doth appear,
As I laye a-thynkynge—oh ! bitter
,flow'd the tear!"

It is much " too late in the day," as the phrase is, for
us to presume upon any critical remarks upon the
humourous compositions of Richard Harris Barham.
Those compositions are now as familiar to the appre-
ciators of the witty and the ludicrous in poetry, as the
adventures of Hudibras, the poem on the Bad Shilling,
the burlesque lines of Somerville, the nonsense-songs of
O'Keefe, and the memorable horse-exercise of John
Gilpin. They are as familiar, and we would wager that
with the majority they are as much prized as the very
best of those grotesque writings. I.):ep sad caustic as
is the retire of Samuel Butli r, we arc not ashamed to
acknowledge, and we are satisfied that we are. by no
means alone in acknowletlging that there is immeasurably
more of the comic, of the pleasant, and (in every sense) of
the readable in the versification of Mr. Barham. Follow
the latter down one page of any one of his legends, and you
are irresistibly borne away by the glibness of his rhythm,
the felicity of his language, the extravagance of his
illustration, and the outrageous absurdity of his plots—
you are carried off helter-skelter through the verses—
your breath is almost taken away by the perusal of a
single sentence—page after page he is pelting you with
the most impossible rhymes, and he brings you to the
end at full gallop, and with explosions of laughter. That
is literally the effect of his metrical pieces. It is the
effect in the " Black Mousquetaire," in his tale by Mr.
Sucklethumkin, in his anecdote from Mr. Simpkin, in
his Legends of the Dark Entry, of the Bishop of Blois,
of the Execution, and of the Ghost. But apart from
the mere manner of his muse, he is by no means inferior
to Butler, or Hood, or Somerville, or Canning, in point
and drollery. To him we are indebted for the most
execrably good pun that man ever dreamt of. Who
can forget it? When the monks and abbots with the
bishop at the head of them, to the number of thirty, are
seated round the refectory table, debating upon the
probable cause of the disappearance of one of their
number—when the dead body is jumping piecemeal from
the neighbouring well, head, legs, arms, and trunk—
when it has rolled and tumbled and hopped to the door
of the monastery—bounced into the room of audience
and stood erect upon the council-board—a ghastly corpse:
"The Prince Bishop's jester, on punning intent,
As he viewed the whole thirty, in jocular terms,
Said they put him in mind'of the Council of Trent,
Engaged in reviewing the Diet of Worms I"
Then, again, for the ludicrous arrangement of his scenery,
his character, and his " situations," Tom Ingoldsby
has no equal. His characters especially are destructive
to the gravity of the very sourest of all sour curmud-
geons, and the carelessness with which they are sketched
offonly renders them the more grotesque. Tuke "Hairy-
faced Dick," for instance :

_ .
" Hairy-faced Dick had a swarthy hue,
Between that of a gingerbread nut and a Jew,
And his queue was long, and bushy, and thick,
Like a pump-handle stuck at the end of a stick."
Or take, again, the companion picture :
" There's an old yellow Admiral living at Bath,
As grey as a badger, as thin as a lath ;
This old yellow Admiral goes to the Rooms,
And he plays long whist till he frets and fumes,
For the ace, and the king, and the rest of the trumps
Get into the hands of the other old frumps."
One of the most felicitous peculiarities in the rhyming
of poor Barham was that of iterating and chiming upon
a word, not merely as a tag throughout a long para-
graph, but intermittently and oddly in the run of a
single line. As this wise :

"In Ratcliffe highway there's an old marine store,
And a great black doll hangs over the door;
Tliere are dusty bones, and fusty rags,
And rusty locks, and musty bags,
And a lusty old woman, called Thirsty Nan,
And her crusty old husband's a hairy-faced man."
Upon this wonderful facility of rhyming, a facility that
appeared to be absolutely inexhaustible, Tom Ingoldsby
built up his reputation as a comic writer, almost as much
as upon the richness of his humour. It would be a
fallacy for any one to rate Mr. Barham among
the ephemeral humourists of the day who amuse
for a season and are forgotten, simply because
he resembles them inasmuch as he indulges in the
popular slang. The reason goes for nothing when we
turn to the Hudibrastic couplets of Charles the Second's
time, and find them interlarded with the cant expressions
then in use, or if we look into the chapters of Gargantna
and Pantagruel, and find that immortal work deformed
in a similar manner. The perishable nature of the flies
cannot destroy the amber, they are themselves preserved
and enveloped by that amber. Between Ingoldsby and
Rabelais, however, there is not merely this resemblance
they are kindred in many other particulars. Like the
great French droll, Mr. Barham very frequently disfigures
his fun by gratuitous snatches of impiety that sometimes
expand into the blasphemous. Thu fault, however, is almost
inevitsble when matters and men ecclesiastical are jumbled
up in burlesque narrative ; when friars and saints, and
" goblins damn, d" aro made the habitual dramatists per-
sum. Like Rabelais, again, Barham occasionally runs
off into extravagancies, that render the works of both
anomalies—admixtures of wisdom and folly. Like Ra-
belais, he at times seizes hold of ideas so utterly entre
that they are " insults to your understanding." Once,
for instance, the devil is carrying a sackful of victims on
his shoulders for his own particular repast in his own
particular locality. By an adroit slit in the sack, the
victims are liberated and scamper away to the chagrin of
the demon. After expatiating upon the plumpness of
" a little fat monk," who is making the best use of his
legs, the devil laments his escape with the exclamation—
" Olio! he'd have made a delicate roast,
Dressed like a wood-cock and served on a toast."

It would-be as hopeless, however, as it is unnecessary to
attempt any very accurate delineation of the characteris-
tics and merits of the two preceding series of the " In-
goldsby Legends"—from which two series all the fore-
going quotations are made from memory—without en •
croft:ling upon our space to a most superfluous extent.
Besides which, as we have already intimated, such a
delineation is altogether as uncalled for as a formal criti-
cism upon the " Battle of the Frogs and Mice," by
Homer. The present volume is rendered peculiarly in-
teresting by the elaborate and brilliant biographical
paper upon the late Thomas Ingoldsby by his brother.
The memoir is written in a strain of appropriate gentle-
ness, and is brimming over with anecdotes, not merely of
Mr. Barham himself, but relating to the wittiest of his
contempararies—such as Theodore Hook and Sidney
Smith. We will not mar the unity of this charming
and delightful biography, by transcribing an odd frag-
ment : we refer the reader to it cordially and confidently
as a source of much pleasantness, and as a satisfaction to
much laudable curiosity. From the miscellaneous cull-
ings from the hitherto uncollected writings of the dead
Wit—writings hitherto scattered through magazines and
other periodicals—we shall content ourselves by making
but a single selection. And we quote this exquisite
little love song, because of its sapphic elegance and be-
cause Mr. Barham's power in the tender and plaintive is
less recognized than his power in the comical and

•
satirical:—
There sits a bird on yonder tree,
More fond than the Cushat Dove ;
There sits a bird on yonder tree,
And sings to me of love.
Oh ! stoop thee from thine eyrie down 1
And nestle thee near my heart,
For the moments fly,
And the hour is nigh,
When thou and I must part
My love !
When thou and I must part.
In yonder covert lurks a Fawn,
The pride of the sylvan scene ;
In yonder covert lurks a Fawn,
And I am his only queen ;
Oh 1 bound from thy secret lair,
For the sun is below the west ;
No mortal eye
May our meeting spy,
For all are clos•d in rest, "
My love
Each eye is clos'd in rest.
Oh. sweet is the breath of morn !
When the sun's first beams appear ;
Oh I sweet is the shepherd's strain,
When it dies on the listening ear ;
And sweet the voice which speaks
The Wanderer's welcome home ;
But sweeter far
By yon mild pale star,
With our true Love thus to roam,
My Dear
With our own true Love to roam
We are pleased with the introduction of Tom In-
goldsby's " Last Lay," immediately before the Finis of
his last work. In its sorrowful tone we recognize a
similarity to those beautiful lines of,the poet Hood, end-
ing—

" I smell the rose above the mould."
As Hamlet says of the King's jester, and as Sterne says
of the poor clergyman—as lovingly too and as sadly es
they did—may we say of Thomas Ingoldsby—" Alas !
poor Yoriek."

A BULL IN A CHINA-suor.—As a drover was driv-
ing a herd of bullocks up the City-road, towards Islington, at
half-past eight o'clock on Friday evening, the attention of
one of the animals was attracted by the red shawl of a lady a
short distance in advance of it, and to which it irstantiv gave
chase. The lady fortunately perceived her danger before. it
became too imminent, and Pied precipitately into the shop of
Mr. Berry, a glass and chinaman, at the corner of Feather-
stone-street, through which she ran into the back parlour,
and there sank down in a state of exhaustion. The door was
instantly closed, but only just in time to save the lady, for
the bullock was so close in pursuit of her that it was through
the shop and entering the parlour when the door was shut in
its face. Mr. Berry, who happened to be behind his counter
at the time, in great consternation at the inevitable de-
struction of his fragible wares, seized the first implement
he could lay his hands on, and began to belabour the unwel-
come intruder over the head and sides with great vigour;
but, as this course was certain to involve an extensive da-
mage to the crockery, which was strewn about the floor in
profusion, he desisted, at the vehement entreaties of the
drover, and the animal, glad to escape from such a hearty
reception, turned itself round and, apparently picking its way
amongt thei plates, pans, and dishes, walked back again into
the street, without the fracture of anything. The lady
shortly after recovered sufficiently to proceed to her own
residence, but the singular intrusion of the bullock created
such excitement in the neighbourhood, that the scene of it
was surrounded for some time after by a mob of persons,
whom it was found ultimately necessary to disperse with the
atsistance of Hayward and other officers from the station-
b use 4jQinii3g.