STRIKE the concertina’s melanch… Blow the spirit-stirring harp like… Let the piano’s martial blast Rouse the Echoes of the Past, For of AGIB, PRINCE OF T…

Is life a boon? If so, it must befall That Death, whene’er he call, Must call too soon. Though fourscore years he give

An Actor sits in doubtful gloom, His stock-in-trade unfurled, In a damp funereal dressing-room In the Theatre Royal, World. He comes to town at Christmas-tim…

No nobler captain ever trod Than CAPTAIN PARKLEBURY… So good– so wise– so brave, he! But still, as all his friends woul… He had one folly– one alone –

List while the poet trolls Of MR. CLAYTON HOOPER, Who had a cure of souls At Spiffton-extra-Sooper. He lived on curds and whey,

If my action’s stiff and crude, Do not laugh, because it’s rude. If my gestures promise larks, Do not make unkind remarks. Clockwork figures may be found

There grew a little flower ‘Neath a great oak tree: When the tempest ’gan to lower Little heeded she: No need had she to cower,

I’ve often thought that headstrong… Of decent education, Determine all-important truths, With strange precipitation. The ever-ready victims they,

Try we life-long, we can never Straighten out life’s tangled skei… Why should we, in vain endeavour, Guess and guess and guess again? Life’s a pudding full of plums

When the night wind howls in the c… moonlight flies, And inky clouds, like funeral shro… When the footpads quail at the nig… bay the moon,

A tenor, all singers above (This doesn’t admit of a question)… Should keep himself quiet, Attend to his diet, And carefully nurse his digestion.

Oh, big was the bosom of brave A… And also the region that under it… In safety and peril remarkably coo… And he dwelt on the banks of the r… Each morning he went to his garden…

Only a dancing girl, With an unromantic style, With borrowed colour and curl, With fixed mechanical smile, With many a hackneyed wile,

Haunted? Ay, in a social way By a body of ghosts in dread array… But no conventional spectres they… Appalling, grim, and tricky: I quail at mine as I’d never quai…

Of all the youths I ever saw None were so wicked, vain, or sill… So lost to shame and Sabbath law, As worldly TOM, and BOB, and… For every Sabbath day they walked