Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 12.djvu/572

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NOTES AND QUEEIES. [io s. xn. DEC. n, im

PARODIES OF KIPLING (10 S. xii. 128, 177, 238, 297). The following notes indicate further parodies, most of which are signed Dak.

The Birmingham Town Crier, 16 July, 1892, ' A Full Ford.' A brewer named Fulford being candidate for one of the City's Parlia- mentary divisions, he was depicted by Bernasconi the cartoonist as drifting to his fate on a sea of beer :

Ford, ford, ford of Fulford river,

Ford of Fulford river rushin', hark !

There 's the river up an' brimmin', And there 's 'arf a brewery swimmin'

Down the ford of Fulford river, what a lark !

17 Dec., 1892, ' Birminggum.' A soldier in India soliloquizes,

Where the Grand Trunk Road goes windin' on a

streak of chalky tape, And the elephants stand stoopid with their silly

jaws agape,

on his home and girl in Birmingham Down at 'Ockley with my Hemma and ta-ra-ra- boum-de-ay.

The Birmingham Dart, 9 Nov., 1894, * The Law of Modern Brum. J " Brum " is Birm- ingham, and its " Law n is set forth in the terms mentioned in ' The Jungle Book. 1

The Philatelic World (Calcutta), 15 Sept., 1905, ' The Apotheosis of the " Gumbug. 1 ' * The " gumbug n is a stamp issued primarily for sale to collectors :

Imprimus, 'twas a joke. Thereafter came

A dealer firm to boom him, and he boomed ;

Then, having lost his natural reserve,

Went " Seebeck," joined the Postals of the

world,

Turned three parts perforate and one imperf,

And lived enshrined in countless catalogues.

Philatelic Journal of India, February, 1900. 'The "Widow" Again.' A new -anna Indian stamp of the widow's-head design had just been issued :

So room for the " widow of Windsor,"

Our dainty Imperial Queen ; So neat and so nice at the cost of a pice,

The " pink of perfection " serene.

(She 's pink, but she used to be green.)

December, 1901. " A man there was ?> A man there was, and his heart he bent

(Even as you and I) On fads and fakes to colossal extent, It wasn't a bit what Philately meant, But the pigeon is plucked from Kabul to Kent

(Even as you and I). Oh, the time we've lost and the cash it cost

On the wonderful stuff to hand On the crossless T and the dotless I And the phantom fun of a doubtful die :

We know it and understand..

WlLMOT CORFIELD. Calcutta.

" MILLET " (10 S. xii. 384). Whatever[its origin, millet is the ordinary Arabic and Persian term for one's belief, faith, religion, especially a people united by a common faith. It is used in a well-known passage by Omar Khayyam :

Haftad u du millet and dar din, kam u besh ; Az millet-ha ishq i tu daram dar pesh.

Literally, ' ' Of sects there are seventy-two in Islam, from which I have chosen the sect of thy love.' 1 This, I fancy, was never translated by FitzGerald, but he has another quatrain in which the seventy-two millets are mentioned :

The Grape that can with Logic absolute The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute ; The subtle Alchemist that in a Trice Life's leaden Metal into Gold transmute.

JAS. PLATT, Juri. [MB. TOM JONES also thanked for reply.]

SWINBUBNE ON IRISH NATIONALISTS (10 S.

xii. 350, 412). In justice to Mr. Swin- burne's memory, the following palinode should be recorded in this connexion :

" That the mock martyrs of Manchester should not have been elevated to the dignity of death by hanging in retribution for homicide that it would have been wiser to spare their forfeit lives as worthless except to the crew who might make use of their execution as serviceable material in the pinchbeck structure of Hibernian fiction and the pasteboard outworks of Hibernian faction I have no more doubt now [1894] than I had at the time ; but I must confess to a conviction that the right word on the matter was not said by Victor Hugo, nor, perhaps, by the humbler voice which anticipated his in appeal against the sentence which gave to three common homicides the chance of a posthumous position as pseudo-martyrs. The brief and admirable words in which Mr. Bright summed up the reasons against hanging those homicides may not be as unanswerable as they seem to me ; but they are unquestionably weightier and graver than the appeal or the protest put forward by any other pleader in that cause. To some more or less inappropriate extravagance of expression in my own hasty lines on the subject I might not be unwilling to plead guilty, but I must also plead that Victor Hugo's exceed them hardly more .... in poetical value than in political extravagance and in imaginative injustice." Swinburne, ' Studies in Prose and Poetry,' 1894, pp. 286-7.

The poem mentioned by MB. PIEBPOINT is reprinted in Swinburne's ' A Channel Passage, 1904 with one phrase altered, in the second line of stanza 7 ; this alteration was made evidently to amend the pro- nunciation of the name Parnell. In the same volume will be found more poems e.g., ' The Question, 1 ' Apostasy ? ex- pressing the poet's opinions of the Irish Nationalist cause and its English supporters.

H. K. ST. J. S.