Rose Koven, Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
Narratives, Satires, Enigmas, Burlesques, Parodies, Travesties,
Epigrams, Epitaphs, Translations, Including the Most Celebrated Comic
Poems of the Anti-Jacobin, Rejected Addresses, the Ingoldsby Legends,
Blackwood's Magazine, Bentley's Miscellany, and Punch.
With More Than Two Hundred Epigrams, and the Choicest Humorous Poetry
of Wolcott, Cowper, Lamb, Thackeray, Praed, Swift, Scott, Holmes,
Aytoun, Gay, Burns, Southey, Saxe, Hood, Prior, Coleridge, Byron,
Moore, Lowell, Etc.
The design of the projector of this volume was, that it shouldcontain the Best of the shorter humorous poems in the literaturesof England and the United States, except:
Poems so local or cotemporary in subject or allusion, as not to bereadily understood by the modern American reader;
Poems which, from the freedom of expression allowed in the healthyages, can not now be read aloud in a company of men and women;
Poems that have become perfectly familiar to every body, from theirincessant reproduction in school-books and newspapers; and
Poems by living American authors, who have collected their humorouspieces from the periodicals in which most of them originally appeared,and given them to the world in their own names.
Holmes, Saxe, and Lowell are, therefore, only REPRESENTED in thiscollection. To have done more than fairly represent them, had been toinfringe rights which are doubly sacred, because they are notprotected by law. To have done less would have deprived the reader ofa most convenient means of observing that, in a kind of compositionconfessed to be among the most difficult, our native wits are notexcelled by foreign.
The editor expected to be embarrassed with a profusion of material forhis purpose. But, on a survey of the poetical literature of the twocountries, it was discovered that, of really excellent humorouspoetry, of the kinds universally interesting, untainted by obscenity,not marred by coarseness of language, nor obscured by remote allusion,the quantity in existence is not great. It is thought that this volumecontains a very large proportion of the best pieces that haveappeared.
An unexpected feature of the book is, that there is not a line in itby a female hand. The alleged foibles of the Fair have given occasionto libraries of comic verse; yet, with diligent search, no humorouspoems by women have been found which are of merit sufficient to givethem claim to a place in a collection like this. That lively wit andgraceful gayety, that quick perception of the absurd, which ladies arecontinually displaying in their conversation and correspondence,never, it seems, suggest the successful epigram, or inspire happysatirical verse.
The reader will not be annoyed by an impertinent superfluity of notes.At the end of the volume may be found a list of the sources from whichits contents have been taken. For the convenience of those who liveremote from biographical dictionaries, a few dates and otherparticulars have been added to the mention of each name. For valuablecontributions to this portion of the volume, and for muchwell-directed work upon other parts of it, the reader is indebte