Is he regularly sending HAIG and BEATTY screeds unending, Good advice with censure blending?
Is he ploughing, is he hoeing? Is he planting beet, or going In for early ’tato-growing?
Is he writing verse or prosing, Or intent upon disclosing Gifts for musical composing?
Is he lecturing to flappers? Is he tunnelling with sappers? Has he joined the U-boat trappers?
Or, to petrify recorders Of events within our borders, _Has he taken Holy Orders_?
Is he well or ill or middling? Is he fighting, is he fiddling?— He can’t only be thumb-twiddling.
These are merely dim surmises, But experience advises Us to look for weird surprises.
Thus we summed the situation When Sir HEDWORTH MEUX’ oration Brought about a transformation.
Lo! the Blenheim Boanerges On a sudden re-emerges And, to calm the naval _gurges_, FISHER’S restoration urges.
[“The most trenchant critics of the Government since its formation have been Mr. PRINGLE and Mr. HOGGE.”—_British Weekly._]
The gipsy camping in a dingle I reckon as a lucky dog; He doesn’t hear the voice of PRINGLE, He doesn’t hear the snorts of HOGGE.
The moujik crouching in his ingle Somewhere near Tomsk or Taganrog I envy; he is far from PRINGLE And equally remote from HOGGE.
I find them deadly when they’re single, But deadlier in the duologue, When the insufferable PRINGLE Backs the intolerable HOGGE.
I’d rather walk for miles on shingle Or flounder knee-deep in a bog Than listen to a speech from PRINGLE Or hearken to the howls of HOGGE.
Their tyrannous exactions mingle The vices of Kings Stork and Log; One day I give the palm to PRINGLE, The next I offer it to HOGGE.
The style of _Mr. Alfred Jingle_ Was jumpy, but he did not clog His sense with woolly words, like PRINGLE, With priggish petulance, like HOGGE.
I’d love to see the _Bing Boys_ bingle, To go to music-halls _incog._, Instead of being posed by PRINGLE And heckled by the hateful HOGGE.
My appetite is gone; I “pingle” (As Norfolk puts it) with my prog; My meals are marred by thoughts of PRINGLE, My sleep is massacred by HOGGE.
O patriots, with your nerves a-tingle, With all your righteous souls agog, Will none of you demolish PRINGLE And utterly extinguish HOGGE?
[Dr. ARTHUR SHADWELL, in the _Nineteenth Century_ for January, 1917, in his article on “Ordeal by Fire,” after denouncing idlers and loafers and shirkers, falls foul “above all” of the young girls called flappers, “with high heels, skirts up to their knees and blouses open to the diaphragm, painted, powdered, self-conscious, ogling: ‘Allus adallacked and dizened oot and a ’unting arter the men.’”]