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With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,

is one of Shakespeare's many musical nonsense refrains.

[Footnote 1: ”She's all my Fancy painted him,” page 20.]

Burns gives us:

Ken ye aught o' Captain Grose?

Igo and ago, If he's 'mang his freens or foes?

Iram, coram, dago.

Is he slain by Highlan' bodies?

Igo and ago; And eaten like a weather haggis?

Iram, coram, dago.

Another very old refrain runs thus:

Forum, corum, sunt di-vorum, Harum, scarum, divo; Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band, Hic, hoc, horum, genitivo.

An old ballad written before the Reformation has for a refrain:

Sing go trix, Trim go trix, Under the greenwood tree.

While a celebrated political ballad is known by its nonsense chorus,

Lilliburlero bullin a-la.

Mother Goose rhymes abound in these nonsense refrains, and they are often fine examples of onomatopoeia.

By far the most meritorious and most interesting kind of nonsense is that which embodies an absurd or ridiculous idea, and treats it with elaborate seriousness. The greatest masters of this art are undoubtedly Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll. These Englishmen were men of genius, deep thinkers, and hard workers.

Lear was an artist draughtsman, his subjects being mainly ornithological and zoological. Lewis Carroll (Charles L. Dodgson) was an expert in mathematics and a lecturer on that science in Christ Church, Oxford.

Both these men numbered among their friends many of the greatest Englishmen of the day. Tennyson was a warm friend and admirer of each, as was also John Ruskin.

Lear's first nonsense verses, published in 1846, are written in the form of the well-known stanza beginning:

There was an old man of Tobago.

This type of stanza, known as the ”Limerick,” is said by a gentleman who speaks with authority to have flourished in the reign of William IV. This is one of several he remembers as current at his public school in 1834:

There was a young man at St. Kitts Who was very much troubled with fits; The eclipse of the moon Threw him into a swoon, When he tumbled and broke into bits.

Lear distinctly a.s.serts that this form of verse was not invented by him, but was suggested by a friend as a useful model for amusing rhymes. It proved so in his case, for he published no less than two hundred and twelve of these ”Limericks.”

In regard to his verses, Lear a.s.serted that ”nonsense, pure and absolute,” was his aim throughout; and remarked, further, that to have been the means of administering innocent mirth to thousands was surely a just excuse for satisfaction. He pursued his aim with scrupulous consistency, and his absurd conceits are fantastic and ridiculous, but never cheaply or vulgarly funny.

Twenty-five years after his first book came out, Lear published other books of nonsense verse and prose, with pictures which are irresistibly mirth-provoking. Lear's nonsense songs, while retaining all the ludicrous merriment of his Limericks, have an added quality of poetic harmony. They are distinctly _singable_, and many of them have been set to music by talented composers. Perhaps the best-known songs are ”The Owl and the p.u.s.s.y-Cat” and ”The Daddy-Long-Legs and the Fly.”

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