Volume 104 — THE COMING OF THE BOGEYS.
Reading edition
I had a Dream, which was not all a Dream. (By Somnus and old Nox I fear 'twas not!) Common-sense was extinguished, and Good Taste Did wonder darkling on the verge of doom. I saw a Monster, a malign, marine, Mysterious, many-whorled, mug-lumbering Bogey, Stretched (like Miltonian angels on the marl) In league-long loops upon the billowy brine. Beshrew thee, old familiar ocean Bogey, Thou spectral spook of many Silly Seasons, Beshrew thee, and avaunt! Which being put In post-Shakspearian vernacular, means Confound, you, and Get out!!! The monstrous worm Wriggling its corkscrew periwinkly twists Of trunk and tail alternate, winked huge goggles Derisively and gurgled. "Me get out, The Science-vouched, and Literature-upheld, And Reason-rehabilitated butt Of many years of misdirected mockery? You ask omniscient Huxley, cocksure oracle On all from protoplasm to Home Rule, From Scripture to Sea Serpents; go consult Belligerent, brave, beloved Billy Russell! Verisimilitude incarnate, I Scorn your vain sceptic mirth! Besides, behold The portent riding me, as Thetis rode The lolloping, wolloping sea-horse of old! Is it less likely that I should remain Than she return?" Then, horror-thrilled, I gazed At her, the Abominable, the Ogreish Thing; The soul-revolting, sense-degrading She, Who swayed and sickened, scourged and scarified The unwilling slaves of fashion and discomfort A quarter of a century since! She sat, A spectral, scraggy, beet-nosed, ankle-less, Obtrusive-panted, splay-foot, slattern-shape, Of grim Medusa-faced Immodesty, Caged cumbrously in a stiff, swaying, swollen, Shin-scarifying, hose-revealing frame Of wide-meshed metal, like a monster mousetrap— Hideous, indecent, awkward! Oh, I knew her— This loathly revenant, revisiting The glimpses of the moon. She shamed my sight, And blocked my way, and marred my young men's art, Twenty years syne and more. 'Twas CRINOLINA, The long-abiding, happily banished horror We hoped to see no more. Shall she return To vex our souls, unsex our wives and daughters, And spoil our pictures as she did of old? Forbid it, womanhood and modesty! And if they won't, let manhood and sound sense Arise in wrath and warn the horror off, Ere she effect a lodgment on the limbs Of pretty girls, or clothe our matron's shapes With shame as with a garment. "Get thee gone!" Cries Punch, and shakes his gingham in her face. "The Silly Season's Nemesis we may stand, But thou, the loathlier Bogey? Garn away! (As 'Liza said to amorous 'Arry 'Awkins) Avaunt, skedaddle, slope, absquatulate, Go, gruesome ghoul—go quickly—and for ever!!!"
Mrs. R.'s nephew read out an announcement to the effect that Messrs. Macmillan were about to publish Lord Carnarvon's "Prometheus Bound." "Indeed!" exclaimed Mr. R.'s excellent aunt. "That's very vague. Doesn't it say how it's to be bound?—whether in calf or vellum?"