POLITICAL SATIRES.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1519, 12 February 1886, Page 3

POLITICAL SATIRES.

Skits, especially political ones, are weak enough things as a rule, but two little satires that have appeared lately are so far above the average of such productions that we venture to advise all who can appreciate and enjoy keen wit, unmixed with malice, to read them. The one, called " The New Democracy: a Fragment of Caucusian History," appeared some time ago; the other, " Shooting Niagara ! or, the last days of Caucusia," is a sequel to it, and has just come out. The author does not choose to disclose his identity, but from internal evidence he is no other than the well-known author of " Lorna Doone." Whoever he is, his powers of burlesque are unquestionable. We give one quotation. It is an extract from a long tirade in imitation of the style of a certain Sage not very long defunct, and a remarkable clever parody it is : Rascaldom is abroad ; with its tatterdemalion figures gamboling in leviathan awkwardness,with its no-mind vacantly engorging itself, with its brawny hands and matted locks, and shallow pates—a band of thick witted idiots, grimy, quaint, audacious, blue-mouldy, uncertain—yet not without a kind of thought among them. Your mob is a strange, weird emanation from nature's sink of impurity—a complex of individualities rising out of the sewer of humanity; withal, a sincerity and reality in the midst of lifeless formality Tremble at it if thou must shriek inanely—nay, have thy fit of hysterics over it, if thou wilt; nevertheless, consider it. It has its work to do, though the thing to be done is unknown to itself, in its blind, chaotic stupidity; yet will it do it. It is the infiammablest of ii ilimmable sky-rockets; it will ignite, consume, and go off with many a pisjiny splutter before the grim explosion ; with what result, with what extent of destructive energy, the Eternal Veracities know not at present. Whereby it is plain that the Eternal Veracities, though living in the Empyrean from the beginning to the end through infinitude of space and time, don't know everything. And this unkempt, vague menacing body of Rascality, with its screeching and gibberings, and Formula-anathematisings, whence cometh it, whence goeth it? These are conundrums; who shall answer them, if not I ? Oh, brother, blind, besotted, inenpeptic, ass-foolish, deep-boused in Tartarean ignorance—oh, thou phantasm of a biped with brain, listen to me, no cold-blooded analyust, no matter-of-fact argumentsplitter, but a messenger charged with a message from the Eternal Voices. Wo to thee, thou quack-ridden, canteaten brother—wo to thee, poor placid invertebrate one, wallowing in thy quagmire of slothful folly and ignorance ; if thou turn not thy ear to the voice of the Destinies which delivers itself through me! "—Glasgow Herald,