Au amusing correspondence has been carried on in the Times
with a view to ascertaining the identity of the prize poem which gave rise to the mock-heroic lines on Nebuchadnezzar. As it seems that the equally well-known lines about Daniel belong to the same travesty, the evidence points to the late Sir Edwin Arnold's Newdigate poem on Belshazzar's Feast in 1852 as the causa eau-sans. But parodies of this sort were prompted by prize poems and ceremonial poems at a much later date : witness the famous couplet on the recovery of the Prince of Wales from his illness in 1872 :—
" Flashed o'er the electric wires the message came, He is not better, he is just the same.' "
In a leader on the subject the Times assumes that " the Newdigate manner" has probably died out, now that the heroic couplet has ceased to be the one permissible metre, and observes that the Newdigate has " often been a distinc- tion to be lived down "; that in virtue of its artificiality it has always encouraged poetasters to imagine themselves poets; and that "all sorts of men have won it and have yet done well enough afterwards." This is substantially true, but we demur to the view that the heroic couplet is obsolete. The verses in that measure signed " I. C." in the Morning Post are a living proof of the complete success with which it can be employed to-day for the purposes of political satire. Again, did not Swinburne and Morris both use the couplet wills consummate skill P
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