29 APRIL 1916, Page 14

• A CORRECTION.

[TO THE EDFTOR OF TRH " SPBOTATOR."I

Sut,—There are slight inaccuracies in the lines quoted by your reviewer in last week's Spectator. The correct version is as follows :— " I sits with my toes in a brook, ,And if any .one axes me why! I gies 'em a rap with my crook,

constancy makes me, see /."

The boute-vintis was a literary game popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:--the rhymed words at the end of a line being given for others to fill_up. Thus, Horace Walpole being given "brook, why, crook, J,7 returned the above burlesque verse.—I am, Sir, &se.,