horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear-trees,
and any odd man you meet may have three legs. Lewis Carroll, living one
life in which he would have thundered morally against any one who walked
on the wrong plot of grass, and another life in which he would
cheerfully call the sun green and the moon blue, was, by his very
divided nature, his one foot on both worlds, a perfect type of the
position of modern nonsense. His Wonderland is a country populated by
insane mathematicians. We feel the whole is an escape into a world of
masquerade; we feel that if we could pierce their disguises, we might
discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare were Professors and
Doctors of Divinity enjoying a mental holiday. This sense of escape is
certainly less emphatic in Edward Lear, because of the completeness of
his citizenship in the world of unreason. We do not know his prosaic
biography as we know Lewis Carroll's. We accept him as a purely fabulous
figure, on his own description of himself:

'His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.'

While Lewis Carroll's Wonderland is purely intellectual, Lear
introduces quite another element--the element of the poetical and even
emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong a
contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded reason
as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his
amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic
prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms.

'Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live,'