It also got me thinking of all the other patter songs and autobiographical introductions written by Gilbert and Sullivan. The most famous is “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” whose rhymes, the work of an obvious genius, include a favorite of mine: “When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery, When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery...” Some years ago I had the pleasure of hearing it sung by Ken Munsey (among other things, the bass player in the late, lamented Back Forty String Band) at the Lebanon Opera House. After a bravura performance that briefly stopped the show, he paused, and did it again at what seemed like twice the speed. It was incredible! – one of those moments that will be forever etched in my memory whenever I hear the song.

The British Empire had a pretty successful 19th century. “The sun never sets on the British Empire” says it pretty well. Like the United States after the Second World War, post-Waterloo Britain felt it could accomplish anything; and like the United States, received occasional disturbing news that such might not be possible. But on the home front, far from the muddy realities of colonialism, wit and poetry flourished. Much of it was a bit heavy, patriotic, or classically oriented. Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” for example, describes the aged hero’s unquenchable yearning for more adventure. In anticipation of old age, I suppose, I memorized it years ago, and love it. Helen Mirren, you may recall, read a part of it to Stephen Colbert, and had him in tears. I’ve picked another, romantic, bit of Tennyson to be inscribed on my gravestone. I’m sure that Tennyson, Dickens, Wordsworth, and Hardy would be tickled (or whatever the Victorian equivalent of that is) to know they’re still appreciated, and even revered, here and there in the American colonies.

But the poets and librettists who travel with me most often are quite a bit lighter-hearted than the marble-busted masters of British literature. Just as those who love Shakespeare can almost always find a quotation to fit any situation, I often find one in Lewis Carroll. Listening to a blusterous politician, I often recall, “When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark, and will talk in contemptuous tones of the shark. But when the tide rises and sharks are around, his voice has a timid and tremulous sound.”

“When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte, as every child can tell, the House of Peers throughout the war did nothing in particular, and did it very well.” – Iolanthe. In America, we tend to flavor our criticism with a dash of morality. Gilbert and Sullivan employed pure spoofing, as with The First Lord of the Admiralty in Pinafore, who rose from office boy at an attorney’s firm by sticking close to his desk, always voting at his party’s call, never thinking for himself at all, and never going to sea. And Captain Corcoran, who issued orders prefaced with “If you please...” and immortalized the line, “Well, hardly ever.”

There was Edward Lear, a court painter to Queen Victoria and a closeted gay, as British law at the time decreed he be. He invented the limerick, that delightful 5-line rhyme in which, among other subjects, he spoofed the snobbery of the upper classes. Fraternity boys to this day spend valuable brain power dreaming up obscene imitations to be sung at parties. He also poked fun at himself, as in “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear”: “When he walks in a waterproof white, the children run after him so, calling, ‘‘E’s coom out in ‘is night gown, that cryzy old Englishmen, ho ho!’”

“The Duck and the Kangaroo”; “The Dong with the Luminous Nose”; “The Two Old Bachelors” (which, like Demosthenes with his mouthful of pebbles, I rehearse while flossing) – they’re all foolish, but written by young Oxonians and Cantabrigians who knew their tenses, declensions, and classics. They live on in 33-rpm recordings by Stanley Holloway, Cyril Ritchard, and Bea Lilley. Latterly, I can take them with me in my car or truck on CDs by Beyond the Fringe, now sadly defunct, but carrying on the tradition with, for example, an interview by a reporter from The Bethlehem Star with one of the shepherds present at the nativity of Christ, or a truly perfect public service announcement by a mush-mouthed Prime Minister Macmillan about what to do “in the event of a nuclear atteck.” It may be pure foolishness; but if you’ve got to drive across the glacial grain of New England, it’s a lot better company than a cooking show.