House and Garden 
shaving and shearing of the priest; but the 
rest of it is now too obscure to throw much 
light on after the lapse of more than four cen¬ 
turies. The tradition as to the facts has, 
however, been kept in the Horner family in 
England, and the house still stands at Mells 
in excellent preservation. 
with an eye to the mam chance, who saw an 
opportunity to turn an honest penny and to 
retaliate upon his wife’s mother at the same 
time. 
The unknown enemy of John Horner who 
lampooned him, perhaps never heard of the 
part of the world where his doggerel was des- 
THE HORNER HOUSE AT MELLS 
The rhyming lampoons themselves would 
long ago have been forgotten had it not been 
for a foolish and noisy old woman in Boston 
a hundred and fifty years ago, who insisted 
on deafening the ears of her irritable son-in- 
law by singing them to her grandchild in 
season and out of season, and had not the 
exasperated man happened to be a printer, 
tined to be printed centuries after he was dead 
and gone, having been handed down by word 
of mouth through succeeding generations and 
finally degenerated into tales for babes. It 
seems a queer fate, but then Dean Swift’s 
vastly more important political satire, “Gulli¬ 
ver’s Travels,” has come to much the same 
end. 
85 
