Twenty magnificent top hats have long adorned the trusty heads of certain important stationmasters on formal occasions; but it has been decreed that, as one by one these toppered heads retire from the service, their successors are to wear a bowler hat.

And now, on Fancy’s easy wing convey’d, The King descended to th’ Elyzian shade. There, in a dusky vale where Lethe rolls, Old Bavius sits, to dip poetic souls, And blunt the sense, and fit it for a scull Of solid proof, impenetrably dull.

There was no one at home but a black cat, who was sitting quite content and purring on the hearth[.]

These were the times when the hardy military virtues might flourish—when Cressy and Agincourt could occur, and the war of the Roses incarnadine the soil of England: …