Oh, Canadians!: Hysterically Historical Rhymes

R.G. Moyles is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views
of Canada, 1880–1914.

“A man whom nobody knows / Wrote verse cause he couldn’t write prose
/ And, in poems he thinks funny, / Hopes to part us from money, / Faint
hope, as this review shows.” If you think that is bad (and you
should), you will have little time for the 20 or so “hysterically
historical rhymes” in this book.

What Snell was asked to do by his publisher was to write some
historically authentic poems about Canadians—a few living (Richard,
Trudeau) but most dead (Cabot, Cartier, Bell, L.M. Montgomery,
Service)—in the humorous style for which he, an Irishman, has gained a
fair reputation. What he produced is a set of dull, unfunny pieces of
“verse and worse” that should never have gotten into print. Example:
“Stephen Leacock got a thrill / From years of teaching at McGill. / He
taught Political Economy / With really quite unusual bonhomie. / For,
expert as he was in money, / He also was extremely funny.

What is good about this book, however, are Aislin’s many excellent
cartoon caricatures that accompany the verse. They are funny.