Ode to P. G. Wodehouse on his 90th birthday, by B. A. Young

This brief tribute in verse appeared in the London Financial Times on October 14, 1971:

Ode to P. G. Wodehouse on his 90th birthday

by B. A. Young

Proclaim great Wodehouse, with a blare of trumpets,
And his great cohort of eggs, beans and crumpets—
Each one of them as instantly familiar
If not as Hamlet, anyway as Ophelia!
Here is Lord Emsworth, that immortal peer,
Scratching his Empress at her starboard ear,
With lesser Threepwoods jostling in the rear;
And ever lurking readily in reach,
Efficient Baxter and the butler, Beach.
Here idiotic Bertie Wooster weaves
His endless problems, all resolved by Jeeves;
Here Ukridge, Mulliner and Corky loom,
Infinite riches in a little room
(To pinch a phrase from Marlowe): and therewith
That seminal figure, polyvalent Psmith;
While, far but still unfaded, see young Mike in
His first eleven finery at Wrykyn.
Jeeves's ad libs had frequent wisdom in them:
Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum
Might have been one (and he'd have made it scan
More elegantly than it seems I can).
Dear Plum, I needn't translate this for you,
Who doubtless know Horace through and through—
You've come to Corinth, and Olympus too.

The author, Bertram Alfred "Freddie" Young (1912-2001), was a long-time drama critic for the Financial Times. There isn't much information about him online, but here is an complete obituary in The Guardian. Some of his books are online: Bechuanaland (1966), The Colonists from Space (1979), The Mirror Up to Nature (1982) and The Rattigan Version (1988).

Some of Young's rhymes are quite clever, and his literary references are worthy of the subject. Christopher Marlowe's line comes from The Jew of Malta (1590), Act I: 

This is the ware wherein consists my wealth;
And thus methinks should men of judgment frame
Their means of traffic from the vulgar trade,
And, as their wealth increaseth, so inclose
Infinite riches in a little room.

The speaker is Barabas, a wealthy merchant sitting in his counting-house. He is surrounded by heaps of gold, but he expresses a preference for jewels and precious stones over bulky metal coins. 

The Latin line is a hexameter from Horace's Epistles, Book I.17:

Res gerere et captos ostendere civibus hostis
attingit solium Iovis et caelestia temptat:
principibus placuisse viris non ultima laus est.
non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum.
sedit qui timuit ne non succederet.

To achieve great deeds and to display captive foemen to one's fellow-citizens is to touch the throne of Jove and to scale the skies. Yet to have won favour with the foremost men is not the lowest glory. It is not every man's lot to get to Corinth. He who feared he might not win sat still.

The translator (H. Rushton Fairclough, in the Loeb edition) observes that the sentence is a "rendering of the Greek proverb, Οὐ παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἐς Κόρινθον ἔσθ᾿ ὁ πλοῦς, which originally referred to the great expense of a self-indulgent life in Corinth. Here, however, the application is very different, viz. that not everyone can gain the prize of virtue."