Tweedledum and Tweedledee the most celebrated and most frequently quoted (and sometimes misquoted) epigrams", satirising the disagreements between George Frideric Handel and Giovanni Bononcini, written by John Byrom (1692–1763): Although Byrom is clearly the author of the epigram, the last two lines have also been attributed to Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. While the familiar form of the rhyme was not printed until around 1805, when it appeared in "Original Ditties for the Nursery", it is possible that Byrom was drawing on an existing rhyme. The characters are perhaps best known from Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There" (1871).
You Are Old, Father William is now mostly forgotten, and only the parody is remembered. Carroll's parody "undermines the pious didacticism of Southey's original and gives Father William an eccentric vitality that rebounds upon his idiot questioner". Martin Gardner calls it "one of the undisputed masterpieces of nonsense verse". Since then, it has been parodied further, including more than 20 versions by 1886 a version by Charles Larcom Graves, a writer for "Punch" in 1889, and "You are young, Kaiser William". In the Walt Disney animated film "Alice in Wonderland" (1951) the first stanza of the poem is recited by Tweedledee and Tweedledum as a