Still find a secret pleasure in the act
Of being plucked and shorn!
However, in long hundreds there they were,
Thronging the hot, and close, and dusty court,
To hear once more addresses from the Chair,
And regular Report.
Alas! concluding in the usual strain,
That what with everlasting wear and tear,
The scrubbing-brushes had n't got a hair-
The brooms mere stumps would never serve again -
the flannels all in shreds,
soap was gone,
The towels worn to threads,
The tubs and pails too shattered to be mended
And what was added with a deal of pain,
But as accounts correctly would explain,
Though thirty thousand pounds had been expended —
The Blackamoors had still been washed in vain!
"In fact, the Negroes were as black as ink,
Yet, still as the Committee dared to think,
And hoped the proposition was not rash,
A rather free expenditure of cash —”
But ere the prospect could be made more sunny-
Up jumped a little, lemon-colored man,
And with an eager stammer, thus began,
In angry earnest, though it sounded funny:
"What! More subscriptions! No-no no,-
not I!
You have had time time-time enough to try!
They WON'T come white! then why-why-why- why
"Why!" said the Chairman, with an accent bland, And gentle waving of his dexter hand,
Why must we have more dross, and dirt, and dust,
More filthy lucre, in a word more gold --
The why, sir, very easily is told,
Because Humanity declares we must!
We've scrubbed the Negroes till we 've nearly killed 'em,
And, finding that we cannot wash them white,
But still their nigritude offends the sight,
ODE TO RAE WILSON, ESQUIRE.
"Close, close your eyes with holy dread,
And weave a circle round him thrice;
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise!"- COLERIDGE.
"It's very hard them kind of men
Won't let a body be."- OLD BALLAD.
A WANDERER, Wilson, from my native land,
Remote, O Rae, from godliness and thee,
Where rolls between us the eternal sea,
Besides some furlongs of a foreign sand,-
Beyond the broadest Scotch of London Wall;
Beyond the loudest Saint that has a call;
Across the wavy waste between us stretched,
A friendly missive warns me of a stricture,
Wherein my likeness you have darkly etched,
And though I have not seen the shadow sketched,
Thus I remark prophetic on the picture.
I guess the features: in a line to paint
Their moral ugliness, I'm not a saint.
Not one of those self-constituted saints,
Quacks not physicians in the cure of souls,
Censors who sniff out moral taints,
And call the devil over his own coals
Those pseudo Privy Councillors of God,
Who write down judgments with a pen hard-nibbed :
Ushers of Beelzebub's Black Rod,
Commending sinners not to ice thick-ribbed,
But endless flames, to scorch them like flax,-
Yet sure of heaven themselves, as if they'd cribbed
The impression of St. Peter's keys in wax!
Of such a character no single trace
Exists, I know, in my fictitious face;
There wants a certain cast about the eye;
A certain lifting of the nose's tip;
A certain curling of the nether lip,
In scorn of all that is, beneath the sky;
In brief, it is an aspect deleterious,
A face decidedly not serious,
A face profane, that would not do at all
To make a face at Exeter Hall,
That Hall where bigots rant, and cant, and pray.
And laud each other face to face,
Till every farthing-candle ray
Conceives itself a great gas-light of grace!
Well!be the graceless lineaments confest!
I do enjoy this bounteous beauteous earth;
And dote upon a jest
"Within the limits of becoming mirth;
No solemn sanctimonious face I pull,
Nor think I'm pious when I'm only bilious
Nor study in my sanctum supercilious
To frame a Sabbath Bill or forge a Bull.
I pray for grace-repent each sinful act-
Peruse, but underneath the rose, my Bible;
And love my neighbor, far too well, in fact,
To call and twit him with a godly tract
That's turned by application to a libel.
My heart ferments not with the bigot's leaven,
All creeds I view with toleration thorough,
And have a horror of regarding heaven
As anybody's rotten borough.
What else? No part I take in party fray,
With tropes from Billingsgate's slang-whanging Tartars,
I fear no Pope and let great Ernest play
At Fox and Goose with Fox's Martyrs!
I own I laugh at over-righteous men,
I own I shake my sides at ranters,
And treat sham Abr'am saints with wicked banters, I even own, that there are times but then
It's when I've got my wine-I say d
I've no ambition to enact the spy
On fellow-souls, a spiritual Pry
"T is said that people ought to guard their noses
Who thrust them into matters none of theirs:
And, though no delicacy discomposes
Your saint, yet I consider faith and prayers
Amongst the privatest of men's affairs.
I do not hash the Gospel in my books,
And thus upon the public mind intrude it,
As if I thought, like Otaheitan cooks,
No food was fit to eat till I had chewed it.
On Bible stilts I don't affect to stalk;
Nor lard with Scripture my familiar talk,-
For man may pious texts repeat,
And yet religion have no inward seat;
'Tis not so plain as the old Hill of Howth,
A man has got his belly full of meat
Because he talks with victuals in his mouth '
Mere verbiage, it is not worth a carrot !
Why, Socrates or Plato-where's the odds?--
Once taught a Jay to supplicate the gods,
And made a Polly-theist of a Parrot!
A mere professor, spite of all his cant, is
Not a whit better than a Mantis,-
An insect, of what clime I can't determine,
That lifts its paws most parson-like, and thence,
By simple savages-through sheer pretence-
Is reckoned quite a saint amongst the vermin.
But where's the reverence, or where the nous
To ride on one's religion through the lobby,
Whether as stalking-horse or hobby,
To show its pious paces to "the house."
I honestly confess that I would hinder
The Scottish member's legislative rigs,
That spiritual Pindar,
Who looks on erring souls as straying pigs,
That must be lashed by law, wherever found,
And driven to church as to the parish pound.
I do confess, without reserve or wheedle,
I view that grovelling idea as one
Worthy some parish clerk's ambitious son,
A charity-boy who longs to be a beadle.
On such a vital topic sure 'tis odd
How much a man can differ from his neighbor;
One wishes worship freely given to God,
Another wants to make it statute-labor
The broad distinction in a line to draw,
As means to lead us to the skies above,
You say-Sir Andrew and his love of law.
And I the Saviour with his law of love.
Spontaneously to God should tend the soul,
Like the magnetic needle to the Pole;
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