Chapter XVII

The thing was odd, and minus Cod
And sauce, they stood like posts;
O, prudent folks, for fear of hoax,
Put no belief in Ghosts!

THE BROKEN DISH.

What’s life but full of care and doubt,
With all its fine humanities,
With parasols we walk about,
Long pigtails and such vanities.

We plant pomegranate trees and things
And go in gardens sporting,
With toys and fans of peacocks’ wings,
To painted ladies courting.

We gather flowers of every hue,
And fish in boats for fishes,
Build summer-houses painted blue,--
But life’s as frail as dishes.

Walking about their groves of trees,
Blue bridges and blue rivers,
How little thought them two Chinese
They’d both be smash’d to shivers.

LITERARY AND LITERAL.

The March of Mind upon its mighty stilts,
(A spirit by no means to fasten mocks on,)
In travelling through Berks, Beds, Notts, and Wilts,
Hants--Bucks, Herts, Oxon,

Got up a thing our ancestors ne’er thought on,
A thing that, only in our proper youth,
We should have chuckled at--in sober truth,
A Conversazione at Hog’s Norton!

A place whose native dialect, somehow,
Has always by an adage been affronted,
And that it is all _gutturals_, is now
Taken for grunted.

Conceive the snoring of a greedy swine,
The slobbering of a hungry Ursine Sloth--
If you have ever heard such creature dine--
And--for Hog’s Norton, make a mix of both!--

O shades of Shakspeare! Chaucer! Spenser!
Milton! Pope! Gray! Warton!
O Colman! Kenny! Planche! Poole! Peake!
Pocock! Reynolds! Morton!
O Grey! Peel! Sadler! Wilberforce! Burdett!
Hume! Wilmot Horton!
Think of your prose and verse, and worse--delivered in
Hog’s Norton!--

The founder of Hog’s Norton Athenæum
Framed her society
With some variety
From Mr. Roscoe’s Liverpool museum;
Not a mere pic-nic, for the mind’s repast,
But tempting to the solid knife-and-forker,
It held its sessions in the house that last
Had killed a porker.
It chanced one Friday,
One Farmer Grayley stuck a very big hog,
A perfect Gog or Magog of a pig-hog,
Which made of course a literary high day,--
Not that our Farmer was a man to go
With literary taste--so far from suiting ’em,
When he heard mention of Professor _Crowe_,
Or Lalla-_Rookh_, he always was for shooting ’em!
In fact in letters he was quite a log,
With him great Bacon
Was literally taken.
And Hogg--the Poet--nothing but a Hog!
As to all others on the list of Fame,
Although they were discuss’d and mention’d daily,
He only recognised one classic name,
And thought that _she_ had hung herself--_Miss Baillie_!

To balance this, our Farmer’s only daughter
Had a great taste for the Castalian water--
A Wordsworth worshipper--a Southey wooer,--
(Though men that deal in water-colour cakes
May disbelieve the fact--yet nothing’s truer)
She got the _bluer_
The more she dipped and dabbled in the _Lakes_.
The secret truth is, Hope, the old deceiver,
At future Authorship was apt to hint,
Producing what some call the _Type-us_ Fever,
Which means a burning to be seen in print.

Of learning’s laurels--Miss Joanna Baillie--
Of Mrs. Hemans--Mrs. Wilson--daily
Dreamt Anne Priscilla Isabella Grayley;
And Fancy hinting that she had the better
Of L.E.L. by one initial letter,
She thought the world would quite enraptur’d see

“LOVE LAYS AND LYRICS

BY

A P I G.”

Accordingly, with very great propriety,
She joined the H. N. B. and double S.,
That is,--Hog’s Norton Blue Stocking Society;
And saving when her Pa his pigs prohibited,
Contributed
Her pork and poetry towards the mess.
This feast, we said, one Friday was the case,
When farmer Grayley--from Macbeth to quote--
Screwing his courage to the “sticking place,”
Stuck a large knife into a grunter’s throat;--
A kind of murder that the law’s rebuke
Seldom condemns by shake of its peruke,
Showing the little sympathy of _big-wigs_
With _pig-wigs_!

The swine--poor wretch!--with nobody to speak for it,
And beg its life, resolved to have a squeak for it;
So--like the fabled swan--died singing out,
And, thus, there issued from the farmer’s yard
A note that notified without a card,
An invitation to the evening rout.

And when the time came duly,--“At the close of
The day,” as Beattie has it, “when the ham--”
Bacon and pork were ready to dispose of,
And pettitoes and chit’lings too, to cram,--
Walked in the H. N. B. and double S.’s,
All in appropriate and swinish dresses,
For lo! it is a fact, and not a joke,
Although the Muse might fairly jest upon it,
They came--each “Pig-faced Lady,” in that bonnet
We call _a poke_.

The Members all assembled thus, a rare woman
At pork and poetry was chosen _chairwoman_;--
In fact, the bluest of the Blues, Miss Ikey,
Whose whole pronunciation was so piggy,
She always named the authoress of “_Psyche_”--
As Mrs. _Tiggey_!

And now arose a question of some moment,--
What author for a lecture was the richer,
Bacon or Hogg? there were no votes for Beaumont,
But some for _Flitcher_;
While others, with a more sagacious reasoning,
Proposed another work,
And thought their pork
Would prove more relishing from Thomson’s Season-ing!

But practised in Shakspearian readings daily,--
O! Miss Macaulay! Shakspeare at Hog’s Norton!--
Miss Anne Priscilla Isabella Grayley
Selected _him_ that evening to snort on.
In short, to make our story not a big tale,
Just fancy her exerting
Her talents, and converting
The Winter’s Tale to something like a pig-tale!
Her sister auditory
All sitting round, with grave and learned faces,
Were very plauditory,
Of course, and clapped her at the proper places.

Till fanned at once by fortune and the Muse,
She thought herself the blessedest of Blues.
But Happiness, alas! has blights of ill,
And Pleasure’s bubbles in the air explode;--
There is no travelling through life but still
The heart will meet with breakers on the road!

With that peculiar voice
Heard only from Hog’s Norton throats and noses,
Miss G., with Perdita, was making choice
Of buds and blossoms for her summer posies,
When coming to that line, where Proserpine
Lets fall her flowers from the wain of Dis;
Imagine this--
Uprose on his hind legs old Farmer Grayley,
Grunting this question for the club’s digestion,
“Do _Dis’s Waggon_ go from the Ould Bäaley?”

THE SUB-MARINE.

It was a brave and jolly wight,
His cheek was baked and brown,
For he had been in many climes
With captains of renown,
And fought with those who fought so well
At Nile and Camperdown.

His coat it was a soldier coat,
Of red with yellow faced,
But (merman-like) he look’d marine
All downward from the waist;
His trowsers were so wide and blue,
And quite in sailor taste!

He put the rummer to his lips,
And drank a jolly draught;
He raised the rummer many times--
And ever as he quaff’d,
The more he drank the more the ship
Seem’d pitching fore and aft!

The ship seem’d pitching fore and aft,
As in a heavy squall;
It gave a lurch and down he went,
Head-foremost in his fall!
Three times he did not rise, alas!
He never rose at all!

But down he went, right down at once
Like any stone he dived,
He could not see, or hear, or feel--
Of senses all deprived!
At last he gave a look around
To see where he arrived!

And all that he could see was green,
Sea-green on every hand!
And then he tried to sound beneath,
And all he felt was sand!
There he was fain to lie, for he
Could neither sit nor stand!

And lo! above his head there bent
A strange and staring lass;
One hand was in her yellow hair,
The other held a glass;
A mermaid she must surely be
If ever mermaid was!

Her fish-like mouth was open’d wide,
Her eyes were blue and pale,
Her dress was of the ocean green,
When ruffled by a gale;
Thought he “beneath that petticoat
She hides a salmon-tail!”

She look’d as siren ought to look,
A sharp and bitter shrew,
To sing deceiving lullabies
For mariners to rue,--
But when he saw her lips apart,
It chill’d him through and through!

With either hand he stopp’d his ears
Against her evil cry;
Alas, alas, for all his care,
His doom it seem’d to die,
Her voice went ringing through his head
It was so sharp and high!

He thrust his fingers farther in
At each unwilling ear,
But still in very spite of all,
The words were plain and clear;
“I can’t stand here the whole day long,
To hold your glass of beer!”

With open’d mouth and open’d eyes,
Up rose the Sub-marine,
And gave a stare to find the sands
And deeps where he had been:
There was no siren with her glass
No waters ocean-green!

The wet deception from his eyes
Kept fading more and more,
He only saw the bar-maid stand
With pouting lip before--
The small green parlour of the Ship,
And little sanded floor.

THE LAMENT OF TOBY,

THE LEARNED PIG.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing.”--POPE.

O heavy day! O day of woe!
To misery a poster,
Why was I ever farrow’d--why
Not spitted for a roaster?

In this world, pigs, as well as men,
Must dance to fortune’s fiddlings,
But must I give the classics up,
For barley-meal and middlings?

Of what avail that I could spell
And read, just like my betters,
If I must come to this at last,
To litters, not to letters?

O, why are pigs made scholars of?
It baffles my discerning,
What griskens, fry, and chitterlings
Can have to do with learning.

Alas! my learning once drew cash,
But public fame’s unstable,
So I must turn a pig again,
And fatten for the table.

To leave my literary line
My eyes get red and leaky;
But Giblett doesn’t want me _blue_,
But red and white, and streaky.

Old Mullins used to cultivate
My learning like a gard’ner;
But Giblett only thinks of lard,
And not of Doctor Lardner!

He does not care about my brain
The value of two coppers,
All that he thinks about my head
Is, how I’m off for choppers.

Of all my literary kin
A farewell must be taken,
Good-bye to the poetic Hogg!
The philosophic Bacon!

Day after day my lessons fade,
My intellect gets muddy;
A trough I have, and not a desk,
A sty--and not a study!

Another little month, and then
My progress ends like Bunyan’s;
The seven sages that I loved
Will be chopp’d up with onions!

Then over head and ears in brine
They’ll souse me, like a salmon,
My mathematics turn to brawn,
My logic into gammon.

My Hebrew will all retrograde,
Now I’m put up to fatten;
My Greek, it will all go to grease;
The Dogs will have my Latin!

Farewell to Oxford!--and to Bliss!
To Milman, Crowe, and Glossop,--
I now must be content with chats,
Instead of learned gossip!

Farewell to “Town!” farewell to “Gown!”
I’ve quite outgrown the latter,--
Instead of Trencher-cap my head
Will soon be in a platter!

O why did I at Brazen-Nose
Rout up the roots of knowledge?
A butcher that can’t read will kill
A pig that’s been to college!

For sorrow I could stick myself,
But conscience is a clasher;
A thing that would be rash in man,
In me would be a rasher!

One thing I ask when I am dead,
And past the Stygian ditches--
And that is, let my schoolmaster
Have one of my two flitches:

’Twas he who taught my letters so
I ne’er mistook or miss’d ’em,
Simply by _ringing_ at the nose,
According to Bell’s system.

MY SON AND HEIR.

I.

My mother bids me bind my heir,
But not the trade where I should bind;
To place a boy--the how and where--
It is the plague of parent-kind!

II.

She does not hint the slightest plan,
Nor what indentures to endorse;
Whether to bind him to a man,--
Or, like Mazeppa, to a horse.

III.

What line to choose of likely rise,
To something in the Stocks at last,--
“Fast bind, fast find,” the proverb cries,
I find I cannot bind so fast!

IV.

A Statesman James can never be;
A Tailor?--there I only learn
His chief concern is cloth, and he
Is always cutting his concern.

V.

A Seedsman?--I’d not have him so;
A Grocer’s plum might disappoint;
A Butcher?--no, not that--although
I hear “the times are out of joint!”

VI.

Too many of all trades there be,
Like Pedlars, each has such a pack;
A merchant selling coals?--we see
The buyer send to cellar back.

VII.

A Hardware dealer?--that might please,
But if his trade’s foundation leans
On spikes and nails, he won’t have ease
When he retires upon his means.

VIII.

A Soldier?--there he has not nerves;
A Sailor seldom lays up pelf:
A Baker?--no, a baker serves
His customer before himself.

IX.

Dresser of hair?--that’s not the sort;
A joiner jars with his desire--
A Churchman?--James is very short,
And cannot to a church aspire.

X.

A Lawyer?--that’s a hardish term!
A Publisher might give him ease,
If he could into Longman’s firm
Just plunge at once “in medias Rees.”

XI.

A shop for pot, and pan, and cup,
Such brittle Stock I can’t advise;
A Builder running houses up,
Their gains are stories--maybe lies!

XII.

A Coppersmith I can’t endure--
Nor petty Usher A, B, C-ing;
A Publican? no father, sure,
Would be the author of his being!

XIII.

A Paper-maker?--come he must
To rags before he sells a sheet--
A Miller?--all his toil is just
To make a meal--he does not eat.

XIV.

A Currier?--that by favour goes--
A Chandler gives me great misgiving--
An Undertaker?--one of those
That do not hope to get their living!

XV.

Three Golden Balls?--I like them not;
An Auctioneer I never did--
The victim of a slavish lot,
Obliged to do as he is bid!

XVI.

A Broker watching fall and rise
Of Stock?--I’d rather deal in stone,--
A Printer?--there his toils comprise
Another’s work beside his own.

XVII.

A Cooper?--neither I nor Jem
Have any taste or turn for that,--
A fish-retailer?--but with him,
One part of trade is always flat.

XVIII.

A Painter?--long he would not live,--
An Artist’s a precarious craft--
In trade Apothecaries give,
But very seldom take, a draught.

XIX.

A Glazier?--what if he should smash!
A Crispin he shall not be made--
A Grazier may be losing cash,
Although he drives a “roaring trade.”

XX.

Well, something must be done! to look
On all my little works around--
James is too big a boy, like book,
To leave upon the shelf unbound.