"Avaunt, ye frights!" his Lordship cried, "Ye look most glum and whitely." "Ah, Lyndhurst dear!" the frights replied, "You've used us unpolitely. "And now, ungrateful man! to drive "Dead bodies from your door so, "Who quite corrupt enough, alive, "You've made by death still more so. "Oh, Ex-Chancellor, "Destructive Ex-Chancellor, "See thy work, "Thou second Burke, At a time too when snug posts and places Wherein lay pickled, in state sublime, 2 These verses were written in reference to the Bill brought in at this time, for the reform of Corporations, and the sweeping amendments proposed by Lord Lyndhurst and other Tory Peers, in order to obstruct the measure. To add to the ruin that round us ANTICIPATED MEETING OF THE By dooming all corporate bodies to fall, Till they leave at last no bodies at all Naught but the ghosts of by-gone glory, Wrecks of a world that once was Tory! Where pensive criers, like owls unblest, Robbed of their roosts, shall still hoot o'er them; Nor mayors shall know where to seek a nest, Till Gally Knight shall find one for them; Till mayors and kings, with none to rue 'em, Shall perish all in one common plague; And the sovereigns of Belfast and Tuam Must join their brother, Charles Dix, at Prague. Thus mused I, in my chair, alone, (As above described) till dozy grown, And nodding assent to my own opinions, I found myself borne to sleep's dominions, Where, lo! before my dreaming eyes, Whose living contents, to fancy's survey, Which was the head or which the queue. Here, Inglis, turned to a sans-culotte, There, ripe for riot, Recorder Shaw Screamed "à-bas ! " from the Tory benches; BRITISH ASSOCIATION IN THE YEAR 1836. 1836. Both tolerably human, in structure and features, And Peel and O'Connell, cheek by Except that the Episcopus seems, Lord jowl, Were dancing an Irish carmagnole. The Lord preserve us! if dreams come true, What is this hapless realm to do? deliver us! To 've been carnivorous as well as granivorous; 1 A term formed on the model of the Mastodon, etc. And Tomkins, on searching its stomach, found there Large lumps, such as no modern stomach could bear, Of a substance called Tithe, upon which, as 't is said, The whole Genus Clericum formerly fed; And which having lately himself decompounded, Just to see what 't was made of, he actu ally found it Composed of all possible cookable things That e'er tript upon trotters or soared upon wings All products of earth, both gramineous, herbaceous, Hordeaceous, fabaceous and eke farinaceous, All clubbing their quotas, to glut the œsophagus Of this ever greedy and grasping Tithophagus.1 "Admire," exclaimed Tomkins, "the kind dispensation "By Providence shed on this much-favored nation, "In sweeping so ravenous a race from the earth, "That might else have occasioned a general dearth — "And thus burying 'em, deep as even Joe Hume would sink 'em, "With the Ichthyosaurus and Paleorynchum, "And other queer ci-devant things, under ground "Not forgetting that fossilized youth,2 so renowned, "Who lived just to witness the Deluge was gratified "Much by the sight, and has since been found stratified!" This picturesque touch-quite in Tomkins's way Called forth from the savantes a general hurrah; 1 The zoological term for a tithe-eater. 2 The man found by Scheuchzer, and supposed by him to have witnessed the Deluge ("homo diluvii testis"), but who turned out, I am sorry to say, to be merely a great lizard. |