The Humourous Poetry of the English Language

298
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;"--