Where certain solemn sages of the nation
Were at that moment in deliberation
How to relieve the wide world of its chains,
Pluck despots down,
Whitee- as well as blackee-man-cipation.
Pug heard the speeches with great approbation,
And gazed with pride upon the Liberators;
To see mere coal-heavers
Such perfect Bolivars
Waiters of inns sublimed to innovators,
And slaters dignified as legislators-
Small publicans demanding (such their high sense
Of liberty) an universal license
And pattern-makers easing Freedom's clogs-
The whole thing seemed
So fine, he deemed
The smallest demagogues as great as Gogs!
Pug, with some curious notions in his noddle,
Walked out at last, and turned into the Strand,
To the left hand,
Conning some portion of the previous twaddle,
And striding with a step that seemed designed
To represent the mighty March of Mind,
Instead of that slow waddle
Of thought, to which our ancestors inclined-
No wonder, then, that he should quickly find
He stood in front of that intrusive pile,
Where Cross keeps many a kind
And free-born animal, in durance vile—
A thought that stirred up all the monkey-bile!
The window stood ajar—
It was not far,
Nor, like Parnassus, very hard to climb-
The hour was verging on the supper-time,
And many a growl was sent through many a bar.
Meanwhile Pug scrambled upward like a tar,
And soon crept in,
Of tuneless throats, that made the attics ring With all the harshest notes that they could bring; For like the Jews,
Wild beasts refuse
In midst of their captivity-to sing.
Lord! how it made him chafe,
Full of his new emancipating zeal,
To look around upon this brute-bastille,
And see the king of creatures in-a safe!
The desert's denizen in one small den,
Swallowing slavery's most bitter pills-
A bear in bars unbearable. And then
The fretful porcupine, with all its quills,
Imprisoned in a pen!
A tiger limited to four feet ten;
And, still worse lot,
A leopard to one spot,
An elephant enlarged,
But not discharged;
(It was before the elephant was shot;)
A doleful wanderow, that wandered not;
An ounce much disproportioned to his pound.
Pug's wrath waxed hot
To gaze upon these captive creatures round;
Whose claws-all scratching-gave him full assurance
They found their durance vile of vile endurance.
He went above-a solitary mounter
Up gloomy stairs--and saw a pensive group
Of hapless fowls—
Cranes, vultures, owls,
In fact, it was a sort of Poultry-Compter,
Where feathered prisoners were doomed to droop:
Here sat an eagle, forced to make a stoop,
Not from the skies, but his impending roof;
And there aloof,
A pining ostrich, moping in a coop;
With other samples of the bird creation,
All caged against their powers and their wills,
And cramped in such a space, the longest bills
Were plainly bills of least accommodation.
In truth, it was a very ugly scene
To fall to any liberator's share,
To see those winged fowls, that once had been
Free as the wind, no freer than fixed air.
His temper little mended,
Pug from this Bird-cage Walk at last descended
Unto the lion and the elephant,
To see all nature's Free List thus suspended,
And beasts deprived of what she had intended.
They could not even prey
A hardship always reckoned quite prodigious.
Thus he revolved-
To give them freedom, civil and religious.
That night, there were no country cousins, raw
From Wales to view the lion and his kin:
The keeper's eyes were fixed upon a saw;
The saw was fixed upon a bullock's shin:
Meanwhile with stealthy paw,
Pug hastened to withdraw
The bolt that kept the king of brutes within.
Now, monarch of the forest! thou shalt win
Precious enfranchisement-thy bolts are undone;
Thou art no longer a degraded creature,
But loose to roam with liberty and nature;
And free of all the jungles about London—
All Hampstead's healthy desert lies before thee!
Methinks I see thee bound from Cross's ark,
Full of the native instinct that comes o'er thee,
And turn a ranger
Of Hounslow Forest, and the Regent's Park-
Thin Rhodes's cows-the mail-coach steeds endanger-
And gobble parish watchmen after dark :-
Methinks I see thee, with the early lark,
Stealing to Merlin's cave-(thy cave)—Alas,
That such bright visions should not come to pass!
Alas for freedom, and for freedom's hero!
Alas, for liberty of life and limb!.
For Pug had only half unbolted Nero,
When Nero bolted him!
"TIS strange how like a very dunce,
Man with his bumps upon his sconce,
Has lived so long, and yet no knowledge he
Has had, till lately, of Phrenology—
A science that by simple dint of
Head-combing he should find a hint of,
When scratching o'er those little pole-hills,
The faculties throw up like mole-hills;-
A science that, in very spite
Of all his teeth, ne'er came to light,
For tho' he knew his skull had grinders,
Still there turned up no organ finders,
Still sages wrote, and ages fled,
And no man's head came in his head-
Not even the pate of Erra Pater,
Knew aught about its pia mater.
At last great Dr. Gall bestirs him-
I don't know but it might be Spurzheim-
Tho' native of a dull and slow land,
And makes partition of our Poll-land ;
At our Acquisitiveness guesses,
And all those necessary nesses
Indicative of human habits,
All burrowing in the head like rabbits.
Thus Veneration he made known,
Had got a lodging at the Crown:
And Music (see Deville's example)
A set of chambers in the Temple :
That Language taught the tongues close by,
And took in pupils thro' the eye,
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