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 Shaksperian readings daily,—
O! Miss Macaulay! Shakspeare at Hog's Nor-

ton!

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 Wagon go from the Ould Bäaley?"

ODE TO PERRY.

THE INVENTOR OF THE PATENT PERRYAN PEN.

"In this good work, Penn appears the greatest, usefullest of God's instruments. Firm and unbending when the exigency requires it-soft and yielding when rigid inflexibility is not a desideratum,-fluent and flowing, at need, for eloquent rapidityslow and retentive in cases of deliberation-never spluttering or by amplification going wide of the mark-never splitting, if it can be helped, with any one, but ready to wear itself out rather in their service-all things as it were with all men,-ready to embrace the hand of Jew, Christian, or Mahometan,-heavy with the German, light with the Italian, oblique with the English, upright with the Roman, backward in coming forward with the Hebrew,-in short, for flexibility, amiability, constitutional durability, general ability, and universal utility, it would be hard to find a parallel to the great Penn."

PERRY'S CHARACTERISTICS OF A SETTLER.

I.

O! PATENT, Pen-inventing Perryan Perry!
Friend of the Goose and Gander,

That now unplucked of their quill-feathers wander,
Cackling, and gabbling, dabbling, making merry,
About the happy Fen,

Untroubled for one penny worth of pen,

For which they chant thy praise all Britain through, From Goose-Green unto Gander-Cleugh !—

II.

Friend to all Author-kindWhether of Poet or of Proser,—

Thou art composer unto the composer

Of pens,-yea, patent vehicles for Mind

To carry

it on jaunts, or more extensive

Perrygrinations through the realms of Thought; Each plying from the Comic to the Pensive, An Omnibus of intellectual sort!

III.

Modern Improvements in their course we feel;
And while to iron-railroads heavy wares,

Dry goods, and human bodies, pay their fares,
Mind flies on steel,

To Penrith, Penrhyn, even to Penzance.
Nay, penetrates, perchance,

To Pennsylvania, or, without rash vaunts,
To where the Penguin haunts!

IV.

In times bygone, when each man cut his quill,
With little Perryan skill,

What horrid, awkward, bungling tools of trade
Appeared the writing implements home-made!
What Pens were sliced, hewed, hacked, and hag-
gled out,

Slit or unslit, with many a various snout,
Aquiline, Roman, crooked, square, and snubby,
Stumpy and stubby;

Some capable of ladye-billets neat,
Some only fit for Ledger-keeping Clerk,
And some to grub down Peter Stubbs his mark,
Or smudge through some illegible receipt ;
Others in florid caligraphic plans,

Equal to Ships, and wiggy Heads, and Swans !

V.

To try in any common inkstands, then,
With all their miscellaneous stocks,
To find a decent pen,

Was like a dip into a lucky box:

You drew, and got one very curly,
And split like endive in some hurly-burly;
The next, unslit, and square at end, a spade;
The third, incipient pop-gun, not yet made;
The fourth a broom; the fifth of no avail,
Turned upwards, like a rabbit's tail;
And last, not least, by way of a relief,
A stump that Master Richard, James, or John,
Had tried his candle-cookery upon,
Making "roast-beef!

VI.

Not so thy Perryan Pens!

True to their M's and N's,

They do not with a whizzing zigzag split,
Straddle, turn up their noses, sulk, and split,
Or drop large dots,
Huge fullstop blots,

Where even semicolons were unfit.

They will not frizzle up, or, broom-like, drudge In sable sludge

Nay, bought at proper "Patent Perryan" shops, They write good grammar, sense, and mind their

stops;

Compose both prose and verse, the sad or merryFor when the Editor, whose pains compile

The grown-up Annual, or the Juvenile, Vaunteth his articles, not women's, men's, But lays "by the most celebrated Pens," What means he but thy Patent Pens, my Perry?

VII.

Pleasant they are to feel!

So firm! so flexible! composed of steel
So finely tempered-fit for tenderest Miss
To give her passion breath,

Or Kings to sign the warrant stern of death—
But their supremest merit still is this,
Write with them all your days,
Tragedy, Comedy, all kinds of plays-
(No Dramatist should ever be without 'em)—
And, just conceive the bliss,—

There is so little of the goose about 'em,
One's safe from any hiss!

VIII.

Ah! who can paint that first great awful night,
Big with a blessing or a blight,

When the poor Dramatist, all fume and fret,

Fuss, fidget, fancy, fever, funking, fright,
Ferment, fault-fearing, faintness-more f's yet:
Flushed, frigid, flurried, flinching, fitful, flat,—
Add famished, fuddled, and fatigued, to that;
Funeral, fate-foreboding-sits in doubt,

Or rather doubt with hope, a wretched marriage,
To see his Play upon the stage come out;
No stage to him! it is Thalia's carriage,
And he is sitting on the spikes behind it,
Striving to look as if he didn't mind it!

IX.

Witness how Beazley vents upon his hat His nervousness, meanwhile his fate is dealt : He kneads, moulds, pummels it, and sits it flat, Squeezes and twists it up, until the felt That went a Beaver in, comes out a Rat! Miss Mitford had mis-givings, and in fright, Upon Rienzi's night,

Gnawed up one long kid glove, and all her bag, Quite to a rag.

Knowles has confessed he trembled as for life,

Afraid of his own

66

Wife ;

Poole told me that he felt a monstrous pail
Of water backing him, all down his spine,-
"The ice-brook's temper "-pleasant to the
chine!-

For fear that Simpson and his Co. should fail.
Did Lord Glengall not frame a mental prayer,
Wishing devoutly he was Lord knows-where?
Nay, did not Jerrold, in enormous drouth,
While doubtful of Nell Gwynne's eventful luck,
Squeeze out and suck

More oranges with his one fevered mouth,
Than Nelly had to hawk from North to South?
Yea, Buckstone, changing colour like a mullet,
Refused, on an occasion, once, twice, thrice,
From his best friend, an ice,

Lest it should hiss in his own red-hot gullet!