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Punch and Judy. 
Nor can ye with your statutes’ musty store 
Seal up the fountains of man’s mirth for ever ; 
Somehow the buoyant spirits will rush o’er, 
Mocking the politician’s dull endeavour 
To bar their progress; nay, perchance the more 
In lands and times least happy :—then, oh, never 
Consult alone the noble’s over-niceness, 
The pleader’s phlegm, or puritan’s preciseness ! 
Besides—forgive th’ apparent contradiction, 
With most, I fear, thisshow of weighty sense, 
This search of abstract good, is but a fiction: 
If not hypocrisy, at least pretence : 
And if it be so, without dereliction 
Of truth and candour, we may gather hence, 
That the world’s sageness is one-half cajolery, 
And las a lurking love for fun and drollery. 
For, hide it as they may, the mass of men 
Shrink from the pain and trouble of deep thought ; 
Hug ignorance ;—or wish, nine out of ten, 
To know, without the plague of being taught :— 
The speculations of a serious pen, 
High principles on sound foundations wrought, 
These would they to the chariot-wheels of Folly tie, 
In heart by nature lovers of frivolity. 
They take grave theories as a medicine, 
Where kealth, and not the palate, is in question ; 
And gulp them with wry faces, I opine, 
To aid the-process of the mind’s digestion : 
But sportive pleasantries they sip like wine ; 
And love as Alexander loved Hepheestion, 
And men in general love the pert despiser 
Of wisdom—not the man who makes them wiser. 
Some intellectual rail-road they require, 
To slide to science without toil or stay ; 
And even should they find it, soon will tire 
Of such a journey by the easiest way. 
Yet seek they not, with ever-new desire, 
The giddy, the fantastical, the gay ? 
And therefore, though the truth be melancholy, 
I say again, the world’s a world of folly. 
The learned lady, who affects geology, 
Will read a novel, when no friend is nigh. 
As for myself, though bred in school and college, } 
Confess I found the Stagyrite too dry. 
E’en you, oh Senators, without apology, 
Rushed forth to see the new balloon pass by, 
Leaving the speaker—as a host their trenches,— 
Without a house, amid the empty benches. 
Oh then, ye grave and reverend scribes, beware, 
In this our age’s weakness and depravity, 
Of stiffsententious dulness. I declare,’ 
And though I now may laugh, ’tis not in suavity, 
But in the merriment of mere despair, 
Myself have suffered deeply from my gravity. 
Wisdom must have a spice of wit to flayour it, 
And.thus is Punch with me, with all, a favaurite, 
[Supr. 
