104
The straw and truckle bed were fiction.
Rome’s priests indeed vowed vows inflated,
Three straws were mixed up with the swans’-down,
But legends won’t be reinstated
By quibblings such as these when once down.
In vain: the myth to mockery yielded
Two years since when truth first revealed it.
And with it those perennial fountains
Of credulous and verdant coppers
That nourished once the sacred mountains
Of seven-fold Rome, like meal from hoppers,
By some malignant sorcery banished
Now sank into the ground and vanished.
From all these causes acting slowly,
But surely with convergent forces
It came to pass one day the Holy-
Father awoke without resources.
The plough of faith that once the lowly
Had kibed so well, now stuck sans horses;
Its cash-boxes were vacuums void
As father Denza’s aneroid.
The only thing that had not dwindled
Was Rome’s imperious need of spending,
That, whether swindling or swindled,
From age to age ran on unending.
’Twas an insatiate fire that kindled
Faith’s noblest deeds, though sometimes blending,
It must be owned, in breasts seraphic,
A taste for haggling, greed, and traffic.
Now it convoked, to solve the crisis,
