Two Mock Epics/Tantum Religio

by Walter William Strickland

Tantum Religio;

or,
SIR BLASIUS.

A mock-heroic Epic in three Cantos, showing forth in choicest doggrel how and by what means Providence protecteth its chosen ministers of grace: and how the Christian dispensation, in beauty, depth and tenderness, immeasurably surpasseth Paganism, Atheism, Scepticism, Humanitarianism, and all other such damnable heresies and superstitions whatsoever.

CANTO I.

To Sondrio, some years ago
(’Twas ’88, if I mistake not),
A worthy pastor, Blasio
Yclept, of Calvinistic fibre
Intrepid, and of faith so too,
So tried and true no rack nor screw
Borrommean could dissolve such a knot,
Could they be now applied, as when
The valley’s patriot, Robustelli,
To fill with blood and brains his belly,
Made of the place a grim Macello;
Marched up the Robustellian Tibur
To take by rant, or storm, or bellow
That miniature of blood-stained Rome,
Marched from his Chiavennian home
With thunderbolts of close-writ parchment
Doctrinal, Popish skulls to enlarge meant;
His squibs determined to let off
Howe’er the beast of Rome might scoff.

⁠This famous town has a renown
Well worthy of a place in history,
Though little known to northern readers:
Forgot its struggles, feuds and leaders:
Now but the haunt of cattle breeders:
Of all its various worthies, I
Won’t here attempt to give a list, or re-
Capitulate its doughty deeds
(Its chronicle’s far too long-winded,
And such a pendant little needs;
Nor could I if I were so minded.)
Against the Austrian tyranny,
Or earlier, how it drove the Gri-
Gioni to their native valleys
When they made buccaneering sallies
For plunder and proselytizing,
The latter being a sort of sizing
To put upon the first, a sort of
Religious gloss: all that I thought of
In this concise parenthesis
Was to point out the place about
To be the theatre of this
New and veracious epopee
Was not unworthy to be chosen
(As every reader, if he goes on
To th’ end will, I feel sure, agree.)
For such a scope; and now, I hope,
The birthplace of Guicciardi and
Large-hearted Beccaria being formally
Presented to Italia’s warm ally,
Trinacria’s chillier twin, may stand
Comparison with Arva Pharphar,
Troy, Islington, Jerusalem,
With th’ Hiawathian Minnehaha
Or Milton’s other place—ahem!
Choose any other fit comparative,
For now I must set forth my narrative.

⁠Arrived (no easy task), he chartered
A room,—for though the town is squalid,
Scarce lighted by petroleum dips,
And with a cobbled pavement trips
The churl from market late returning,
Till his lop-sided goitre skips
Out of his baggy vest, his wallet’s
Much hungrier paunch and scantier earning
To make acquaintance with—Most solid
Is the true faith of its inhabitants
In masses, popes and heavenly hopes
And suchlike gear, so that like rabid ants
Dragging their eggs this way and that,
If you should squash their ant-hill flat,
Its starving female wens swarm altar-wards,
At holy Mary’s shrine to falter words
Of prayer, their neck balloons removed,
May be; prayers mixed with priest-approved
Promises of fat capon-boons,
Or in default of these cocoons
And such brave knick-knacks slid down planes
Of inclined deal, from th’ iron screen
Outside which Goitre writhes and strains
In pious ecstacy to where within
The virgin puppet, dressed in green,
Star-spangled—most appropriate mordaunt—
Smiles blandly on the rag-clad scene
To think her dupes can be so verdant.
For th’ apparatus so constructed is
That whatsoever there eructed is
Shot down into that Holy of Holies
Is irrecoverable, as coal is
Shot from the truck into the cellar,
Or stars that fall from regions stellar.
In vain the twice-repentant sinner
Repents her of her vanished dinner.
Empty she crawls in tears away,
Feeling her goitres sag and play
About a neck no hair’s breadth slenderer
(Her throbbing prayers have made it tenderer).
Curses and vows she breathes in vain,
Pence Petrine don’t return again;
Already, long ere set of sun,
The capon and the priest are one.
But to return: a cretin bartered
Her services for some small pay,—
But rendered punctual to the day,—
Her juicy brain being just enlightened
Enough to find her purse strings tightened
In this world better than the burden
Bound on her hump by priests, the guerdon
Of their post-mortem paradise
To equipoise by this world’s sighs,
And for her gross, material way
Of thinking, had well nigh been martyred
By others of the goitrous clay,
Indignant she should thus aspire
An inch above the common mire;
Else had th’ apostle of Geneva’s
Shrill creed, by Sondrio’s pure believers
Been doomed to boil his own tin kettle,
And thus, with all his fire and mettle,
Had little time to fan the schism
’Twixt oil and water, font and chrism.
I’ve said ’twas no light task, at first,
A house to find or room to preach in;
For who would house a soul accurst
Or hire out rooms for such to teach in?
’Twould draw down lightnings in the attic
To isolate the lank schismatic;
And by Christ’s blood no apostate fellow
Should e’er lap must in Sondrian cellar:
But when house-blessing day came round,
If such as he should chance be found
On the first floor, what priest were willing
To asperge walls fouled by such a villain;
Or Holy Church not fail to impound,
Outraged, the rent to the last shilling?
(For things like this occur, you know,
In priest-rid towns like Sondrio.)

⁠At last, a Judas soul, as dour
As his of Jewry, did consent—
Faithless to faith,—in evil hour,
To let a small apart-a-ment
In his own crumbling tenement
Unto the Calvinistic Vandal,
Indifferent to the public scandal.
(For twenty jingling piastres
A month he risked his lath and plaster’s
Damnation in the world eternal
To purgatorial flames infernal.)
His godless avarice was, I think,
Attributed by some to drink.
The fact is, ’twas not due to toddy
But the austere religious body,
To whom was due his own poor rent,
His savings being in masses spent.
Not long, they’d threatened to distrain;
For Churchmen waste not threats in vain,
But misery’s last mite extract
With the sleek gusto once they racked.
But well he knew the legal screw
Was in the fire, his fate was settled;
For Father Fuchs, the Capuchin,
Owed him a grudge, and that’s a sin
Past shrift; so, desperate and nettled,
He turned an ear to Blasio’s offer,
Defied the Pope and housed the scoffer.

⁠Great was the scandal: deputations
Poured to the house, with execrations
And protests ’gainst such desecrations
Of Sondrian rookeries, yet unsullied;
Fat priests wheezed vague vaticinations
Of famine, plague, dread expiations,
And bull necks Tully’s self out-tullied.
Others rushed up with book and candle
And boys, to exorcise the scandal.
From wine-tubs some denounce the outrage,
Others perambulate and spout rage;
Some quote Ezekiel, some the Pandects,
All thump their fists, till every hand aches;
Brief, every papist heart is full,
Like Phalaris roaring in his bull.

⁠But unappalled and undismayed
The bold Sir Blasius rose, arrayed
In majesty, and two small bands
That flapped below his stubbly chin
Like Capricorn’s two dewlaps thin,
And from the window his tirade
Roared forth, the Bible in his hands,
And orbs to ill-tiled roofs upraised,
And lips that burned and nose that blazed.
So moribund aquatic fowl
Raise piteous eyes from reed-bound lands
While levin smites and thunders growl,
And mangy sheep crowd cheek by jowl.

⁠I’m well aware that here should follow
That saintly Calvinist’s phillipic,
But recollect when papists holloa
Their logic method’s mostly hippic,
And what finds favor in the stable
Or ring, they bawl while they are able;
When lungs, as heads, are empty, whacks
Administer, or turn their backs.
On this occasion all the quarter
Was seething and bubbling like a water-
Spout, mud yolcano or tornado,
Just as it doubles up the dado
And irons out the cat and kittens
As flat as granny’s new silk mittens
The most intrepidest reporter
Had soon been doubled up as fans are
When hurricanes rage o’er Arkansa;
Squashed flat among those wine-tubs burly,
His shorthand deafened by the hurly.
In fact, they kicked up such a shindy,
That Blasio vanished from the windy.

⁠Vanished, not vanquished: lo! intrepid
Most strong in grace and just a gill
Of something taken through a quill,
He thunders down the stair decrepid,
Close followed by a stalwart Rheatian
Of six-foot-four and contours Grecian,
And eighteen summers:—as from Troy
Through flames Æneas bore his boy
And old Anchises; on his shoulders
Achates through the amazed beholders
Bore, unperturbed by all their hubbub,
Not infant Bacchus but a tub up:
And swinging round the mighty vat
Gave an involuntary scrubbing
To many an umber jowl and hat
That ne’er before had known a tubbing,
For where by two or three the Pope is
Adored, in general light nor soap is.
As on they stalked, unmoved, gigantic,
The mob at first lunged at them, frantic.
So furious dogs at flying trains
Till the swift wheels dash out their brains;
Then with a howl half-disconcerted
Recoiled—the well-plied vat staves hurt it,
Papist with Papist ’gan to jostle
And left a road for the Apostle
Of Calvin to disport his bony
Person along the street way stony:
Rawboned, he onward strode with grace
Behind, and reached the market place.

⁠Thus by the grace of gin and vat, sir,
Lo! Blasio master of the piazza:
Planted the tub evangelistic,
Sir Blasio-Cyclops-Calvinistic
High o’er the hoops upreared tremendous,
Ready to hell or heaven to send us,
And pouring forth, without palaver,
Doctrinal scoria, flames and lava,
Gape people, pavements, walls aghast
As Blasio’s rhetoric round is cast.
Blasting and withering in Saharas
Of eloquence popes, priests, tiaras,
Tats, scarlet, tinsel, mariolatries,
Indulgences, Antichrists, idolatries,
Popes, pope’s toes, tonsures, nuns, worm-eaten
Confessionals, with brass plates beaten
Fine and pierced large for whispered sins
To slip through easily from chins
In lace and powder, rouge and pins;
In fact, his lightnings fulminated
All the frayed, tawdry properties
Of Popery’s puppet-show theatrical;
Laid bare its shams, exposed its lies,
Its frauds to a palanca rated,
Proving how Jesuits’ and priests’ fat tricks all
Who, haltered ’neath its crumbling gable,
Munch mouldy oats in popery’s stable.
Far off, awhile, the folk in awe,
Spellbound at what they heard and saw,
Huddled together and, perplexed,
Scarce from far corners caught the text,
So loud the beat of gathering feet
From rearward trampling down the street
And shuffling forward till, at last,
No longer proof ’gainst these attacks
The foremost line of arms and backs
Gave way, and all, a torrent vast,
Like swirling rookeries in a storm
Eddying concentric round their elms,
The dusky market overwhelms,
As towards the centre drift and swarm
The motley hosts to form a crater
Round that erupting prêtre or prater.

⁠Silent awhile at first they listen,
Till slow, but surely, access gains
To water-logged, thick-witted brains,
Some inkling of the preacher’s meaning.
Then eyes began to gleam and glisten
And hands to twitch, that overweening
Blasphemous heretic to chastise:
Some toward the rushing Mallero cast eyes
Of longing, some for firewood hankered;
Some drowned their feelings in a tankard;
Those imprecate with words articulate,
These hiccough oaths, and all gesticulate;
And one, a lank, long-fingered fellow,
With hatchet face and cheek-bones yellow,
And eyes cerulean, somewhat haggard,
And rabbit-mouth and accents mellow,—
A sort of spider-monkey blackguard,—
Mounted a stall, and shrill and fast
Piped out a Popish counterblast
That drew the mob; for mild as were
His tones, they urged to vengeance hellish:
And Popery’s groundlings always hear
Of blood and fire with wondrous relish.

⁠“Brothers!” he cried, and o’er his head
Raised a long, skinny hand to heaven;
“Is memory of the past so dead,
And of the patriotic leaven
That once in Sondrio’s vales was given
To raise the theologic bread;
That none recal how Aryans bled
When Val Fontana’s streams ran red,
And Teglio’s patriots, in a ferment,
Shot down the Calvinistic vermint,
Trapped in its musty pews and chapels?
Oh! glorious cunning thus to trap hell’s
Worst fiends, then through the casements slaughter
With slugs and grape-shot—and no quarter?
To see the blood rush out like water
Down the broad flight of steps, a cascade
Most dear to Heaven; to hear them ask aid
Of God and Christ, with screams and tears
And cries and groans and widows’ prayers;
Then bounce against the well-barred door
In vain attempts to force their shambles,
Then plump down thud upon the floor,
While the full tides of bubbling gore,
Replenished at each volley, pour,
Lapping the lintels, or run low
After each surging overflow.
Now, panie-struck, some lank youth scrambles
Up to a lancet window, strains
His tow-pate through the rainbow panes
Whack! whack! a stalwart musket brains
That too precocious poppy head;
Its opiate seeds and milk juice scatters,
The hollow capsule cleaves and shatters,
Coating the walls a creamy red.
Or, if some prattling infant, crying,
Clung to your knees, its mother dying,
Shot through the womb, the babe to seize,
What joy! the dimpling legs to squeeze,
Then, grasping firmly by the heels,
And gloating o’er its piteous squeals,
To whirl it sling-like round your shoulders
And dash its brains out on the boulders!
What a hushed silence then succeeds
As the smashed corpselet throbs and bleeds,
A carrion man, a shattered nought,
Once palpitating life and thought.

⁠Oh! Sixteen-twenty! glorious flint-age!
Faith’s climacteric! human vintage!
Better than thine, O famed Grumello!
Of purpling vines and clusters mellow,
Now mantling o’er thy rock Tarpeian
And castles’ mouldering battlements,
Screening its lizard-haunted rents!
Then from thy crenelled fastness swung
The purpling heretic, from lung
Apostate tortured cries were rent
And through the blood-damp air were spent
Wind-wafted to the empyrean.
Then all thy splintered precipice
Ran crude with human sacrifice,
Thou eyrey of the faith! impaled
On spears, their little lives exhaled.
Above thy smooth rock-platform boys
Of tenderest age, and infants flung
From the sheer edge, in torments hung
Wedged into clefts, or bleeding clung
To splintered spires or round them coiled
Convulsive, or like broken toys
By their own childish fingers spoiled
In days of sunny infancy,
Lo! broken on the ground they lie
Beneath the glaring azure sky!
Is memory: of that glorious past
In Sondrian hearts so wholly quenched
That, dubious, now we stand aghast,
By yonder crackpate’s rhetoric drenched?
Where is the stern will nought requires
To spur it to heroic deeds,
The strong, just purpose of our sires
To crush, ere sown, sedition’s seeds?
O glorious butchery! the names
Of the great dead that fed thy flames
Scarce linger in the halls they reared,
Where once they rang beloved and feared.
In Besta’s home the rafter falls
And goitrous squalor throngs the halls,
And through the desecrated court
The Cretin wails his vanished thought.
In Tirano, no more thy name,
O Robustelli! heroes claim,
That once tremendous sped the flood
Of death to Adda running blood:
And shall we don the modern creed
Of dull indifference and greed
Where once, in hosts, the grey rats fell
And thousands thronged the gates to hell?
Nay! let Calabria’s sturdy faith,
Who burnt her heretics as late
As the proud year of fifty-eight,
Recal us to the stake and flame
And paint our recreant cheeks with shame.
On! brothers! on!” the haggard wraith
Bounced from his stall, “to the attack!
On! brothers! on! with fire and rack;
And damned be he that first holds back.”

⁠As thus he spake, the throng, entranced,
Deployed, and like a wall advanced,
Or bellying surf, all arm and leg,
Such as when o’er thy virgin scrub,
O Michigan or Winnipeg!
The proud red Indians whoop and dance,
Blood-thirstier than thy weazels, France!
And all converge upon the tub
To sweep it, with the man of grace
Upon it, off this planet’s face,
Or, if a star-were goal too far,
At least, from off the market-place.

⁠In Spagna’s happy lands, we know,
Some century or more ago,
A popish genius once contrived
A cage for heretics, derived
From his own vivid sense of hell.
It was a toy to fill with joy
The soul of every Jesuit shrived:
In brief, a small collapsing cell,
Whose iron walls, that formed a square,
Enclosed a space some ten feet wide,
The iron plates being so applied
They could at need be made recede,
And then the room they formed expanded;
As they approached the space grew spare
And could be made to disappear—
If circumstances should demand it.
Just in the middle of this cell
Was sunk an awful shaft or well,
To which the walls, contracting, swept
As onward, inch by inch, they crept
The wretch within ’em to the oubliette:
Death’s natural horror’s not sufficient
To punish folks, in faith deficient,
So Church, a natural proficient
In butchery, has not idly slept
But done her utmost to quintuple it.
(According to strict rules of grammar
The “it” refers to faith instead of
That final act we're all in dread of,
And Church made thrice more awful, d—n her.)
I trust the couplet thus amended
Conveys the meaning here intended.
Well, to return from this digression,
These iron walls I’ve laid such stress on
With frightful fiends were decorated,
Such as your Christian’s never sated
With fancying and depicting where
In keeping—say, his house of prayer.
This cell being destined for religious
Performance of a kind prodigious,
No pains, be sure; had been omitted
To decorate it as befitted:—
In fact, both in and out ’twas painted
With the worst fiends saints e’er invented;
Fiends with saw teeth and fish-hook tails,
Huge, gaping jaws and serpent’s scales,
Bat’s wings and claws, eyes goggling red,
Tridents, nets, flames and goblins dread,
Some small and vicious, others bigger,
All compounds of bat, goat and nigger.
In fact, religion here surpassed
Herself; as in a mirror glassed
And emptied out; for naught but hell
Can be religion’s parallel.
To use this aid to pious thought
A heretic must first be caught,
The cell, red-heated by a flue,
And then the saints had naught to do
But drop the heretic inside.
At first, from walls expanded wide,
The painted fiends glower at a distance,
And fan with fiery breath the wretch
Who crouches, powerless of resistance;
Then crank and lever groan and stretch,
And fiends and fiery walls rush nearer:
Just staggering on the brink of death,
With crackling brain and kindling breath,
He ravishes each reverend hearer
Who works, in turn, with pious fingering,
So sensitive that to a pin
It feels how much the wretch within
Can bear and not lose consciousness,
The torture-trap’s adjustments, lingering
With fond, sweet, child-like tenderness,
Upon the knobs and springs mechanic
On which depend those joys Titanic;
“He’s fainting! Curse! The springs reverse!”
Back fly the walls: with starting eyes
And lolling tongue, his agonies
Prolonged, the shrivelling victim trails
His blackening carcase from the pit,
His smouldering raiment gashed and split.
By the wild work of blistering nails;
Hark! what a world of piteous wails,
“Not husky, though. Oh! he can bear!,”
Once more the sickening furnace flails,
Fiends vomit fire and monsters glare.
“Joy! what a scream!” “He’s gone:” “No, slacken
The walls, and let them cool and blacken
An hour. He’ll bear another bout.”
Now one by one again flash out
The demons, inch by inch the sheet
Of flame contracts; his tabid feet
Stick viscid to the flesh-strewn stones;
Glued to the fiery walls that eat
Into his back and singe the bones
And bubbling muscles—ah! what moans
As slowly thrust on toward the brink—
He writhes upon the demon-claws.
“He’s almost in.” “There: now, a pause
That he may smell the sickening stink
That steams up from th’ obscene abyss.
Hark! still the sinews snap and hiss
In the dread heat, and still he groans.
But, curse the apostate! now how faintly,
The game’s up.” Swift the fingers saintly
A handle grasp. The walls clap tight.
“A splash!” “He’s quenched!” “Praise Heaven!” “Good night!”

⁠Not otherwise the wall of noses
And knees indignant scour the square,
Converging furibond to where,
Shorn of its eloquence and bare,
Nor longer resonant, reposes
The Calvinistic tub, for there
No Boanerges smites the air
With winged words, but like a hare
Skips nimbly o’er the wine-dark cobbles,
While slow behind the wine tub wobbles,
Swung by his young Bregallian giant,
Who stone by stone disputes defiant
Each inch of ground, and dares the van.
As swift, more swift, the holy man
Skims like a scopperel down the wind,
His broad bands fluttering far behind,
And black robes bellying unconfined.
Dodging and doubling left and right,
Excogitating rapid flight,
His twinkling feet, in swift retreat,
E’en thus had scarcely gained the street
Ere the gross mob the entrance blocked
And past the lamp-post surged and rocked.
Here Blasius, breathless, tripped and reeled,
A moment more his fate had sealed;
Had not, with more than human courage
And worthier Macedon than our age,
His peerless rearguard, young Achates,
Just saved the Anabaptist vates:
O’er the loud tumult sings the vat,
Three roundest of the foe lie flat.
The frighted crowds recoil a pace
Irresolute, a moment waver.
That moment’s grace, that ceded space,
Have turned the scales in Blasio’s favour.
Helvetia’s hero and her prophet
Are half-way down the street, and off it
Cut like two swallows kestrel-chivied.
Flap! through an arch obscure, and, livid
From throat to brow, each muscle straining,
Hurl themselves at the oaken graining
Of the huge cumbrous door, impassive
As faith to reason; cobwebbed, massive,
The scarp with grit, the hinge encumbered
With scaly rust, rebellious lumbered,
Dry, stiff and stark, through a small are
The panelled logs—then scraping grounded
Blocked by the shingle: nerves a-tingle,
Like caoutchouc balls the two saints bounded
Back through the gloom; then, blinded by their
Own sweat, with heads breast-high rebutted
’Gainst the derisive woodwork, either
To perish in the attempt or shut it.
At last it yielded, slow, resentful,
As if reluctant planks so orthodox
Should shield such reprobates, then went full
Tilt, crash! one valve ’gainst th’ other half,
And like a nine-pin one, a slaughtered ox
The other, Blasius and his acolyte
Dropped right and left: a moment vivid
Thro’ closing cleft a narrowing crack o’ light
Flashed the wild spectrum of the crowd,
With anger pale, with fury livid,
Whose tangled swarms of heads and arms
Shook menaces of vengeance, vowed
With imprecations deep and loud.
Then Blasius, scrambling to his feet,
With one broad lurch shut out the street,
Shot each thick bolt into its socket,
Fixed the doors, bars, and props to block it,
And clapped the huge key in his pocket.
Then, stair and landing barricaded,
The rescued pair, each in his chair
Dropped like a billet, breathless, jaded,
With scarce strength left to wipe his brow,
And, simpering, breathe the mystic “Ciaǹ!”

⁠We’ve had so much of thump and thunder
I deem ’twere an artistic blunder
Again minutely to depict
The mob’s wild rage as, foiled and tricked,
It bubbled, frothed and seethed below
Like boiling milk in overflow.
Not that its temperament was lactine—
But similes one can’t be exact in—
Nor were its rags or features pallid:
The froth and fume’s the part that’s valid,
As now it swirled, then, gathering, hurled
A flight of stones, the windows smashing.
Then, down the archway blindly dashing
In dark platoons, it flounced, bounced, hammered
Against the stubborn planks, and stammered
Vain imprecations as the portals
Respinged that surge of clamouring mortals.
So things unchanged awhile went on,
And then, when all the panes were gone,
The saints above put up the shutters,
And as they did so, blandly bowed
And smiled triumphant at the crowd
(Much as grimalkin in the cherry-
Tree safe ensconced at Trot makes merry).
To hear the stones rebound upon
The scalps below or line the gutters.
No wonder, hampered thus and gagged,
This flagstone conversation flagged,
And steadier than that rain of knocks
On craniums thick and orthodox,
Moved by some instinct deep and subtle
Flowing from soul to soul magnetic,
A hush, a silence sympathetic
Falls spell-like on th’ impassioned tumult.
Those battering in the gateway’s gloom halt:
The flights of stones from mid-street shatter
The panes no more, but idly patter,
Harmless, upon the kindred paving
From slackening fists, as o’er the lists
Lo! the same lanky leader waving
His spidery arms like flails, and craving,
In accents higher than Strasburg spire,
Like a bat raving so shrilly, shaving,
Brand, firewood, torch, to fill the porch,
Burn down the doors that very minute,
And fire the house with Blasio in it!
This bright suggestion without more question
Is hailed with readiest acquiescence,
And flying heels the fact reveals
As down the slums and ghauts they scuttle
To fetch combustibles and put all
In instant practice, and thus the fact is
After this sudden effervescence,
The street is left as bare and emptied
As was the soul the demons tempted,
When all the seven fiends took to horse
With seven as horsey, lewd, vicious, saucy,
Their seven lewd selves to reinforce,
Within its halls set up their stables,
And on smug virtue turn the tables.

 

CANTO II.

Bards of the Epic order high
The ways of Heaven to men would try
Like advocates to justify:
Know all of this world and the other,
Primed their defects, your doubts to smother,
And bring you back to faith again.
Mine being the mock heroic vein,
Hoisted few feet o’er pig and plain,
A humbler task affronts my pen
That cautious gropes from line to line
To prove divine as stars that shine
The works of men to one another.
And here a fine occasion offers
Itself, to show the sceptic scoffers
Who mock humanity’s weak sides
How subtly interest divides
The bands of hate; what vice exacts
Self-love or avarice counteracts;
How passions timely yield to reason’s
Mild influence or the change of seasons;
How nature’s nail now this whim stopping,
Now that, keeps all the cat-gut hopping,
Expectant lifted high, now sinking
Despairing, swearing, hoodwinking, drinking,
Protesting, resting, declaiming, blaming,
Now cutting short its own existence,
Its neighbour’s now, with the assistance
Of slugs and seconds, swords and scandals;
How past and present turn the handles
Of Time’s harmonious organetta,
Prelude to eternity’s bright operetta;
Brief, how all’s ordered for the best,
And heaven this world’s hid palimpsest.
But hold, rash pen, that hast invaded,
By too prolific fancy aided,
Epic’s untrod and sacred province!
Have I not shewn me lavish of hints
Thou art no goose-quill, nibbling mine,
To soar, Lord bless us! high o’er Parnassus?
No province thine sublime, divine,
Thy sphere’s provincial, wretched quillet
Of wingless brass; then sink—and fill it!
Off with thee, to the land of Yankees,
Lynching and long-bows, Mood’ and Sankies;
All civilisation’s latest hits
From Barnum to free petticoats;
Where perfect freedom naught permits
To pantaloons and hats with votes
But blindly to adore the cow
As moonbeams slant from brow to brow;
For from that happy land of Cocaigne
Where lords and land-leaguers go flocking,
One strand of that intricate cable
Cause and effect we call, when able
To trace them, and mistake for links
Ina long chain that has no ending;
Though, to a mind that sees and thinks,
A boundless net, through all things wending,
Were amore apt similitude;
Our narrow, lancet minds perceiving
One file of meshes, and believing
That to be all, as eyes conclude,
Because so moulded by our sight,
In rays and pencils springs the light
That rolls through all things infinite,—
One strand, I say, of causes and
Effects was twisted in the land
Of Yankee, which I place my trust on
To save Sir Blasius from combustion.
If other strands contributed,
Forth in due order shall be set.

⁠First, then, a President, profound
In states-craft, and but newly chosen,
Had placed protection dues all round,
Machinery, victuals, crockery, clothes, on:
Whereby, you’ll see without much trouble,
The price of all things rose to double;
And labour hugged its chain’ contented,
Wages being also cent-per-cented;
At least, it should have, but th’ unlettered,
Always a thankless sort of sinners,
Now paying doubly for their dinners,
Refused to find their status bettered:
As though the paying more were not
Itself the pleasure to be sought
By civilised and liberal nations,
Not the mere bulk of beer and rations,—
A gross detail of second-rate
Importance m a perfect state.
Howe’er this be, if nerve and muscle
Could hold their heads up in the tussle
And live content with what they got so,
With many a one, alas! ’twas not so.
The feebler, sacked and shewn the door,
Were twice more wretched than before.
Now, of these most unlucky devils
Who sank to subter-social levels,
The bulk were of that gifted race
Which always takes the highest place
As its of right; then, unaccountably,
While drudging Scots and Teutons mount ably,
Display through depths of brawl and drinking
Their mastery in the art of sinking:
In fact,—a fact that really sad is,—
These geniuses were mostly Paddies,
And, to the honour of their nation,
All of the Catholic persuasion.
Thus if, by chance, they got a job, all
Their money went to swell the obol:
They did not hoard it up or save it,
But generous Pat to Peter gave it;
And Peter spent it, part in Rome’s
High jinks, snug dinners, shows, at homes,
Part in promoting village wakes
And trips to shrines, where pious rakes
Combined hard drinking with devotions,
And brought home complicated notions
Of heaven and hell together muddled,
And oft a pate in cere-cloths huddled,
As though by toothache bulged; for daggers
Ne’er lag where Superstition swaggers.
But, surrogate with kindly play
The village doctor’s scanty pay.
You gaze aghast the well-known faces
A field of turnips now replaces,
Wagging at doors, a spectral crop,
Or, circling round the village shop
With nips of “grappa” to compose
Its doddering limbs and purpling nose.
But of Pat’s hard-won earnings far the
Most bulky part went off in rather
A curious way—in squibs and crackers,
Rockets and Roman candles, whackers!
And Catherine wheels or showery spangles,
Mortars, cascades of fiery tangles,
Phosphoric snakes of wavering fire,
Balloons that rose and, bursting higher,
Peopled the nights with dazzling flights
Of radiant stars and Iris lights;
Set pieces,—frameworks, overloaded
With every sort of squib, exploded
In one vast, roaring broadside, just as,
Thus welcomed by devotion’s busters
The host or lowly Nazarene—
A wooden effigy, bedecked
With star-flecked robes of blue and green,
Striped red, the climax of the scene
Swept, staggering o’er the crowd, erect
On four well-padded cruppers sturdy,
Preceded by a hurdy-gurdy
Grinding out waltzes from Waldteufel.
Next came the village band, a trifle
In drink, and a superb costume,
But struggling bravely—boum! boum! boum!
With Sullivan’s Mikado blended
With reminiscences of Verdi.
More in the middle tramp in sight
A file of priests in blue and white-
Lace tippets and red skull-caps tight,
Decanting forth from lungs stentorian
A chant, half-Afric, half-Gregorian,
By a long line of choir-boys followed
In crimson cassocks and white collared
Who, with shrill trebles, intertwined
A tarantella, while behind
The street boys crossed themselves and hollo’d
In different keys, and every angle
Rang with applause and crowned the jangle—
A mode of doing one’s devotions
Not consonant with northern notions;
Most efficacious, though, to tether
The flock of Church in southern weather
And keep its rambling sheep together:
But like all true religion, costly:
Whence it befel, religion’s coffers
(To the delight of Atheist scoffers)
Grew lean and empty, and were mostly
Now tenanted by shekels ghostly
Instead of those of parts more sensible
For pious needs, propagating creeds,
And filling friars quite indispensable.
This state anæmic—they would here
Denominate it Carestia—
Was partly due to Pat’s profusion
Ere the new tariff-law’s diffusion
To his finances brought confusion,
And dragged him down with empty pockets
To misery and a four-cent. lodging:
Pat, Romeward every dollar sending,
Fanned with his faith the rage for spending,
Till heaven was fairly stormed by rockets,
And cherubs spent their time in dodging
The missiles shot from earth to show
The heavenly road to clods below.
In part the crash of Rome’s finances—
Rather its general undoing—
Was due to Popish ways of viewing
Expenses and the law of chances.
“If what we spend,” ’twas urged, “enhances
The obol’s flow from rustic purses
To more than cost of stimulus
The future gain tis clear reverses
Our present loss: or put it thus,
If every squib we let off fill
The gaping peasant with a zeal
That yields us twice the squib’s net price,
We save, if we are not mistaken,
Both the churl’s soul and our own bacon.
His faith flares up to heaven a tow-ball,
Our gains roll downward like a snowball,
At every revolution doubling,
And win both worlds without more troubling.
Such outlays for the Church’s glory
Place, then, in special category:
Like new wine on the cellar shelves
Because they more than pay themselves.”
Delightful system surely this is!
Perpetual fireworks for the sheep,
And for the shepherds endless fleeces,
Rolling themselves up heap on heap,
Perfect in theory, alack! ’tis
Not quite so workable in practice
Nor for poor grovelling human clay meant,
For when the husbandmen ran dry,
With not a sou fresh seed to buy,
In pawn the pig and winter’s raiment,
Their faith dried too, and they stopped payment.
Fobs empty may by faith be tempted
But not the fobs that faith has emptied.
And lastly to the aforesaid causes
Which emptied Popery’s money vases:
To wit, the lavish waste engendered
By Pat’s too liberally tendered
Reserves, when trade and toil were flourishing
And Rome’s ingenuous mode of nourishing
Her sweating bags on poor men’s earnings
From fustian hose enticed by burnings
Of Bengal lights—no more, alas!
Of Lutheran lime and Arian gas,
But still with powder, bang and blaze,
A pale reflex of other days:
A third and last was now appended
Which with the other twain contended
In cutting short the firework mission
And bringing Popery to derision:
Most fatal third, the rise of prices
Out west, had brought things to a crisis
By pumping dry th’ Hibernian sluice
That once was like the widow’s cruse
(The good old soul lived near Mount Carmel)
A never-failing source of palm-oil!
Not that the sudden running dry
Of Patrick’s well can be ascri-
bed, if truth be told, quite altogether
To the tariff—two other forces
Were acting with it,—one, the sources
Themselves to choke and one to ti-
ce, those healing waters otherwhither.
Rome’s harpies teach, though, to be sure,
Themselves—but that’s a sine cure—
Rifle the pockets of the poor
Without compunction, of the sever
Most deadly sins which forfeit heaven:
The worst of all is to defraud
The poor man of his toil’s reward,
“His labours’ fruits” the Church’s phrase is
(The penalty’s the usual blazes)
Which, perhaps, but means, with due reserves,
Hands off! don’t poach on our preserves!
Howe’er this be, the Irish cranium
Whose logic method’s somewhat flighty,
Translated thus the dictum weighty:
“If landlords raise your rent a mite, ye
Must pay th’ excess in lead or brain ’em.”
A simple truth—so very simple—
Like all great truths of true religion:
Lords and caretakers are all widgeon
Created for your shot to dimple—
That’s their sole end of being, to act as
The target of the meek and holy.
Then take your rifles and go practice,
Ye disinherited and lowly!
That it took root and quite invaded
That neural rudiment or plexus
Th’ Iberian brain and-slums pervaded
From Colorado’s swamps to Texas,
But such a gospel truth exacting
Much shot and powder guns and training
’Gainst its own preachers now. reacting
Drained off the dimes once Romeward raining.
Into the depths of Land-league pockets,
Who the same give and take game playing
With shot and daggers that with rockets
The firework preachers found so paying,
Took all the wind out of the lateen-
Rigged sails, and left the sharks who sat in
The Petrine Skiff, becalmed and hollow,
Upon the weltering brine to wallow,
A Nemesis not quite unmerited
For eating up the disinherited
Rome thus was left to fawn and wheedle
Cut-throat sedition—now her rival
With cringing promises to shrive all
The bloodiest knives for just a little
Of the blood-money, just a trifle,
She even hinted at conniving
Besides the mere official shriving:
A great come-down for men of soul,
Who held the knife to hold the bowl.
Still not a wholly uncongenial
Position, if a trifle menial
For the descendants of the chosen
Who fried apostates in their hosen:
Indeed peat hovels in a blaze
With roasting caretakers inside ’em,
And carded pigs a-squeal beside ’em,
With other tender patriot ways,
Sweetly though sadly (see Moore’s lays)
Recalled the light of other days,
And reconciled red hats and capes
To being red ruin’s Jack-a-napes.
But e’en this servile dagger licking
To catch the drops that from them trickled
Could not with here and there a picking
Fillup the gap they scarcely tickled.
It was not moonlighting that solely
Drew tight the purse-strings of the lowly
To Rome’s imperious needs. Th’ Iberian
Is not averse to fob or fibbing
Himself, but proves a deuced leary ’un
To any who’d his wiles be cribbing.
Nothing so much provokes high-flying
As the being duped by others’ lying.
But halt! that last word’s out of place:
In dealing with such ticklish matter
As revelation is and grace,
Bards should be careful how they chatter,
If they must risk it, taste bids hedge and
For certain words put “myth” or “legend.”
The bagmen, then, of Rome’s bottega
⁠Who tooted the Hibernian shanty,
Finding a clientèla eager
⁠To swallow bait, however scanty,
Formed it a myth, the wily dupers;—
In fact, they “legended” like troopers
Of how their holy father lay
⁠A prisoner in the Vatican,
And scarcely saw the light of day
⁠Within his dungeon’s narrow span;
Of how he slept upon a pallet
Of mouldy straw, and had no valet.
And how, in spite of this, he prayed
⁠For those vile tyrants who afflicted him,
When, for their wickedness, instead,
⁠He might have banned and interdicted ’em;
A course which would have had for certain
Such dire results I drop the curtain.
Now if some reader with a temper
⁠Not formed for treating questions moral
Protest, I merely note, “Sic semper
⁠Erat, sic est, sic erit,”—quarrel
With fact: ’tis vain; religion’s cradle
Has always been a legend-ladle.
Why were these modern “legend” spinners
⁠Worse than the venerable cocoons
Spun by the more primeval sinners,
⁠And held inestimable boons
By those who go to church and masses?
What! silent all? Respond, ye asses!
They did but use the method ages,
⁠So-called of faith, had found so useful.
To put it thus, the herb called sage is
⁠Never amiss to stuff your goose full.
They but repristinated chimes
First sung in far far earlier times;
But in these days when nothing’s sacred
⁠To press and Argus-eyed reporters,
And pious frauds are dipped in acrid
⁠Reagents and corrosive waters
To extract the gold of truth—if any,
And coin it, faith fades from the many.
And to attempt to re-instate it
⁠By setting those old bells a chiming,
In other words reintegrate it
⁠By miracles or legend rhyming
With doubt and instantaneous lenses
At every angle fairly frenzies.
In this case ’twas a penny paper’s
⁠Gross indiscretion broke the spell
And showed the theologic capers
⁠Of fiction round the fabled well:
’Twas a mere oversight, the Arrow
Being ultramontane to the marrow.
But quite forgetful of the mythus,
⁠To magnify the power of Rome,
It issued various chromo lithos
⁠Showing his Holiness at home
In such pomp, pageantry and splendour
As lithographs alone can render.
There was his park so vast and stately,
⁠With immemorial trees embellished,
A gilded litter, where sedately
⁠He lounged and Nature’s beauties relished,
And to escort him to his palace
Troops of retainers, pages, valets.
As many more their lord awaited
⁠Upon the dazzling marble scala,
And bowing lowly reinstated
⁠His godhead in his dining sala,
And brought an ewer of alabaster
To wash the fingers of their master.
He dined off plates of solid gold,
⁠Quaffed choicest wines from cups of amber,
And when the silver doors unfold,
⁠Lo! to escort him to his chamber,
Are other pages, other valets,
With crystal lamps and opal chalice,
And in the chamber ’tis no shock
⁠Of moulded straw on which he tosses,
But whitest fleeces of the flock
⁠And snowiest lawn and silken flosses
Fine as the diadem the spider
Of autumn weaves, and quilts of eider.
Such grave discrepancies, no wonder
⁠Pat’s dark, suspicious nature puzzled.
It brooded o’er his brows in thunder
⁠To think perhaps he had been chuzzled,
And every day brought fresh conviction
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,
⁠A rapid gathering of the fathers
Conscripti, to discourse of prices
⁠And victualling, perhaps sans scrip-ti rather’s
The fitter term for whom devices
⁠For floating loans and filling larders,
Adjusting deities’ and digestions’
Claims and the like are now the questions
Sans scrip or scrap to pay the bakers’
⁠And butchers’ monthly tendered bills;
Th’ apothecary medicine-makers’
⁠If e’er his Holiness took pills;
Those heavier ones to undertakers
⁠When Cardinals, from this world’s ills,
And debts unpaid, in hats and pink hose,
Float up to heaven’s gate like flamingoes.
Some would accept the project Pat Egan,
⁠The New York stock jobber, suggested:—
To form a company: “The Vatican
⁠And Pope Co., Limited.” If blessed, it
Should tap the faithful. “I’ll do what I can,’
⁠He cried, “and when their gold’s invested,
Make me sole Trustee and I’ll chance it,
For Church and faith’s sake and finance it.”
Some who were disinclined to swallow
⁠The baits of dividends and bonuses
Would purge the Petrine ark, now hollow,
⁠By throwing overboard the Jonases.
Their personal foes, and some the Apollo
⁠Would sacrifice to these new onuses,
And smuggle into France the Parian
Chef-d’œuvre world-famed as Belviderian.
At last it was agreed to clear up
⁠The situation by electing
A board: to reckon each arrear up,
⁠And then a pilot sure selecting
The cranky craft of Church to steer up
⁠The straits it foundered in;—reflecting,
They chose Monsignor Card’nal Foca,
Notorious for his luck at poker,
With full authority to transact
⁠The operations he deemed needful.
Fail—and he would be disfrocked and sacked,
⁠With other penalties as dreadful:
Succeed—the means would not be ransacked
⁠By eyes too critical and heedful:
Such was the compact subter velum.
Væ vietis! vincitori cælum.
I cannot here pursue this prelate
⁠Through all the tortuous ways his gambles
Constrained the obol through to swell it;
⁠His borsine victories, losses, scrambles;
How by express shot like a pellet
⁠To Paris:—now its Bourse he rambles;
Now sea-sick braves it o’er the Channel,
His sea-green face wrapped up in flannel;
How from each Bourse he thrusts his nose in
⁠He draws it out a palm the longer,
Because he sells when markets closing
⁠Are weak, and buys when they are stronger:
How slily smiles, a claw reposing
⁠On parrot beak each Jewish sponger
When Monsignore Poker-Foca
Is sold up by his private broker.
All that concerns me here to mention’s
⁠The net result, which filled the tills
In Peter’s store with-good: intentions
⁠In shape of promissory bills:
And I.O,U.’s—the accursed. inventions
⁠Of Jewdom’s hell,—and little-else:
The loaves were gone; gone, too, the fishes,
But left their: scales upon the meshes.
And Popery, gathering up the broken
⁠And addling eggs that should be chickens
Into her bosom, pores, some token
⁠Of life to find,-but nothing quickens
Save the grey mould that flings a cloak on
⁠The festering yolk that rots and sickens
All hope’s expansiveness in gloom;
Of withering nights and gathering doom.

 

CANTO III.

Thus then the Papal deficit.
In strongly marked relief is set
By these last lines: not less the factors,
Among the scattered simian actors
In Europe and the busy sphere o’
The western world, that summed, divided,
Squared and the like, in th’ end provided
A revenue of minus zero
For Popery’s pontifex and clero.
And wrinkled fingers now unclasped
The huge worm-eaten cash-box hasped,
And bound with iron rough and rusty,
And raised the lid and trembling grasped
The mouldering rim, and gazed aghast,
With breaking eyes ensphered, and sighs,
Into that vacuous cavern vast
That yawned beneath them like the last
Dark home of all, as dead and dusty
With scurf and mould and all things musty
Impregnated, it seemed to kill
The very breath of life and will:
Then to their pens and desks they wandered
Unsteady, tried the nibs and pondered,
Or dashed off bulls to confraternities
Of whom they knew some secret scandal
With covert menace to disband all
The brotherhood; by all th’ eternities
Conjuring them to dub up handsome
Their spiritual sire to ransom:
One such, enough to make you rap your chins,
Had reached the leader of the Capuchins
In Sondrio, the aforesaid Fulks
Or Fuchs, and put him in the sulks,
The which encyclical has whirled us
Too once more ’mid brave Sondrio’s elders.

⁠The Capucini form a body,
Or corporation, dressed in shoddy
Of coarse brown colour, and a hood,
A girdle and a small calotta
Or skull cap: they’ve a bowl for food
The which they beg while doing good:
Complexion mostly terra cotta,
But sometimes ruddy, round and burnished,
In which case with a paunch they’re furnished
Rough as a chestnut’s trunk and bulky,
But generally they’re thin and sulky,
With wiry black beard—fino—fino—
Manzoni’s term is mingherlino.
In theory—and this is funny—
They must not ask or beg for coin:
But only bread, cheese, pork, sirloin,
Chestnuts, fat capons, fish, fruit, wine,
Chestnuts, fat capons, fish, fruit,Etcetera.
In practice if you offer bread
They curl their noses, and, instead,
With truculence demand your money,
Chestnuts, fat capons, fish, fruit,Etcetera.
The rule of being paid in kind
Amongst a people agricultural
Was not invented by the blind,
Witness the monuments of sculptural
Art in the convents and certosas
Where fatted these celestial boozers
For heaven’s last fair, mid altars rare
Ablaze with gold and costliest gems
Flaming from frosted diadems
And pyxes—miracles Fontana
And Benvenuto wrought to garner
The bread of life—and walls mosaic
Bade blossom into wonders laic
Imagination ne’er conceived,
With wreaths of agate interleaved
And flowers of lapis-lazuli,
Sprinkled with dewdrops casually
Of pearls and topazes and moonstones:
Here, roused by clarions’ and bassoons’ tones
To costliest viands, costliest vice,
Beyond the dreams of avarice,
They lived their earthly Paradise,
Fawned on by flattery and servility—
These Christian preachers of humility!
Their Buddhist bowls for humble doles
And scourge of knotted thongs upon vent,
Being—for the outside of the convent.

⁠Alas! in these lewd days of doubters
The inner walls are like the outers;
Stripped of their arras and intaglios,
The convents are no more seraglios,
And Fuchs by Papal spendthrifts dunned
Had scarce a kreutzer to refund:
No wonder, then, these “mingherlin” ants
Sell up, rack-rent and milk their tenants.
Sir Blasio’s landlord, we have seen,
⁠Was one of those they squeezed most tightly,
Else had his lodgings never been
⁠Let out to heretics so lightly;
And now, for harbouring two such tenants
He’s doubly dunned and pinched for penance.
Now if he’d happened to be in
⁠When that sage worthy ran to earth,
He, doubtless, had condoned his sin
⁠By casting the apostate forth.
’Tis always sweet to see a blazer rent,
Like Blazius, if he first prepays your rent.
Besides, he thus would curry favour
⁠With those harsh landlords of the cowl.
Then, when that lank, fanatic shaver
⁠Egged on the mob with voice and scowl.
“Burn down the house! Smoke out the stranger:”
There was his furniture in danger;
But thanks to Providence or fortune,
⁠He had been barred out with the crowd.
’Twas all in vain for him to importune
⁠With threat or curse, however loud;
The wily Chiavennian fox
Was deaf to all his shouts and knocks:
He should have been at home by rights,
⁠But—and that “but” was the salvation
Of the two Calvinists—his nights
⁠And noons, with others of his station,
Now oft were spent in drowning thought
Of debts and duns in Trani port.
This liquor was a god-send truly
⁠To those who groaned beneath the ferule
Of that ecclesiastic bully,
⁠Fuchs, of the Capuchins, and their rule.
A litre, costing six palancas,
Wiped clean from thought those rusty cankers.
Then Japhet, so the loon was christened,
⁠Astride a barrel would denounce ’em,
With flaming cheeks and eyes that glistened
⁠Down at the “Bœuce” and roar: “I counts ’em
No better nor a gang of fakes,
The linsey-woolsey undertakers!”
And much more to the same effect,
⁠The Trani wines being strong and heady;
Then, when indignant and erect
⁠He rose, protesting and unsteady,
It was a sight to see him peg off
Like a green cricket with one leg off.
It needed just that other strand of
⁠Coincidence—a vintage season
Unrivalled in the fabled land of
⁠Brigands and knives and popish treason
And Policastrian pirates coasting—
To save Sir Blasio from his roasting.
In fact, o’er far Calabria’s hovels,
⁠Where pigs and Christians share the bowl
And priests parade with coal-black shovels
On inch-thick skulls, and bless the whole;
Where blear-eyed brats o’er muck heaps clamber,
And sows lie farrowing in the chamber,
Had burst a perfect vinous deluge
⁠And turned the vats and casks to sluices,
In fact, in all the land no well huge
⁠Enough to hold the surplus juices
Was found, they rushed down oyer-brimming
Troughs—dykes—the very fields were swimming.
The folk there with that want of sense,
⁠Which is the note of priest-rid regions,
Had never had the providence
⁠To cooper casks for these occasions,
So that a vintage to excess in
These lands was more a curse than blessing.
The roads were bad, the means of transit
⁠Far worse, and buyers next to nil,
Folk could not all the autumn dance it
⁠And drink—the very pigs took ill:
Excess of good cheer turned to loathing
And then the wine went off for nothing.
And thus it happened that hard drinking
⁠Became the rage in northern valleys
Where heretofore cool sober thinking
⁠Had put a rein upon the chalice:
When two sous sees you half-seas over,
Philosophy bids reap your clover.
Thus many a half-fed, half-clad blackguard
⁠Would shut this sorry world’s dim woes out
And glorious home at even staggered
⁠With ill-botched boots in holes, and toes out,
As Japhet now, his hose unmended,
In spirals down the bare street wended,
But not so drunk as not to seize
⁠The salient points of the position:
His fellow townsmen, if they please,
⁠May suffocate the Calvin mission:
Be all Geneva purged with fire!
But not his household gods the pyre.
One way alone he saw to save ’em
⁠Blocked out among the common herd:—
To warn the Capuchins—and brave ’em—
⁠Dread thought!—a slender chance, he feared.
Yet who can tell which scale of fate
Prevail shall, avarice or hate?
So sobered now, with heel to shoulder,
⁠He clattered down the cobbly causeway
To where the Capucini moulder
⁠Behind their rusty bars where bore sway
Huge spinners slung on hammocks clothy
Of dusty felts and colours brothy,
And, happily, he found it open—
⁠That convent door with huge nails studded,
And ’mid the brothers, some with cope on,
⁠Some half unlaced, some girthed and hooded,
He rushed in, nose and eyeballs burning,
Priests, flagons, possets overturning,
And stammered out his fatal message.
⁠Ah! who but Arno’s primal poet
Could paint those brown saints’ rage—to presage
⁠The Calvin roast—and then forego it
’Twas maddening—to neglect the warning,
Some shrieked, popes, bulls, bills, ruin, scorning,
Some, rent twixt avarice and hatred,
⁠Slouched blubbering on the wine-splashed table,
With epileptic eyes and pate red
⁠While others swift unloosed the cable
That girthed their palpitating paunches:
Some sat bolt upright on their haunches
With stony eyes inanely staring:
⁠One roared out Psalms, a firebrand waving,
And one, his scanty tonsure tearing,
⁠Fell flat face downward on the paving,
While one drawled out, the bursar Florian,
Their butchers’ bills to tunes Gregorian.
But Fuchs, who knew, and knowing, grieved
⁠How thin the plank ’twixt them and ruin,
With one wild yell his soul relieved,
⁠And then such storms of frenzy flew in
That every monk’s hood-cowlèd ear rings
⁠And tonsures blaze like backwood clearings,
Each hair erect, as through them whistled,
Like slug or grape shot: “Hark! ye, dumb-heads,
Swift call the fire-brigade!” or bristled
⁠As “flay their mangy hides for drum-heads!”
He roared:—then down the staircase jumps
In flights, ejaculating: “Pumps:”
Now, “whirra! whirra! hammer! hammer!”
⁠Hose, engine, firemen headlong gallop,
Cleaving the mobs that chafe and clamour
⁠Like surfs behind a racing shalop.
Pouff! whizz! flies on the painted dragon,
Fuchs foremost brandishing a flagon.
Just, only just in time they reach it—
⁠The fated house, its portal glaring
With the red bonfires piled to breach it,
⁠Where on the ground like cherubs blaring
The faithful lie, their puffed cheeks beaming
Like gourds a-roast or pumpkins steaming.
And all along the façade, by the
⁠Ground-storey window bars deflected,
From juniper and larch branch fly the
⁠Bright swarm of sparks, in spires ejected:
And men, with Alpine rhododendron
Flaring like tow, from end to end run.
Close packed behind, like fields in fallow,
⁠The dense mob heaves in breathless rapture,
When pizz! whizz! splash from bald pate sallow
⁠Off flies a hat, the hat to capture
The owner with scant back hair dripping
Among the crowd goes dipping, dipping.
And now another splash, bang, fizzle,
⁠Two water rockets cannonading
Bear off two wigs that spurt and frizzle
⁠Screwed fast upon the palisading
That fronts the house, some inches higher
Than the long flickering tongues of fire.
And faster now those watery rockets
⁠Go spluttering all among the masses,
Now sousing heads, now emptying pockets,
⁠Till all begin to bray like asses
And then stampede diramifying
As rays through clouds when suns are dying.
This simile, I hold’s, Miltonic,
⁠And greatly dignifies the matter,
Being both appropriate and euphonic,
⁠Clouds are but firemen, suns to spatter,
And ’tis a rule to shun the bathos
By likening limpets to Mount Athos.
Howe’er this be, the crowd stampeded
⁠With better halves at home to shelter,
Such and what household words succeeded
⁠This unheroic helter-skelter
For fustians spoiled:—’twere as irrelevant
To introduce here as an elephant.
Now fizzles out the last faint sparkle
⁠From the drenched logs and firewood humid
And glimmering twilight ’gins to darkle
⁠And lampless streets, in mire and gloom hid,
The fire is spent: the saints are dozing
Indoors, below the day is closing.
Far down the mist-dank roadway dwindle
⁠Hose, firemen, engine, Fuchs and flagon,
And lurid clouds to westward kindle,
⁠Or ashen grey, moor, scar and crag on,
Pale in the low moon’s shuddering beam,
Like the wan spectres of a dream.
So Blasius won the day, at least, he
⁠Appeared to win, but soon his outlines
And his Achates, too, grow misty
⁠Far down stream, and the night of doubt lines
The hollow vale, and hangs its pall
O’er mountain shrine, o’er echoing hall,
O’er whited kirk, o’er fretted altar,
⁠O’er chanted rhymes, o’er periods rounded,
O’er creeds that fail, o’er faiths that falter,
⁠All mouldering, in one white ring bounded,
Dim as the shadowy streams that pen
The pale, wan ghosts that once were men;
But Fuchs much fame and praise acquired
⁠For charity and magnanimity.
True, had he dared, he would have fired
⁠With his own hands the Calvin dimity:
History, though, must not note intentions,
Or fame were scarce as well-earned pensions.
And this same late-won reputation
⁠Of charity towards foes heretical
He used, with persons high in station,
⁠To get sealed up with seals hermetical
That fount of eloquence artesian
Had soused them with its periods Rhetian.
Next, to expunge it from their walls,
⁠With mayor and judge he interceded:
Surely the Chiavennian Pauls
⁠Their Blasio’s ministration needed;
Thus came, one day, to Blasio’s wicket
⁠Some strong hints and a railway ticket;
And, sick at last of screeching dogma
⁠To empty walls, he took the first
And last, and left the Sondrian quagmire,
⁠First shaking off its mire accurst;
And therewith learned two truths at least,—
⁠That deep of ignorance is the thirst;
And that, while earth spins west to east,
Rome remains Rome, and priest a priest.