Verses and Translations | Page 9

eye detected
Senior Wranglers in them all.
By degrees my education
Grew, and I became as others;
Learned to court delirium tremens
By the aid of Bacon Brothers;
Bought me tiny boots of Mortlock,
And colossal prints of Roe;
And ignored the proposition
That both time and money go.
Learned to work the wary dogcart
Artfully through King's Parade;
Dress, and steer a boat, and sport
with
Amaryllis in the shade:
Struck, at Brown's, the dashing hazard;
Or (more curious sport than that)
Dropped, at Callaby's, the terrier

Down upon the prisoned rat.
I have stood serene on Fenner's
Ground, indifferent to blisters,
While the Buttress of the period
Bowled me his peculiar twisters:
Sung 'We won't go home till
morning';
Striven to part my backhair straight;
Drunk (not lavishly) of Miller's
Old dry wines at 78:-
When within my veins the blood ran,
And the curls were on my brow,
I did, oh ye undergraduates,
Much as ye are doing now.
Wherefore bless ye, O beloved ones:-
Now unto mine inn must I,
Your 'poor moralist,' {51a} betake me,
In my 'solitary fly.'
BEER.
In those old days which poets say were golden -
(Perhaps they laid the gilding on themselves:
And, if they did, I'm all
the more beholden
To those brown dwellers in my dusty shelves,
Who talk to me "in
language quaint and olden"
Of gods and demigods and fauns and elves,
Pans with his pipes, and
Bacchus with his leopards,
And staid young goddesses who flirt with
shepherds:)
In those old days, the Nymph called Etiquette

(Appalling thought to dwell on) was not born.
They had their May,
but no Mayfair as yet,
No fashions varying as the hues of morn.
Just as they pleased they
dressed and drank and ate,
Sang hymns to Ceres (their John Barleycorn)
And danced
unchaperoned, and laughed unchecked,
And were no doubt extremely
incorrect.
Yet do I think their theory was pleasant:
And oft, I own, my 'wayward fancy roams'
Back to those times, so
different from the present;
When no one smoked cigars, nor gave At-homes,
Nor smote a
billiard-ball, nor winged a pheasant,
Nor 'did' their hair by means of long-tailed combs,
Nor migrated to
Brighton once a-year,
Nor--most astonishing of all--drank Beer.
No, they did not drink Beer, "which brings me to"
(As Gilpin said) "the middle of my song."
Not that "the middle" is
precisely true,
Or else I should not tax your patience long:
If I had said 'beginning,'
it might do;
But I have a dislike to quoting wrong:
I was unlucky--sinned against,
not sinning -
When Cowper wrote down 'middle' for 'beginning.'
So to proceed. That abstinence from Malt
Has always struck me as extremely curious.
The Greek mind must
have had some vital fault,

That they should stick to liquors so injurious -
(Wine, water,
tempered p'raps with Attic salt) -
And not at once invent that mild, luxurious,
And artful beverage,
Beer. How the digestion
Got on without it, is a startling question.
Had they digestions? and an actual body
Such as dyspepsia might make attacks on?
Were they abstract
ideas--(like Tom Noddy
And Mr. Briggs)--or men, like Jones and Jackson?
Then Nectar--was
that beer, or whiskey-toddy?
Some say the Gaelic mixture, _I_ the Saxon:
I think a strict adherence
to the latter
Might make some Scots less pigheaded, and fatter.
Besides, Bon Gaultier definitely shews
That the real beverage for feasting gods on
Is a soft compound,
grateful to the nose
And also to the palate, known as 'Hodgson.'
I know a man--a tailor's
son--who rose
To be a peer: and this I would lay odds on,
(Though in his Memoirs it
may not appear,)
That that man owed his rise to copious Beer.
O Beer! O Hodgson, Guinness, Allsop, Bass!
Names that should be on every infant's tongue!
Shall days and
months and years and centuries pass,
And still your merits be unrecked, unsung?
Oh! I have gazed into my
foaming glass,
And wished that lyre could yet again be strung
Which once rang

prophet-like through Greece, and taught her Misguided sons that "the
best drink was water."
How would he now recant that wild opinion,
And sing--as would that I could sing--of you!
I was not born (alas!)
the "Muses' minion,"
I'm not poetical, not even blue:
And he (we know) but strives with
waxen pinion,
Whoe'er he is that entertains the view
Of emulating Pindar, and will
be
Sponsor at last to some now nameless sea.
Oh! when the green slopes of Arcadia burned
With all the lustre of the dying day,
And on Cithaeron's brow the
reaper turned,
(Humming, of course, in his delightful way,
How Lycidas was dead,
and how concerned
The Nymphs were when they saw his lifeless clay;
And how rock
told to rock the dreadful story
That poor young Lycidas was gone to
glory:)
What would that lone and labouring soul have given,
At that soft moment, for a pewter pot!
How had the mists that
dimmed his eye been riven,
And Lycidas and sorrow all forgot!
If his own grandmother had died
unshriven,
In two short seconds