"THE VICTIM."

NOT by Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate,

(See Good Words, January 1, 1868).

I.

A plague upon the people fell,

A plague of writers high and low,

There were some wrote ill, and some wrote well,

And the Novel, the Novel was all the go;

But the people tired of what they admired,

And they said to the Editors one and all,

'We have had enough of sensation stuff,

So give us a change, be it great or small'—

And the Editors paled

As they heard the throng—

What would you have of us?

Poem or Song?

Were it the queerest,

Were it the dearest

Money can purchase,

We'll give you a Song.

II.

But still the plague spread far and wide,

Bad novels were written and bought and read,

In which handsome wives took their husbands' lives,

And maidens behaved as if they were wed:

So the people stormed and some of them swore,

'"Good Words" they butter no parsnips, no;

So give us a song, both sweet and strong,

Or you or your magazines may go—

To Jericho!'—

Or was it Hong Kong?

'Were it the queerest,

Were it the dearest,

We'll give them a song.'

III.

The Editors went through 'The Men of the Time,'

'Including the Women,' with eager look,

Through the men and women who dabble in rhyme,

Whose names are inscribed in that golden book.

'Oh! who shall we get to sing to "the Beast"?

To sing to the Beast a deathless song?'—

'Till they came to Tupper, the great High Priest—

Proverbially the worst of the throng.

And their hearts exulted

A moment or two:—

'His were the queerest,

But we've promised the dearest,

Tupper won't do!'

IV.

Again they looked for a bard divine.

'Here's one,' they exclaimed, 'should be preferred

A poet the half of whose name is Swine,

Is fittest to sing to the swinish herd.

But Swine and burn suggest in their turn

Ideas a little too gross and warm;

And a poet who writes of hermaphrodites

Is scarcely the man to weather the storm.

So Swineburne, too,

Won't do, won't do!

What's to be done

With the raging throng?

We can't have the queerest,

We'll pay for the dearest:

Give us a song!'

V.

The cry went forth o'er cities and towns;

It tickled the ears of the men who write;

It leaped from the land and over the downs,

And flew like wind through the Isle of Wight:

There Tennyson sat in his wide-awake hat,

Or smoked and strolled on his 'sponge-wet' grounds;

'I'll give them a song not over long—

I'll give them a song for two hundred pounds.'

How happy, how happy,

The Editors grew!

'Were it the merest

Trash, 'tis the dearest,

And therefore will do.'

VI.

The poet wrote the poem I quote,

'The Victim,' whose life the priests would destroy

But the Editor knows ere now, I suppose,

That he is the victim, and not the boy:

'Tis he must bleed for this rhythmic deed

And ever for more, as the public cry,

May Alfred the Great—the Laureate—

Shriek out 'the dearest, the dearest am I!'

And the public are happy,

And so they ought;

For to them doth belong,

If not the sincerest

Outburst of song

That ever was thought,

At least the dearest

That ever was bought.

January 27, 1868, "M."

Dublin Paper.

Tennyson's The Victim was curiously anticipated by The Prophet Enoch, a poem by James Burton Robertson (London, James Blackwood, 1860), in which the following passage occurs:—

"'One victim more!' a thousand voices cry;

'One victim more!' resounds the cave of gloom.

Lo! borne on lofty car, 'mid savage cries

Of a wild band, a costlier victim comes.

It is a lovely stripling, o'er whose cheek

Youth hath her earliest purple bloom suffused:

In rich luxuriant curls his locks descend,

Twined with the fatal flowers that sweetly mock

The victim they adorn. Wild with despair,

His shrieking mother grasps the iron wheel

Of the inexorable car: she spurns

The fierce rebukes, or menace of the throng,

To catch the last glimpse of her darling boy.

'Ah! spare my son; shed mine own blood instead:

My life may satisfy your vengeful gods!'"

Exclaims the hapless matron, but in vain.