PAST AND PRESENT OBSTRUCTION.
Where now are the Parsons, with too high a hand
Who whilom were wont things to carry?
The sole Clergy known to the Law of the Land,
With charter to bury and marry,
Whose Pluralists lazily fattened, like swine;
Their rubicund joles bloomed like roses:
They were used so to soak themselves full of port-wine,
That it purpled their overgrown noses.
O where and O where are those proud Parsons gone?
O where and O where shall we find them,
With the waistcoat so full, and the shovel-hat on,
As our limners in their days designed them?
A sinecure mostly the cure of the souls
To which for attention not giving
They never feared being called over the coals,
They showed forth their fruits of good living.
To the Church they were stanch; they held on with a kind
Of a power like horseleeches' of suction,
Intolerant, bigoted, narrow, and blind,
They but lived to persist in obstruction.
They evermore voted for absolute rule,
For coercion, restraint, and repression,
And exclusion, by tests, from each College and School,
They opposed every kind of concession.
Those Parsons of old are no longer seen here;
Now no more do they hamper this nation.
They are all gone the way of Herr Breitmann his beer;
They have ceased to obstruct education.
The Church has grown broad, throwing open each door,
Which, the bigot except, each one enters,
And we now, in the place of the Parsons of yore,
Behold cross-grained and jealous Dissenters.