DANUBIAN HOMICIDE.
Hosts on the Danube's banks are felled
To please one man's ambitious whim;
And yet there is no inquest held,
No Hue-and-Cry raised after him.
His likeness, true, the shops expose;
His hair, his eyes, are in the News,
And every Constant Reader knows
How high he stands without his shoes.
But how he sleeps, of what partakes,
In food and drink, from day to day,
What casual remarks he makes,
The newspapers omit to say.
We know that he persists in lies
Of quite an inconsistent kind.
But not that any chaplain tries
To rectify his frame of mind.
For wholesale murder does not meet
The doom that waits the single crime,
The exaltation in the street,
The carrion-crows, or grave of lime.
The head with an Imperial crown
To deck its slant or flattened top,
Will never, Donovan, come down
Among its fellows in thy shop.
Where, in King William Street, the Strand,
Thy window shows to public view
The culprits of the red right hand,
Whom hemp and Mr. Calcraft slew.
Bishop and Williams, Burke and Hare,
Courvoisier—that fiend in plush—
At whom the people come to stare,
With Thurtell, Greenacre, and Rush.