The stamp of fiscal avarice.
If brevity be, indeed, the soul of wit, how witless this laboured effort!
If our poet could but return and his poem were to do again, he would have to wrestle with very changed conditions, and would probably give us something like this:—
Noisy, th’ effluvious motor-car appears,
Throbbing and shaking like a jelly:
Smelling to Heaven in pestiferous clouds
Of ill-combusted petrol, blue and beastly.
Danger in its course of twenty miles
An hour, and in the rear a frightened horse
And battered trap. Wrecking the shops,