A burly man was he—
"My lads," he said, "I'll give a toast,
And here's my toast d'ye see:
"John Barley-corn, the king of seeds!"
And round the glasses go,
"For that's a corn that ne'er impedes
The light fantastic toe!"
IF any reader has conscientiously borne with me even unto the end, he may be ready to exclaim—"But where are the 'Southerly Busters?' No allusion to them except in the title and frontispiece. It's been a dead calm all the way."
Gentlest of a proverbially gentle class, what you say is perfectly true; but I have excellent precedent for this inconsistency. No one, not even an evangelical parson, sticks to his text now-a-days; and the gentleman who objected to being told "in mournful numbers" that "things are not what they seem," was a self-deceiving visionary who wanted to close his eyes to what everyone else knows to be an established fact. An M.P.'s speech on free trade seldom alludes to the subject; the daring feats and marvellous situations depicted outside a circus are never seen inside; light literature, advertised as such, is proverbially heavy; ————'s "Vermin Destroyer" has rather a nutritious and invigorating effect on vermin than otherwise, according to my experience; Young's "Night Thoughts" were written in broad day-light; and few can have failed to remark the absence of pork and the presence of cat in a restaurant pork-sausage.
The author of the most confused piece of literary mechanism that ever was printed, calls it "Bradshaw's Guide."