By the Younger Bowyer, written at St. John’s College, Cambridge,
November 29, 1719.
“Ne quicquam sapit, qui sibi ipsi non sapit.”
A goodly parson once there was,
To ’s maid would chatter Latin;
(For that he was, I think, an ass,
At least the rhyme comes pat in.)
One day the house to prayers were met,
With well united hearts;
Below, a goose was at the spit,
To feast their grosser parts.
The godly maid to prayers she came,
If truth the legends say,
To hear her master English lame,
Herself to sleep and pray.
The maid, to hear her worthy master,
Left all alone her kitchen;
Hence happened much a worse disaster
Than if she’d let the bitch in.
While each breast burns with pious flame,
All hearts with ardours beat,
The goose’s breast did much the same
With too malicious heat.
The parson smelt the odours rise;
To ’s belly thoughts gave loose,
And plainly seemed to sympathise
With his twice-murdered goose.
He knew full well self-preservation
Bids piety retire,
Just as the salus of a nation
Lays obligation higher.
He stopped, and thus held forth his Clerum,
While him the maid did stare at,
Hoc faciendum; sed alterum
Non negligendum erat.
Parce tuum Vatum sceleris damnare.
TULIP-TIME.
Writing of the death of a former Master of Magdalen College, “whose whole delight was horses, dogs, sporting, &c.,” which, says Cole, happened on the first of September, the legal day for partridge-shooting to begin, “it put me in mind of the late Dr. Walker, Vice-master of Trinity, a great florist (and founder of the Botanical Garden at Cambridge,) who, when told of a brother florist’s death, by shooting himself in the spring, immediately exclaimed, ‘Good God! is it possible? Now, at the beginning of tulip-time!’”
THE COLLEGE BELL.
When Dr. Barrett, Prebend of St. Paul’s, was a student at Peter-house, Cambridge, he happened to make one of a party of collegians, where it was proposed that each gentleman should toast his favourite belle; when it came to his turn, he facetiously gave “the college-bell!”