VIOLINIST.
A PLASTER CAST.
Indicative of human habits,
All burrowing in the head like rabbits.
Thus Veneration, he made known,
Had got a lodging at the Crown:
And Music (see Deville’s example),
A set of chambers in the Temple:
That Language taught the tongues close by,
And took in pupils thro’ the eye,
Close by his neighbour Computation,
Who taught the eyebrows numeration.
The science thus—to speak in fit
Terms—having struggled from its nit,
Was seiz’d on by a swarm of Scotchmen,
Those scientifical hotch-potch men,
Who have at least a penny dip
And wallop in all doctorship,
Just as in making broth they smatter
By bobbing twenty things in water:
These men, I say, make quick appliance
And close, to phrenologic science;
For of all learned themes whatever,
That schools and colleges deliver,
There’s none they love so near the bodles,
As analyzing their own noddles;
Thus in a trice each northern blockhead
Had got his fingers in his shock head,
And of his bumps was babbling yet worse
Than poor Miss Capulet’s dry wet-nurse;
Till having been sufficient rangers
Of their own heads, they took to strangers’,
And found in Presbyterians’ polls
The things they hated in their souls;
For Presbyterians hear with passion
Of organs join’d with veneration.
No kind there was of human pumpkin,
But at its bumps it had a bumpkin;
Down to the very lowest gullion,
And oiliest scull of oily scullion.
No great man died but this they did do,
They begg’d his cranium of his widow;
No murderer died by law disaster,
But they took off his sconce in plaster;
For thereon they could show depending,
“The head and front of his offending,”
How that his philanthropic bump
Was master’d by a baser lump;
For every bump (these wags insist)
Has its direct antagonist,
Each striving stoutly to prevail,
Like horses knotted tail to tail;
And many a stiff and sturdy battle
Occurs between these adverse cattle,
The secret cause, beyond all question,
Of aches ascribed to indigestion,—
Whereas ’tis but two knobby rivals
Tugging together like sheer devils,
Till one gets mastery good or sinister,
And comes in like a new prime-minister.
Each bias in some master node is:—
What takes M‘Adam where a road is,
To hammer little pebbles less?
His organ of destructiveness:
What makes great Joseph so encumber
Debate? a lumping lump of Number:
Or Malthus rail at babies so?
The smallness of his Philopro—
What severs man and wife? a simple
Defect of the Adhesive pimple:
Or makes weak women go astray?
Their bumps are more in fault than they.