A BALLAD.
Air.—"Sleep on, sleep on, my Kathleen dear.
salvete, fratres Asini. ST. FRANCIS.
Write on, write on, ye Barons dear,
Ye Dukes, write hard and fast;
The good we've sought for many a year
Your quills will bring at last.
One letter more, Newcastle, pen,
To match Lord Kenyon's two,
And more than Ireland's host of men,
One brace of Peers will do.
Write on, write on, etc.
Sure never since the precious use
Of pen and ink began,
Did letters writ by fools produce
Such signal good to man.
While intellect, 'mong high and low,
Is marching on, they say,
Give me the Dukes and Lords who go
Like crabs, the other way.
Write on, write on, etc.
Even now I feel the coming light—
Even now, could Folly lure
My Lord Mountcashel too to write,
Emancipation's sure.
By geese (we read in history),
Old Rome was saved from ill;
And now to quills of geese we see
Old Rome indebted still.
Write on, write on, etc.
Write, write, ye Peers, nor stoop to style,
Nor beat for sense about—
Things little worth a Noble's while
You're better far without.
Oh ne'er, since asses spoke of yore,
Such miracles were done;
For, write but four such letters more,
And Freedom's cause is won!
SONG OF THE DEPARTING SPIRIT OF TITHE.
"The parting Genius is with sighing sent."
MILTON.
It is o'er, it is o'er, my reign is o'er;
I hear a Voice, from shore to shore,
From Dunfanaghy to Baltimore,
And it saith, in sad, parsonic tone,
"Great Tithe and Small are dead and gone!"
Even now I behold your vanishing wings,
Ye Tenths of all conceivable things,
Which Adam first, as Doctors deem,
Saw, in a sort of night-mare dream,[1]
After the feast of fruit abhorred—
First indigestion on record!—
Ye decimate ducks, ye chosen chicks,
Ye pigs which, tho' ye be Catholics,
Or of Calvin's most select depraved,
In the Church must have your bacon saved;—
Ye fields, where Labor counts his sheaves,
And, whatsoever himself believes,
Must bow to the Establisht Church belief,
That the tenth is always a Protestant sheaf;—
Ye calves of which the man of Heaven
Takes Irish tithe, one calf in seven;[2]
Ye tenths of rape, hemp, barley, flax,
Eggs, timber, milk, fish and bees' wax;
All things in short since earth's creation,
Doomed, by the Church's dispensation,
To suffer eternal decimation—
Leaving the whole lay-world, since then,
Reduced to nine parts out of ten;
Or—as we calculate thefts and arsons—
Just ten per cent. the worse for Parsons!