Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.’”
Almost worthy to be set beside Lowell’s lines is Mr. William A. Croffut’s “Dirge concerning the late lamented King of the Cannibal Islands” in which he rings the changes on a single theme:
“And missionaries graced his festive board,
Solemn and succulent, in twos and dozens,
And smoked before their hospitable lord,
Welcome as if they’d been his second cousins.
When cold he warmed them as he would his kin—
They came as strangers, and he took them in.
“He had a hundred wives. To make things pleasant