Wherefore wedlock’s lottery enter?
Chances for you, one to three!
Richest ventures oft miscarry,
Fanny, Fanny, if you marry,
Prythee, marry me!
A DISCOURSE DELIVERED BY A COLLEGE TUTOR,
AT A SUPPER PARTY, JULY 1ST, 1825.
Ye dons and ye doctors, ye provosts and proctors,
Who are paid to monopolise knowledge,
Come make opposition, by vote and petition,
To the radical infidel college;
Come put forth your powers, in aid of the towers
Which boast of their bishops and martyrs;
And arm all the terrors of privileged errors
Which live by the wax of their charters.
Let Mackintosh battle with Canning and V——,
Let Brougham be a friend to the niggers,
Burdett cure the nation’s misrepresentations,
And Hume make a figure in figures;
But let them not babble of Greek to the rabble,
Nor teach the mechanics their letters;
The labouring classes were born to be asses,
And not to be aping their betters.
’Tis a terrible crisis for Cam and for Isis,
Fat butchers are learning dissection;
And looking-glass makers become Sabbath breakers,
To study the laws of reflection;
Sin Φ and sin Θ, no sin can be sweeter,
Are taught to the poor of both sexes,
And weavers and spinners jump up from their dinners
To flirt with their y’s and their x’s.
Chuck farthing advances the doctrine of chances
In spite of the staff of the beadle;
And menders of breeches between the long stitches
Write books on the laws of the needle;
And chandlers all chatter of luminous matter,
Who communicate none to their tallows;
And rogues gets a notion of the pendulum’s motion
Which is only of use at the gallows.
The impurest of Attics read pure mathematics,
The gin-shops are turned into cloisters;
A Crawford next summer will fill up your rummer,
A Copleston open your oysters;
The bells of Old Bailey are practising gaily
The erudite tunes of St. Mary’s;
The Minories any day will rear you a Kennedy,
And Bishopsgate blossom with Airy’s.
The nature of granites, the tricks of the planets,
The forces of steam and of gases,
The engines mechanical, the long words botanical,
The ranging of beetles in classes,
The delicate junctions of symbols and functions,
The impossible roots of equations,
Are these proper questions for Cockney digestions,
Fit food for a cit’s lucubrations?
The eloquent pages of time-hallowed sages,
Embalmed by some critical German,
Old presents by Brunckius, new futures by Monckius,[6]
The squabbles of Porson with Hermann,
Your Alphas and Betas, your canons of metres,
Your infinite powers of particles,
Shall these and such like work make journeymen strike work,
And ’prentices tear up their articles.
But oh, since fair science will cruelly fly hence,
To smile upon vagrants and gypsies,
Since knights of the hammer must handle their grammar,
And nightmen account for eclipses,
Our handicraft neighbours shall share in our labours
If they leave us the whole of the honey,
And the sans culotte caitiff shall start for the plate if
He puts in no claim for plate-money.