Must all go to❜t;
Both men and cattle;
I'm larger grown from head to tail,
Than mammoth, elephant, or whale;
Now feel a tangible extension,
Of semi-infinite dimension.
Inflated with supreme intensity,
I fill three-quarters of immensity;
Should Phoebus come this way, no doubt
But I could blow his candle out.
This earth's a little dirty planet,
And I'll no longer help to man it;
But off will flutter in a tangent,
And make a harum-scarum range on't.
Stand ye appall'd, quake, quiver, quail,
For so I stride a comet's tail;
If my deserts you fail t' acknowledge,
I'll drive it plump against your college.
But if your Esculapian band,
Approach my highness, cap in hand,
And show great tokens of humility,
I'll treat your world with due civility.
As Doctor Young foretold-right soon,
I'll make your earth another moon ;
And Phoebus then, an arrant ass,
May turn his ponies out to grass.
But now, alas! a wicked wag,
Has pull'd away the gaseous bag;
From heaven, where thron'd with Jove, I sát, • I'm fall'n, fall'n, fall'n down flat, flat.
Thus as the ancient story goes,
When o'er Avernus flew the crows,
And trumpets sound, drums beat, and great guns rattle;
And streaming veins and dying groans,
And mangled limbs, and splinter'd bones.
They were so stench'd that in a minute,
They giddy grew, and tumbled in it.
And so a blade, who is too handy,
To help himself to wine or brandy;
He first gets higher, then gets lower,
Then tumbles dead-drunk on the floor.
Such would have been my sad case, if
I'd taken half another tiff;
And even now I cannot swear
I'm not as mad as a march hare.
How these confounded gases serve us,
But Beddoes says that I am nervous ;
And that this oxyd gas of nitre,
Is bad for such a nervous writer.
Indeed sir doctor very odd it is,
That you should deal in such commodities.
Which drives a man beside his wits,
And women to hysteric fits.
Now since this 'wildering gas inflation..
Is not the thing for inspiration,
I'll take a glass of cordial gin,
Ere my sad story I begin.
And then proceed with courage stout,
From hard-bound brains to hammer out
My case, forlorn in doleful ditty,
To melt your worships' hearts to pity.
Sirs, I have been in high condition,
A right respectable physician,
And pass'd with men of shrude discerning
For wight of most prodigious learning.
True, there's your battle of Marengo,
From which ten thousand souls took wing to
For I could quote with flippant ease,
Grave Galen, and Hippocrates;
Brown, Cullen, Sydenham, and such men,
Besides a score of learned Dutchmen.
In all disorders was so clever,
From toothach up to yellow fever,
That I by learned men was reckon'd
Don Esculapius the second.
No cause to me was problematic,
Pains, topical or symptomatic,
From aching head to gouty toes,
The hidden cause I could disclose.
Minute examiner of Nature,
And most sagacious operator,
I could discern, proscribe, apply,
And cure disease in louse's eye.
To insect small as e'er one sees,
Floating in torrid summer breeze;
Altho' to less than nothing verging,
Could give a vomit or a purging.
I had a curious little lancet,
Your worships could not help but fancy it;
By which I show'd with skill surprising,
The whole art of flea-bottomising.
And with it oft'inoculated,
At which friend Jenner 'll be elated,
Flies, fleas, and gnats with cow-pox matter,
And not a soul took small-pox a'ter,
Could take a microscopic mite,
Invisible to human sight,
The shades of hell,
The lengthened list to swell,
Of mighty heroes, who in battle fell.
Ad infinitum could divide it,
For times unnumber'd have I try'd it.
With optic glass of great utility,
Could make the essence of nihility;
To cut a most enormous figure,
As big as St. Paul's church or bigger.
A soldier in my glass's focus,
Without the aid of hocus-pocus,
Briareus-like, terrific stands,
With fifty heads and hundred hands.
A fish-boat seems a grand flotilla,
To frighten Addington or Billy,
Appears a dreadful French invasion,
Tannihilate the British nation.
Could tell, and never be mistaken,
What future oaks were in an acorn;
And even calculate at pleasure
The cubic inches they would measure.
Discover'd worlds within the pale
Of tip-end of a tadpole's tail;
And took possession of the same,
In my good friend Sir Joseph's name.
And soon shall publish by subscription,
A topographical description
Of worlds aforesaid, which shall go forth
In foolscap, folio, gilt, and so forth.
Could tell how far a careless fly
Might chance to turn this world awry,
If flitting round in giddy circuit,
With leg or wing he kick or jerk it.
[Continued in subsequent Notes.]
Your skirmish too, at Austerlitz,
Where many a soul was cut to bits,
And headlong sent
To realms below, in the event.
The plains of Abram too could tell,
Quebec her walls might testify,[6]
[6] For the induction of the second Song, prolonging his unrivalled lays who sang the first, (with the points of attraction in those walls and plains,) see subsequent Notes.
In a mouldering cave, where the wretched retreat,
Britannia sat wasted with care;
She wept for her Wolfe, and exclaim'd against fate,
And gave herself up to despair.
The walls of her cell she had sculptur'd around,
With the feats of her favourite son;
And even the dust, as it lay on the ground,
Was engrav'd with some deeds he had done.
The Sire of the Gods from his crystalline throne,
Beheld the disconsolate dame ;
And mov'd with her tears, he sent Mercury down,
And those were the tidings that came.
Britannia forbear, not a sigh nor a tear,
For thy Wolfe so deservingly lov'd;
Your tears shall be chang'd into triumphs of joy,
For Wolfe is not dead, but remov'd.
The sons of the East, the proud giants of old,
Have crept from their darksome abodes ;
And this is the news, as in heaven it was told,
They were marching to war with the gods.
A council was held in the chambers of Jove,
And this was their final decree :
That Wolfe should be call'd to the armies above,
And the charge was deliver'd to me.
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