Rats! rats! rats! By beds where the dying pant for life! How snug they stand with lancet and knife; While the vampyre tugs at the fluttering heart, How they jabber jargon of middle-aged art! Soothing pain when 'tis savage and strong By naming it something Latin and long! A grain of this and a scruple of that!-- Know ye the name of the Medical Rat?
Rats! rats! rats! Rats that run in the month of May Rats of reform and right are they! Rats who believe the hottest of speeches Soonest the shame and sorrow reaches; Generous rats whose chiefest delight Is to set the order of Providence right; Lean, or hairy, or greasy, or fat, Know ye the name of the Platform Rat?
Rats! rats! rats! Oh, Truth and Justice, and Common-Sense When will you drive this rat-tribe hence? Bait 'em and beat 'em! hurry 'em! skurry 'em! With satire and scorn and laughter flurry 'em! In hole and corner and cranny to hide, The Flunkey Rat, and the Rat of Pride, Selfishness, Pedantry, Cant, and all that, Till nobody hears of a single Rat!
"THE CREOWNIN' GLORY OF THE UNITED STATES."--_Knickerbocker Magazine._
My Hearers:--My text ain't in Worcester's Pictorial, nor Webster's big quarto; but it is in the columns of the Bunkum Flagstaff and Independent Echo--"_Edication is the Creownin' Glory of the United'n States'n._" Thar ain't a feller in all this great and glorious Republic but has studed readin', ritin', and 'rithmetic. Thar ain't a youngster so big that you couldn't drown him in a spit-box but what has read Shakspeare's gogerphy, and knows that all the world is a stage, with two poles instead of one like a common stage; and that it keeps goin' reound and reound on its own axis, not axin' nothin' o' nobody; for "_Edication is the Creownin' Glory of the United'n States'n_." Who was it that, durin' the great and glorious Revolution, by his eloquence quenched the spirit of Toryism? An American citizen. Who was it that knocked thunder out of the clouds, and took a streak o' greased lightnin' for a tail to his kite? An American citizen. Who was it that invented the powder that will kill a cockroach, if you put a little on its tail and then tread on it? Who was it that discovered the Fat Boy, and captured the wild and ferocious _What Is It?_ An American citizen! Oh, it's a smashin' big thing to be an American citizen! King David would have been an American citizen, and the Queen of Sheba would have been naturalized, if it could a bin did; for "_Edication is the Creownin' Glory of the United'n States'n_." When you and I shall be no more; when this glorious Union shall have gone to etarnal smash; when Barnum shall have secured his last curiosity at a great expense; then will the historian dip his pen in a georgious bottle of blue-black ink, and write--"_Edication was the Creownin' Glory of the United'n States'n_."