Old long-dead days of boisterous mirth, Far dim-seen hours of arduous fight When gaiety possessed the earth, When morning felt no fear of night; School-form, field, footlights, club! _Eheu Fugaces!_ These, indeed, are fled, But thoughts of dashing MONTAGU, That dauntless soul now lying dead, After long fight with pitiless pain Make the old memories live again.
Before the triumphs of the Court, Before the honours of the Bench, Wild days there were of toil and sport, Long ere our brows had learned to blench At threatenings of the first grey hair. Ah! cordial comrade, champion stout, The fierce ordeal you had to bear Is ended; fortune's final flout Has fallen, and that gallant breast Is still at last in well-earned rest.
It was your happy lot to blend Sound brain and sympathetic heart; The loyal service of a friend, With worldly wisdom keen and tart. Shrewd advocate and councillor keen, You knew the world, yet pitied it; Compassion mild, not cynic spleen Tempered the edge of caustic wit. Farewell! It dims much pomp and state, _Your_ title--"Poor Man's Magistrate!"
(_A Tip (after Tennyson) to Tory Topsawyers._)
Come down, O Scribe, from yonder sniffy height; What pleasure lives in "sniff" (the Councillor sang), In sniff and scorn, the weakness of the "swells"? But cease to move so near the clouds, and cease To sit a votary of the "Great Pooh-Pooh"; And come, for Labour's in the valley, come, For Toil dwells in the valley, come thou down And watch him; by the dim slum threshold, he, Or hand in hand with poverty in the docks, Or black with stithy-swartness by the forge, Or troll-like in the mine; nor cares to walk With Wealth and Fashion in the parks and squares; But _follow!_ Come thou down, and let the cold Cramp-headed cynics yelp alone, and leave The mugwump scoffers there to shape and sleek Their thousand paragraphs of acrid joke That like a squirting fountain waste in air: So waste thou not; but come; for hunger pale Awaits thee; haggard pillars of the hearth Appeal to thee; slum children call, and now The Crowd's astir, with every man a Vote To give him voice, and in that voice you'll hear Myriads of "movements" hurrying into "laws," The moan of men at immemorial ills, And murmuring of innumerable shes.