Yet he filled no mean place in the kingdom of letters; Far happier than many a literary hack, He bore only paper-mill rags on his back (For it makes a vast difference which side the mill One expends on the paper his labor and skill); So, when his soul waited a new transmigration, And Destiny balanced ’twixt this and that station, Not having much time to expend upon bothers, Remembering he’d had some connection with authors; And considering his four legs had grown paralytic,-- She set him on two, and he came forth a critic. Through his babyhood no kind of pleasure he took In any amusement but tearing a book; For him there was no intermediate stage From babyhood up to straight-laced middle age; There were years when he didn’t wear coat-tails behind, But a boy he could never be rightly defined; Like the Irish Good Folk, though in length scarce a span, From the womb he came gravely, a little old man; While other boys’ trousers demanded the toil Of the motherly fingers on all kinds of soil, Red, yellow, brown, black, clayey, gravelly, loamy, He sat in the corner and read Viri Romæ. He never was known to unbend or to revel once In base, marbles, hockey, or kick up the devil once; He was just one of those who excite the benevolence Of your old prigs who sound the soul’s depths with a ledger, And are on the lookout for some young men to “edger- Cate,” as they call it, who won’t be too costly, And who’ll afterward take to the ministry mostly; Who always wear spectacles, always look bilious, Always keep on good terms with each _materfamilias_ Throughout the whole parish, and manage to rear Ten boys like themselves, on four hundred a year: Who, fulfilling in turn the same fearful conditions, Either preach through their noses, or go upon missions. In this way our Hero got safely to college, Where he bolted alike both his commons and knowledge; A reading-machine, always wound up and going He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing, Appeared in a gown, with black waistcoat of satin, To spout such a Gothic oration in Latin That Tully could never have made out a word in it (Though himself was the model the author preferred in it), And grasping the parchment which gave him in fee All the mystic and-so-forths contained in A.B., He was launched (life is always compared to a sea), With just enough learning, and skill for the using it, To prove he’d a brain, by forever confusing it. So worthy St. Benedict, piously burning With the holiest zeal against secular learning, _Nesciensque scienter_, as writers express it, _Indoctusque sapienter a Roma recessit_.