There’s a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails:
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?
--
St. 7. text in Galatians: chap. 5, vv. 19-21, where are enumerated
“the works of the flesh”. There are seventeen named;
he uses twenty-nine indefinitely; it’s common in French
to use trente-six (36) for any pretty big number.
If I trip him: What if I; and so in next stanza.
a Manichee: a follower of Mani, who aimed to unite Parseeism,
or Parsism, with Christianity.
8.
Or, my scrofulous French novel
On gray paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe:
If I double down its pages
At the woful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in’t?
9.
Or, there’s Satan!--one might venture
Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he’d miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine. . .
‘St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratia
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r--you swine!
--
St. 9. Hy, Zy, Hine: represent the sound of the vesper bell.
Holy-Cross Day.
On which the Jews were forced to attend an Annual Christian Sermon in Rome.
--
* “By a bull of Gregory XIII. in the year 1584, all Jews above the age
of twelve years were compelled to listen every week to a sermon
from a Christian priest; usually an exposition of some passages
of the Old Testament, and especially those relating to the Messiah,
from the Christian point of view. This burden is not yet wholly removed
from them; and to this day, several times in the course of a year,
a Jewish congregation is gathered together in the church of S. Angelo
in Pescheria, and constrained to listen to a homily from a Dominican friar,
to whom, unless his zeal have eaten up his good feelings
and his good taste, the ceremony must be as painful as to his hearers.
In the same spirit of vulgar persecution, there is upon the gable
of a church, opposite one of the gates of the Ghetto, a fresco painting
of the Crucifixion, and, underneath, an inscription in Hebrew and Latin,
from the 2d and 3d verses of the 65th chapter of Isaiah--
‘I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people,
which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts;
a people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face.’”
--George S. Hillard’s Six Months in Italy. (1853.)
--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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