With what delight the eyes of all Gaze on you, seated in your Hall, Like Sancho in his island, reigning, Loved leader of its motley hosts Of lawyers and their bills of costs, And all things thereto appertaining, Such as crimes, constables, and juries, Male pilferers and female furies, The police and the _polissons_, Illegal right and legal wrong. Bribes, perjuries, law-craft, and cunning, Judicial drollery and punning; And all the _et ceteras_ that grace That genteel, gentlemanly place! Or in the Council Chamber standing With eloquence of eye and brow, Your voice the music of commanding, And fascination in your bow, Arranging for the civic shows Your "men in buckram," as per list, Your John Does and your Richard Roes, Those Dummys of your games of whist. The Council Chamber--where authority Consists in two words--a majority. For whose contractors' jobs we pay Our last dear sixpences for taxes, As freely as in Sylla's day, Rome bled beneath his lictors' axes. Where--on each magisterial nose In colours of the rainbow linger, Like sunset hues on Alpine snows, The printmarks of your thumb and finger. Where he, the wisest of wild fowl, Bird of Jove's blue-eyed maid--the owl, That feather'd alderman, is heard Nightly, by poet's ear alone, To other eyes and ears unknown, Cheering your every look and word, And making, room and gallery through, The loud, applauding echoes peal, Of his "_où peut on etre mieux Qu'au sein de sa famille_?"[A]