How skillfully she builds her cell, How neat she spreads her wax, And labors hard to store it well, With the sweet food she makes, With the sweet food she makes, With the sweet food she makes, makes, makes, When rising just as morning breaks, The dewdrop from the leaf she shakes, And oft the sleeping moth she wakes, And diving through the flower she takes, The honey with her fairy rakes, And in her cell the same she cakes, Or sports across the silver lakes, Beside her children, for whose sakes How skillfully she builds her cell, How neat she spreads her wax, And labors hard to store it well, With the sweet food she makes. In works of labor or of skill, I would be busy too, For Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do, For idle hands to do, For idle hands to do, do, do. Things which thereafter they will rue, When Justice fiercely doth pursue, Or conscience raises cry and hue, And evil-doers look quite blue, When Peelers run with loud halloo, And magistrates put on the screw, And then the wretch exclaims, Boo-hoo, In works of labor or of skill I wish I’d busied too, For Satan’s found much mischief still, For my two hands to do. There! Would a poet get much reputation for these variations, which are much better in their way than most of those built upon tunes? Would the poetical critics come out, as the musical critics do, with “Upon Watts’ marble foundation Buggins has raised a sparkling alabaster palace;” or, “The old-fashioned Watts has been brought into new honor by the _étincellant_ Buggins;” or “We love the old tune, but we have room in our hearts for the fairy-like fountains of bird-song which Buggins has bid start from it?” Mr. Punch has an idea that Buggins would have no such luck; the moral to be deduced from which fact is, that a musical prig is luckier than a poetical prig. REITERATIVE VOCAL MUSIC. A well-known reviewer, in an article on Hymnology, says:— Who could endure to hear and sing hymns, the meaning and force of which he really felt—set, as they frequently have been, to melodies from the Opera, and even worse, or massacred by the repetition of the end of each stanza, no matter whether or not the grammar and sense were consistent with it. Take such memorable cases of incongruity as:— “My poor pol— My pool pol— My poor polluted heart.” To which he might have added from Dr. Watts:—