If generous fortune give me leave to choose My saucy neighbors barefoot or in shoes, I leave the hero blustering while he dares On platforms furnished with posterior stairs, Till prudence drives him to his “earnest” legs With large bequest of disappointed eggs, And take the brawler whose unstudied dress Becomes him better, and protects him less; Give me the bullying of the scoundrel crew, If swaggering virtue wont insult me too! Leaving, with this impersonation, “The noisy tribe in panta-loons or -lets,” the poet drives directly at the august cities of Boston and New York, and ruthlessly smashes all the literary crockery in those two emporiums of letters. Here is his gird at the modern Athens: The pseudo-critic-editorial race Owns no allegiance but the law of place; Each to his region sticks through thick and thin, Stiff as a beetle spiked upon a pin. Plant him in Boston, and his sheet he fills With all the slipslop of his threefold hills, Talks as if nature kept her choicest smiles Within his radius of a dozen miles, And nations waited till his next Review Had made it plain what Providence must do. Would you believe him, water is not damp Except in buckets with the Hingham stamp, And Heaven should build the walls of Paradise Of Quincy granite lined with Wenham ice. Now this would give “wondrous great contentment” to the denizens of Manhattan, did not the satirist pounce down upon them with even more ironical fury. We have only space for the conclusion, and would particularly emphasize the hit at the scholars. It must be borne in mind that the poem was originally delivered at Yale College, the head-quarters of Websterism in spelling. When our first Soldiers’ swords of honor gild The stately mansions that her tradesmen build; When our first Statesmen take the Broadway track, Our first Historians following at their back; When our first Painters, dying, leave behind On her proud walls the shadows of their mind; When our first Poets flock from farthest scenes To take in hand her pictured Magazines; _When our first Scholars are content to dwell_ _Where their own printers teach them how to spell_; When world-known Science crowds toward her gates, Then shall the children of our hundred States Hail her a true METROPOLIS of men, The nation’s centre. Then, and not till then!