The lawyers in the Forum are squabbling loud and long, To the wonder of their clients, confounding right and wrong; Begowned, bewigged, bewildered, each judge the clamour hears, And Justice, blind already, would fain have stopped her ears. As now the wordy contest grew hotter still and hotter, The desks, the books, the benches, began to quake and totter; And they heard a sound like thunder, a horrid, dreary sound, As though all the powers of evil danced the polka underground. The lawyers through their spectacles looked with a stony glare, And the crier stammered out, “O Yes,” and whispered through a prayer: Some of the judges fainted, and there for dead they lay; And the jury snatched their solidi, and fleetly ran away. And now――O, sight of wonder!――with a stifling smell of sulph- Er, in the Middle Forum, there gaped a hideous gulf: A gulf as black as midnight, or “best Japan,” I trow; And a voice came howling, hissing up, like a thousand whirlwinds now: “This gulf will close――no, never! till in Rome the rarest thing, The rarest and most wondrous, a sacrifice you bring.” O! great was the lamenting, when these fearful facts were known, The mothers weep and wring their hands, the grandames groan “Ochone;” And the little boys no longer their flying hoops pursue, Nor chaunt of “Ole Virginny,” as they were wont to do. And the men in moody silence pace slowly to and fro, With pallid lip, and frowning brow, and countenance of woe; And the Fathers of the City――the Aldermen and Mayor―― Are met in solemn council, with a grave and puzzled air. Then uprises Lucius Cimber, a grocer proud was he, Who traded first with China, in Twankay and Bohea; And in accents slow and solemn, thus the meeting he advised:―― “Let’s try and fill the hole up with stones macadamised.” And they listened to his counsel, and with shovel and with spade, They adjourned unto the Forum, and aside their togas laid. And then all in their shirt sleeves they worked with might and main, Patrician and Plebeian, alike they worked in vain. For though a thousand cart-loads into the gulf they threw, Instead of getting shallower it deep and deeper grew. And now a frenzied client who had lost his all that day, Seized “Selwyn’s Nisi Prius” from the bookshelf where it lay, And in the hole he dashed it, with a howl of maniac glee, And wished all law and lawyers at the bottom of the sea. And, fired by his example, the crowd seized, one by one, On “Chitty,” and on “Starkey,” and on “Coke and Lyttleton” On Bacon’s Whole Abridgement, with tooth and nail they fell, But where they wished those authors, ’twere not polite to tell.