An odd way this, we thought, to criticize-- This barrackyard "Attention! d---- your eyes!" But England smiled and lightly pardoned him, For was he not her Mowgli and her Kim? But now the neighbourhood remonstrance roars, He's naughty still, and naughty out of doors. 'Tis well enough that he should tell Mamma Her sons are tired of being what they are, But to give friendly bears, expecting buns, A paper full of stale unwholesome Huns-- One might be led to think, from all this work, That little master's growing quite a Turk. O Rudyard, Rudyard, in our hours of ease (Before the war) you were not hard to please: You loved a regiment whether fore or aft, You loved a subaltern, however daft, You loved the very dregs of barrack life, The amorous colonel and the sergeant's wife. You sang the land where dawn across the Bay Comes up to waken queens in Mandalay, The land where comrades sleep by Cabul ford, And Valour, brown or white, is Borderlord, {224} The secret Jungle-life of child and beast, And all the magic of the dreaming East. These, these we loved with you, and loved still more The Seven Seas that break on Britain's shore, The winds that know her labour and her pride, And the Long Trail whereon our fathers died. In that Day's Work be sure you gained, my friend, If not the critic's name, at least his end; Your song and story might have roused a slave To see life bodily and see it brave. With voice so genial and so long of reach To your Own People you the Law could preach, And even now and then without offence To Lesser Breeds expose their lack of sense. Return, return! and let us hear again The ringing engines and the deep-sea rain, The roaring chanty of the shore-wind's verse, Too bluff to bicker and too strong to curse. Let us again with hearts serene behold The coastwise beacons that we knew of old; So shall you guide us when the stars are veiled, And stand among the Lights that never Failed. {225} _Le Byron de Nos Jours; or, The English Bar and Cross Reviewers._ Still must I hear?--while Austin prints his verse And Satan's sorrows fill Corelli's purse, Must I not write lest haply some K.C. To flatter Tennyson should sneer at me? Or must the Angels of the Darker Ink No longer tell the public what to think-- Must lectures and reviewing all be stayed Until they're licensed by the Board of Trade? Prepare for rhyme--I'll risk it--bite or bark I'll stop the press for neither Gosse nor Clarke. O sport most noble, when two cocks engage With equal blindness and with equal rage! When each, intent to pick the other's eye, Sees not the feathers from himself that fly, And, fired to scorch his rival's every bone, Ignores the inward heat that grills his own; Until self-plucked, self-spitted and self-roast, Each to the other serves himself on toast.