Since first you loomed upon my infant ken My firm belief has ever been, and still it is, That you are fashioned not as other men (Subject, at best, to mortal disabilities), But come of more than human kin, Immune, or practically so, from sin. Godlike the poise that to your bearing lends The aspect of a tower that never totters; There's a divinity hath shaped your ends (Rough-hewn, perhaps--especially your trotters); Your ample chest, your generous girth Have no precise similitude on earth. I cannot picture you (though I have tried) Wearing a bowler hat and tweed apparel, Or craving sustenance for your inside Drawn either from the oven or the barrel; Scarcely you figure in my eye As liable, in Nature's course, to die. And it was you who almost fell from grace, Striking, like Lucifer, against authority, Leaving your Heaven for another place Not mentioned by your ten-to-one majority, And doomed, to your surprise and pain, Never, like Lucifer, to rise again. But you were wise, my Robert, wise in time; And I, who set you far above humanity, High-pedestalled upon my lofty rhyme, Rejoice with you in your recovered sanity; To me I feel it would have mattered Enormously to see my idol shattered. But 'ware the Bolsh, who fain would lure your feet To conduct unbecoming in a copper; Once you betrayed us, going off your beat, And now you've nearly come another cropper; If, tempted thrice, you break your trust, You'll have no halo left to readjust. O.S. * * * * * EMBARRASSMENT AND THE LAWYER. Watson is a young barrister who is feeling rather pleased with himself. I confess that he has deserved it. The situation was as follows. Before the War he had had no briefs, but had always had a conscience. A hopeless state of affairs. Then he went to the War and shed his conscience somewhere in the Balkans. So far so good. But, when he was demobilised and began to take stock of what had been happening at home in the meanwhile, he found to his horror that a conscience had again been thrust upon him by the General Council of the Bar. Such was the situation he had to face, and he has won through. How, you ask, did the G.C.B. play this trick on him? It happened in this way. Having nothing better to do during Watson's absence and at a critical moment of the War, these idle elderly well-fed lawyers solemnly deliberated upon the following fantastic problem:-- "What is the duty of counsel who is defending a prisoner on a plea of Not Guilty when the prisoner confesses to counsel that he did commit the offence charged?" With a cynical disregard of their own past these sophists propounded the following answer:--