What harm if men who burn the midnight-oil, Weary of frame, and worn and wan in feature, Seek once a week their spirits to assoil, And snatch a glimpse of “Animated Nature?” Better it were if, in his best of suits, The artisan, who goes to work on Monday, Should spend a leisure hour amongst the brutes, Than make a beast of his own self on Sunday-- But what is your opinion, Mrs. Grundy? Why, zounds! what raised so Protestant a fuss (Omit the zounds! for which I make apology) But that the Papists, like some fellows, thus Had somehow mixed up _Dens_ with their theology? Is Brahma’s bull--a Hindoo god at home-- A papal bull to be tied up till Monday-- Or Leo, like his namesake, Pope of Rome, That there is such a dread of them on Sunday-- But what is your opinion, Mrs. Grundy? Spirit of Kant! have we not had enough To make religion sad, and sour, and snubbish But saints zoological must cant their stuff, As vessels cant their ballast--rattling rubbish! Once let the sect, triumphant to their text, Shut Nero[2] up from Saturday till Monday, And sure as fate they will deny us next To see the dandelions on a Sunday-- But what is your opinion, Mrs. Grundy? NOTE.--There is an anecdote of a Scotch Professor who happened during a Sunday walk to be hammering at a geological specimen which he had picked up, when a peasant gravely accosted him, and said, very seriously, “Eh! Sir, you think you are only breaking a stone, but you are breaking the Sabbath.” In a similar spirit, some of our over-righteous sectarians are fond of attributing all breakage to the same cause--from the smashing of a parish lamp, up to the fracture of a human skull;--the “breaking into the bloody house of life,” or the breaking into a brick-built dwelling. They all originate in the breaking of the Sabbath. It is the source of every crime in the country--the parent of every illegitimate child in the parish. The picking of a pocket is ascribed to the picking of a daisy--the robbery on the highway to a stroll in the fields--the incendiary fire to a hot dinner--on Sunday. All other causes--the want of education--the want of moral culture--the want of bread itself, are totally repudiated. The criminal himself is made to confess at the gallows that he owes his appearance on the scaffold to a walk with “Sally in our alley” on the “day that comes between a Saturday and Monday.”