What’s life but full of care and doubt, With all its fine humanities, With parasols we walk about, Long pigtails and such vanities. We plant pomegranate trees and things And go in gardens sporting, With toys and fans of peacocks’ wings, To painted ladies courting. We gather flowers of every hue, And fish in boats for fishes, Build summer-houses painted blue,-- But life’s as frail as dishes. Walking about their groves of trees, Blue bridges and blue rivers, How little thought them two Chinese They’d both be smash’d to shivers. LITERARY AND LITERAL. The March of Mind upon its mighty stilts, (A spirit by no means to fasten mocks on,) In travelling through Berks, Beds, Notts, and Wilts, Hants--Bucks, Herts, Oxon, Got up a thing our ancestors ne’er thought on, A thing that, only in our proper youth, We should have chuckled at--in sober truth, A Conversazione at Hog’s Norton! A place whose native dialect, somehow, Has always by an adage been affronted, And that it is all _gutturals_, is now Taken for grunted. Conceive the snoring of a greedy swine, The slobbering of a hungry Ursine Sloth-- If you have ever heard such creature dine-- And--for Hog’s Norton, make a mix of both!-- O shades of Shakspeare! Chaucer! Spenser! Milton! Pope! Gray! Warton! O Colman! Kenny! Planche! Poole! Peake! Pocock! Reynolds! Morton! O Grey! Peel! Sadler! Wilberforce! Burdett! Hume! Wilmot Horton! Think of your prose and verse, and worse--delivered in Hog’s Norton!-- The founder of Hog’s Norton Athenæum Framed her society With some variety From Mr. Roscoe’s Liverpool museum; Not a mere pic-nic, for the mind’s repast, But tempting to the solid knife-and-forker, It held its sessions in the house that last Had killed a porker. It chanced one Friday, One Farmer Grayley stuck a very big hog, A perfect Gog or Magog of a pig-hog, Which made of course a literary high day,-- Not that our Farmer was a man to go With literary taste--so far from suiting ’em, When he heard mention of Professor _Crowe_, Or Lalla-_Rookh_, he always was for shooting ’em! In fact in letters he was quite a log, With him great Bacon Was literally taken. And Hogg--the Poet--nothing but a Hog! As to all others on the list of Fame, Although they were discuss’d and mention’d daily, He only recognised one classic name, And thought that _she_ had hung herself--_Miss Baillie_!