When he that can run, sir, may read--if he borrows the book, or goes on tick-- In my poems the bit that describes how the Hellespont joins the Propontic. There are men, I believe, who will tell you that Gray wrote the whole of The Bard-- Or that I didn't write half the Elegy, Bill, in a Country Churchyard. When you know that my poem, The Poet, begins--"Ruin seize thee!" and ends With recapitulations of horrors the poet invokes on his friends. And I'll swear, if you look at the dirge on my relatives under the turf, you Will perceive it winds up with some lines on myself--and begins with the curfew. Now you'll grant it's more probable, Bill--as a man of the world, if you please-- That all these should have prigged from myself than that I should have prigged from all these. I could cry when I think of it, friend, if such tears would comport with my dignity, That the author of Christabel ever should smart from such vulgar malignity. (You remember perhaps that was one of the first little things that I carolled After finishing Marmion, the Princess, the Song of the Shirt, and Childe Harold.) Oh, doubtless it always has been so--Ah, doubtless it always will be-- There are men who would say that myself is a different person from me. Better the porridge of patience a poor man snuffs in his plate Than the water of poisonous laurels distilled by the fingers of hate. 'Tis a dark-purple sort of a moonlighted kind of a midnight, I know; You remember those verses I wrote on Irene, from Edgar A. Poe? It was Lady Aholibah Levison, daughter of old Lord St. Giles, Who inspired those delectable strains, and rewarded her bard with her smiles. There are tasters who've sipped of Castalia, who don't look on _my_ brew as _the_ brew: There are fools who can't think why the names of my heroines of title should always be Hebrew. 'Twas my comrade, Sir Alister Knox, said, "Noo, dinna ye fash wi' Apollo, mon; Gang to Jewry for wives and for concubines, lad--look at David and Solomon. And it gives an erotico-scriptural twang," said that high-born young man, "--tickles The lug" (he meant ear) "of the reader--to throw in a touch of the Canticles." So I versified half of The Preacher--it took me a week, working slowly. Bah! You don't half know the sex, Bill--they like it. And what if her name was Aholibah? I recited her charms, in conjunction with those of a girl at the _cafe_, In a poem I published in collaboration with Templeton (Taffy). There are prudes in a world full of envy--and some of them thought it too strong To compare an earl's daughter by name with a girl at a French _restaurant_. I regarded her, though, with the chivalrous eyes of a knight-errant on quest; I may say I don't know that I ever felt prouder, old friend, of a conquest. And when _I_'ve been made happy, I never have cared a brass farthing who knew it; I Thank my stars I'm as free from mock-modesty, friend, as from vulgar