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 Deus 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 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? ODE TO RAE WILSON, ESQUIRE [Footnote: Who had, in one of his books, characterized some of Hood's verses as "profaneness and ribaldry."] THOMAS HOOD. "Close, close your eyes with holy dread, And weave a circle round him thrice; For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise!"--Coleridge. "It's very hard them kind of men Won't let a body be."--Old Ballad. A wanderer, Wilson, from my native land, Remote, O Rae, from godliness and thee, Where rolls between us the eternal sea, Besides some furlongs of a foreign sand-- Beyond the broadest Scotch of London Wall; Beyond the loudest Saint that has a call; Across the wavy waste between us stretched, A friendly missive warns me of a stricture, Wherein my likeness you have darkly etched, And though I have not seen the shadow sketched, Thus I remark prophetic on the picture. I guess the features:--in a line to paint Their moral ugliness, I'm not a saint, Not one of those self-constituted saints, Quacks--not physicians--in the cure of souls, Censors who sniff out moral taints, And call the devil over his own coals-- Those pseudo Privy Councillors of God, Who write down judgments with a pen hard-nibbed: Ushers of Beelzebub's Black Rod, Commending sinners not to ice thick-ribbed, But endless flames, to scorch them like flax-- Yet sure of heaven themselves, as if they'd cribbed The impression of St. Peter's keys in wax! Of such a character no single trace Exists, I know, in my fictitious face; There wants a certain cast about the eye; A certain lifting of the nose's tip; A certain curling of the nether lip, In scorn of all that is, beneath the sky; In brief, it is an aspect deleterious, A face decidedly not serious, A face profane, that would not do at all To make a face at Exeter Hall-- That Hall where bigots rant, and cant, and pray, And laud each other face to face, Till every farthing-candle RAY Conceives itself a great gas-light of grace!