You might see, my dear Baron, how bored and distrest
Were their high noble hearts by your merciless tale,
When the force of the agony wrung even a jest
From the frugal Scotch wit of my Lord Lauderdale![2]
Bright Peer! to whom Nature and Berwickshire gave
A humor endowed with effects so provoking,
That when the whole House looks unusually grave
You may always conclude that Lord Lauderdale's joking!
And then, those unfortunate weavers of Perth--
Not to know the vast difference Providence dooms
Between weavers of Perth and Peers of high birth,
'Twixt those who have _heir_looms, and those who've but looms!
"To talk _now_ of starving!"--as great Athol said[3]--
(And the nobles all cheered and the bishops all wondered,)
"When some years ago he and others had fed
"Of these same hungry devils about fifteen hundred!"
It follows from hence--and the Duke's very words
Should be publisht wherever poor rogues of this craft are--
That weavers, _once_ rescued from starving by Lords,
Are bound to be starved by said Lords ever after.
When Rome was uproarious, her knowing patricians
Made "Bread and the Circus" a cure for each _row_;
But not so the plan of _our_ noble physicians,
"No Bread and the Treadmill,"'s the regimen now.
So cease, my dear Baron of Ockham, your prose,
As I shall my poetry--_neither_ convinces;
And all we have spoken and written but shows,
When you tread on a nobleman's _corn_,[4]
how he winces.
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