Pure, exquisite Box! no corruption can soil it;
There's Otto of Rose in each breath it unlocks;
While Grote is the "Betty," that serves at the toilet,
And breathes all Arabia around from his Box.
'Tis a singular fact, that the famed Hugo Grotius
(A namesake of Grote's--being both of Dutch stocks),
Like Grote, too, a genius profound as precocious,
Was also, like him, much renowned for a Box;--
An immortal old clothes-box, in which the great Grotius
When suffering in prison for views heterodox,
Was packt up incog. spite of jailers ferocious,[1]
And sent to his wife,[2] carriage free, in a Box!
But the fame of old Hugo now rests on the shelf,
Since a rival hath risen that all parallel mocks;--
_That_ Grotius ingloriously saved but himself,
While _ours_ saves the whole British realm by a Box!
And oh! when, at last, even this greatest of Grotes
Must bend to the Power that at every door knocks,
May he drop in the urn like his own "silent votes,"
And the tomb of his rest be a large Ballot-Box.
While long at his shrine, both from county and city,
Shall pilgrims triennially gather in flocks,
And sing, while they whimper, the appropriate ditty,
"Oh breathe not his _name_, let it sleep--in the Box."
[1] For the particulars of this escape of Grotius from the Castle of
Louvenstein, by means of a box (only three feet and a half long, it is
said) in which books used to be occasionally sent to him and foul linen
returned, see any of the Biographical Dictionaries.
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